Taking Socialism Seriously 9780739166352, 0739166352

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: Twenty-five Questions about Socialism
Chapter Two: In Defense of Marxism
Chapter Three: But What Is Your Alternative?
Chapter Four: Romantic Couple Love, the Affective Economy, and a Socialist-Feminist Vision
Chapter Five: Socialism, Post-Capitalism, and the Division of Labor
Chapter Six: Socialism and Human Nature
Chapter Seven: Solidarity: The Elusive Road to Socialism
Chapter Eight: Is Socialism Relevant in the “Networked Information Age”?
Chapter Nine: Beyond Capitalism and Socialism
Chapter Ten: Social Movements and Struggles for Socialism
Index
About the Contributors

Citation preview

Taking Socialism Seriously

Critical Studies on the Left Series Editors: Anatole Anton, San Francisco State University and Richard Schmitt, Worcester State University Critical Studies on the Left publishes books that elaborate on alternative views to capitalism. This series will publish works that discuss the necessity of socialism and the continued vitality of social movements that call for a critique of capitalism. The series aims to develop and publish cogent, accessible socialist visions informed by the ideas and motivations of contemporary movements: peace, sustainability, identity, dignity, human rights, equality, and international solidarity. Volumes in the series will include original critiques of mainstream philosophy and social theory, as well as translations of important texts on these subjects that are not yet available in English. Titles in the Series Taking Socialism Seriously, edited by Anatole Anton and Richard Schmitt

Taking Socialism Seriously Edited by Anatole Anton and Richard Schmitt

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.lexingtonbooks.com 10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom Copyright © 2012 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Taking socialism seriously / edited by Anatole Anton, Richard Schmitt. p. cm. — (Critical studies on the left) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-6635-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-6637-6 (ebook) 1. Socialism. I. Anton, Anatole. II. Schmitt, Richard, 1927– . HX73.T35914 2012 335—dc23 2011053189

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction Anatole Anton and Richard Schmitt 1

Twenty-five Questions about Socialism Richard Schmitt 2 In Defense of Marxism Milton Fisk 3 But What Is Your Alternative?: Reflections on Having a “Plan” David Schweickart 4 Romantic Couple Love, the Affective Economy, and a Socialist-Feminist Vision Ann Ferguson 5 Socialism, Post-Capitalism, and the Division of Labor Anatole Anton 6 Socialism and Human Nature Karsten J. Struhl 7 Solidarity: The Elusive Road to Socialism Richard Schmitt 8 Is Socialism Relevant in the “Networked Information Age”?: A Critical Assessment of The Wealth of Networks Tony Smith 9 Beyond Capitalism and Socialism Richard Schmitt 10 Social Movements and Struggles for Socialism John L. Hammond Index About the Contributors

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Introduction Anatole Anton and Richard Schmitt

Four years ago Anatole Anton and I published a book called Toward a New Socialism which contained a number of very interesting essays about different aspects of a socialist society. A translation of a version of that book has recently appeared in Spanish. Our project came to be in the face of the progressively more brutal power of capitalist institutions. It become less and less reasonable to think that capitalism might be keeping any of the promises made on its behalf by its supporters. Wealth was not trickling down; the gap between the rich and the poor was growing daily. Even the lucky ones who capitalism enriched were not happier than before. While at the same time the results of electoral politics seemed increasingly questionable, public corruption was on the rise and democracy moribund as the economy alternatively boomed and burst. Capitalism had not brought us peace and security, neither at home nor abroad, but instead involved us in endless warfare and mass slaughter. It daily became a more intense threat to the natural environment and human survival on earth. Nor have the moral requirements of racial and gender equality made great inroads. Overwhelmed by these realities, we thought that socialism is clearly what the world needs. But, at the same time, we found that the large anticapitalist literature had little to tell us about the detailed features of a socialist society. Hence we asked a group of our friends to write papers about their thoughts about a socialist society. They did and what emerged is a really interesting book. But the book did not answer the question that needs answering. When you ask someone about their conception of socialism, you may very well get a description of their fantasies about a better world. They will give you their dreams and wishful thinking. But wishful thinking will not repair the ravages of capitalism. What we need are alternative institutions that we can build in the present. We need not only to ask ourselves how we imagine a better world but also how we are going to construct it in the prefiguative process of reconstructing ourselves and our social relations. Socialism has been on the agenda for close to 200 years. It began its career as the name for a society based on cooperation and equal economic and political rights. Becoming then associated with the Marxist theory of vii

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history, socialism became a future state that would follow capitalism once that mode of production met its inevitable demise. Not much needed to be known about socialism because we would find out, when the time came, how we needed to construct a society not dominated by the private ownership of the means of production. Socialism was going to be the opposite of a society where means of production were privately owned. For a variety of historical reasons that was taken to mean that in a socialist society the state would own and direct the economy. This conception spawned numerous socialist experiments—most of them brutal failures. In addition, dominant theories about socialism derived from the Marxian philosophy of history have made predictions that are clearly false. Ever since the middle of the 19th century, socialists have predicted the imminent collapse of capitalism and the victory of the united working class. Neither of those has happened so far. Socialists have recommended political strategies which have not worked. They have organized labor unions that turned out to be solidly anti-communist. They have organized “socialist” political parties that became staunch supporters of capitalist institutions. They have talked grandly about international working class solidarity only to find workers flocking to their national colors when war broke out. They have created schools and families that have reproduced the very authoritarianism they were intended to overthrow. Both the traditional Marxist theory of history and Marxist politics grounded in that theory of history have lost legitimacy. Thinking about socialism, having been closely associated with Marxist theory, therefore is in disarray. Many theorists today, however, critical of capitalism follow in the footsteps of Eduard Bernstein and deny that capitalist collapse is inevitable (without adopting Bernstein’s electoral strategies). If capitalism is not expected to fall apart it is extremely unlikely that we will be able to replace the entire capitalist system with an alternative—socialism. The anti-capitalist project needs to be reoriented. Instead of organizing an entirely new society from the ground up, our task as the enemies of capitalism, is to develop projects which can restrict the dominance of capitalist institutions and values. No longer in the business of changing everything all at once or in a short period, the enemies of capitalism are becoming enormously inventive in thinking about what specific changes they want to make. None of these projects will bring about a better society by itself. All together they may—we hope—help. Absent serious thought about how socialism will come into the world in concrete incarnations our descriptions of aspects of a socialist society must remain utopian. It is time for socialists to abandon the comforting generalities of the past and the pleasing fantasies with which we maintain our sanity in an insane world. We need to ask ourselves about con-

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crete strategies of transformation. We need to think about socialist institutions and how to construct and make them viable. We need to take note of the many existing proposals for counteracting the economic, social, political, and ecological damage capitalism does every day. We need to find out which of the existing projects is thriving and which seem unsuccessful. We need, most of all, to engage in concrete resistance to the rapacious capitalism we oppose. The essays that follow, in one way or another, address those two question—questions about the nature of socialism and about the transition from capitalism to socialism. The opening paper sets the task for the contributors to this volume. Richard Schmitt in “25 Questions about Socialism” urges readers to consider the two questions What is socialism? and What form will the transition to socialism take? in much more detail than socialists have done so far. One important subgroup of the what-is-socialism questions concerns democracy. It is not sufficient to insist that socialism will be democratic. We must try to understand in what ways socialist democracy differs from and is superior to the institutions and practices that we call “democracy” under global capitalism. It is not at all easy to make clear what socialist democracy consists of. The paper by Milton Fisk, “In Defense of Marxism,” responds to the question about the nature of socialism by insisting that socialism is not merely a means for ending the economic damages done by capitalism— increased inequality, a series of economic collapses, the destruction of the environment and others—but is essential for avoiding social collapse. Fisk reacts to the inclination of socialists—including the contributors to Toward a New Socialism—to describe socialism as “capturing all that is good and noble.” They indulge in fantasies about an ideal world when they answer questions about the nature of socialism. Instead, Fisk stresses, socialism is necessary and it is urgent. The capitalist regime will soon lead to disaster. To save our world socialism takes measures to build social cohesion, above all by promoting democracy in different areas of daily life. Fisk outlines some central features of socialism designed to forestall a social collapse. In his paper, Milton Fisk briefly sketches the outlines of a socialist society. David Schweickart (“But What Is Your Alternative? Reflections on Having a ‘Plan’”) provides a great deal more detail about socialist societies with this discussion of “economic democracy.” In socialism democratic decision-making will be extended to the economy. A market for goods and services plays an important role in this economic democracy. But there will be no market for labor or investment capital. Workers will be the owners and managers of their workplaces. Investment capital will be distributed by publicly held banks according to criteria set through democratic political processes.

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Most socialists consider gender equality a significant aspect of any future socialist society but do not provide a detailed analysis of how this gender equality is to be accomplished. In “Romantic Couple Love, the Affective Economy, and a Socialist Feminist Vision” Ann Ferguson closely examines some of the obstacles to gender equality in capitalist societies. Capitalism, she points out, besides producing and consuming commodities, contains a sex—affective economy in which, primarily, women produce love, affection, caring, and emotional support. Ferguson, then, differentiates several different sex affective relationships and argues that romantic couple love supports traditional, unequal arrangements in which women produce affection and men mostly consume it. Greater emphasis on other forms of love promises greater gender equality. The paper adds a whole new dimension to attempts to answer the question: “What is socialism?” Many critics of socialism say that socialism is a fine idea but can never be realized because it conflicts with human nature. Defenders of Marx have responded to that by denying that there is such a thing as “human nature.” The advocate of socialism thus needs to struggle on two fronts: against the thesis that human nature makes socialism impossible—which presuppose the existence of human nature—and the view that human nature does not exist. In his “Human Nature and Socialism: Taking Human Nature Seriously” Karsten Struhl takes on both of these controversies. The task he sets for himself in this paper is further complicated by the fact that the attacks on socialism take different forms. Some critics point to human competitiveness as an obstacle to socialism; others, like Freud, claim that human nature includes an aggressive instinct. Some claim that our behavior is pretty completely determined by biological factors; others base their opposition to socialism specifically on the theory of evolution. The discussion ends on a cautiously optimistic note. The chapter brings impressive clarity to a topic confused by many ill considered positions. In “Socialist Solidarity” Richard Schmitt considers an aspect of socialism widely regarded as important but rarely discussed—solidarity. A look at the history of attempts to build solidary communities in Israeli kibbutzim yields a surprising conclusion: previous attempts at building such solidary communities failed because no one had a clear idea of how specifically to bring this solidarity about. The early kibbutzniks were dedicated to following the principle “from each to their ability, to each according to their need” but did not know how to translate that maxim into concrete institutions and practices. This suggests a completely new explanation of past socialist failures. Past explanations ascribe socialist failures to such obstacles as absent or inadequate theory, the hostility of capitalists, the false consciousness of the working class. Schmitt suggests that some failures may have a completely different origin: we do not know how, concretely, to put socialist ideals into practice.

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Tony Smith in “Is Socialism Relevant in the ‘Networked Information Age’? A Critical Assessment of The Wealth of Networks” takes on theorists who claim that a new mode of production is emerging that frees us from commodification and exploitation. The work of Yochai Benkler is one example of a veritable flood of books suggesting that capitalism needs reform but that these reforms are within reach or are already under way. Smith argues that Benkler does not make his case. The burdens of capitalism remain and need to be done away with. The paper makes an important contribution to reflections about the transition to capitalism. Benkler is just one of many theorists who, although critical of dominant forms of capitalism, also believe that capitalism will be able to reform itself or is already doing so. Smith uncovers the confusions and ambiguities that make such a claim appear plausible. He makes a powerful case that technological change alone will not serve to transform capitalism into a less rapacious mode of production. But that conclusion is, of course, primarily negative. It does not tell us what we need to do to hasten the advent of socialism. In “Beyond Capitalism and Socialism,” Richard Schmitt argues that socialists today are committed to a rather different transition narrative than traditional, orthodox Marxists. They no longer await the inevitable collapse of capitalism. Nor do they expect the working classes of different countries steadily to grow in power and in unity as capitalism slowly subsides. They expect socialism to be created in a wide variety of concrete projects, animated and executed by the social movements discussed in Hammond’s paper. John L. Hammond, in “Social Movements and Struggles for Socialism,” examines social movement in considerable detail in order to determine how they might lead us to a socialist society. Examining actual social movements provides us with a great deal of interesting information about their different goals and contributions. But Hammond ends with a number of difficulties social movements face in their march toward socialism. He notices, for instance, that many writers about socialism seem to envisage a world where everybody happily goes to many, many meetings. Hammond recognizes this and other challenges as serious problems. Will those many activities and projects bring about a socialist society? We do not know the answer to that question. The book begins with many questions. It ends with others. It is our hope that it will encourage other socialists to think hard about what they are about instead of repeating the familiar old formulae that become less useful with each generation that repeats them religiously. As long as socialists were preparing for the inevitable collapse of capitalism, they could trust the benign spirit of History to guide them after the collapse. As more and more socialists give up waiting for the implosion of capitalism, they find themselves facing the task of building socialism

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today. In that situation, the lesson from the kibbutzim needs to be taken very seriously: in many situations we do not know what specific arrangements will yield a more just, a more humane society. The task of socialists today is to try to engage with the questions with which we began and those we end with: what is socialism? How must we go about constructing it?

ONE Twenty-five Questions about Socialism Richard Schmitt

Recent years have been witness to a lively and, at times, technically complex debate about the economic organization of socialist societies. That debate is widely familiar. But few understand that the very conduct of this debate constitutes a serious departure from traditional Marxist teaching. Traditional Marxism confidently predicted the collapse of capitalism. Socialism was bound to come. All we had to do, or could do, was to help it along as birth coaches for the new society. 1 This assumption has been an integral part of the Marxian theory of history. Each era, according to the Marxist theory, comes to an end when its mode of production is replaced by a different one. A mode of production is ready to be replaced when the tensions between the forces and the relations of production become too great. In this way socialism was certain to take the place of the existing capitalist system when the stresses between capitalist forces and relations of production could no longer be managed. We did not need to consider at present what that socialism would look like because we would find that out soon enough once capitalism collapsed. Supported by their theory of history, Marx and Engels could reject as “utopian” those authors who tried to foresee the lineaments of a socialist society. This Marxian theory of history and its predictions have fallen out of favor. Many socialists today believe that socialism is not inevitable but must be built slowly and laboriously by the political and economic actions of men and women seeking a freer and more just society. 2 Hence 1

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we now see some discussions about the nature of socialism. Any society that we might want to build would require a blueprint. The debate about market socialism—the best developed of these discussions about socialism—is an attempt to provide a partial blueprint for a socialist society. Our willingness to engage in these debates signals a clear departure from Marxist orthodoxy. The economic characteristics of socialism have received some attention but even this discussion is quite fragmentary. There exists an interesting variety of schemes that all present themselves as socialist, but, except for the “market-socialism” debate, they have received little critical examination. Even less thought has been devoted to the non-economic features of a future, socialist society. We have been reluctant to look at the different aspects of a socialist society. Perhaps, since socialism has been largely out of favor, even among ardent critics of existing conditions, we are afraid that if we ask difficult question, we will discover that socialism is impossible and that we must, therefore, give up our hope for a world less unjust and corrupt. In these pages I want to raise a series of these difficult questions. If there will ever be socialism, we will have to work for it. One kind of necessary work is to penetrate much more deeply into the idea of socialism. If we do not have a fairly detailed understanding of the project and its challenges, we will remain in our current condition of talking about socialism but being unable to do much, if anything to promote it.

TOPIC 1: WHAT IS SOCIALISM? Questions about the nature of socialism are of two very different sorts. In the context of Marxist theory, the word “socialism” refers to a mode of production—a complex system of social and economic institutions and ways of thinking. At the heart of a mode of production are certain economic arrangements: the forces of production and the relations of appropriation. Most basically, the mode of production is determined by the system of property ownership and by the technological features and workplace organization of the productive apparatus. If we ask about the nature of socialism in that context, we are asking about socialist modes of production, about the ownership of productive resources and their relation to productive technologies and different forms of workplace organization. We are asking about a whole host of institutions closely tied to one another into a systematic whole in which no institutions can be altered significantly without permanent alterations in many of the others. If societies exemplify modes of production, systems of institutions tightly linked to one another, fundamental social change tends to take a cataclysmic character. More or less everything must be made new in short order. Many institutions have to be changed at once or in a very short span of

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time. Gradualism is out of the question; only a genuine revolution will do. But, as I said earlier, some elements of Marxist theory, especially the belief in the inevitability of socialism have ever shrinking numbers of supporters. It does not seem very plausible anymore that we can be sure that socialism will replace capitalism in the future. Marxism laid claim to being a science; the inevitability thesis was just one of its scientific results. The mode of production model of societies was another part of that Marxist science. If we are dubious about inevitability, will we also perhaps be less convinced that human history is best understood in terms of modes of production? Do the changes that make up human history really conform to the Marxist model of radical transformations which consist of the replacement of one mode of production by another? Many theorists who once described themselves as Marxists, and may still do so, have surrendered the conception of social change in terms of modes of production together with giving up on the inevitability thesis. They use the word “socialism” in a more elastic sense to refer to any social order that is not capitalist. Using that meaning of socialism, the question what is socialism is answered by saying “whatever is not capitalist.” Question #1: By socialism do we mean a “mode of production” or a socio/economic system different from (and superior to) capitalism? 3 Suppose we distance ourselves from Marx’s theory of the modes of production. There are many answers to the question of what a system different from and, we hope, superior to capitalism would be like but what kind of evidence, or rational argument can be supplied to support our answers? Asking point blank “what is socialism?” invites speculation about the ways in which abolishing private ownership of the means of production will make everything different and better. But these speculations rest, if not on fantasy or wishful thinking, on complex circumstantial reasoning that is not persuasive to any but the faithful. Following Toni Smith 4 and others, I want to approach that question from a different side. Socialists have traditionally been quite hostile to liberalism. Liberals have been regarded as providing an ideological cover for the depredation of capitalism. Liberals build Potemkin villages of happy, free societies but behind that facade capitalism savages the working class. While these criticisms have a good deal to support them, it is also true as, for instance, Roselli and Smith have pointed out, that the goals of liberalism are not so different from those of socialists. 5 All are aiming for a society where all are free, and equal, and live in solidarity with one another. The intense hostility of many socialists for existing liberal regimes flows from just that set of common goals which liberals seem to share with socialists but seem, also, to betray daily while concealing this betrayal behind ringing clichés about freedom, equality and solidarity.

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But this similarity in goals may be deceptive. Liberals and socialists use many of the same words to designate their goals, but do they mean the same thing by that? That question must serve a number of purposes, one of which is self-clarification on the side of socialism. Question #2: Liberty, equality, and solidarity—liberal and socialist: How are they different?

TOPIC 2: MARKET SOCIALISM AND CENTRAL PLANNING Market socialism is popular even though different market socialist projects diverge significantly from one another. Markets are favored for at least two reasons. In an advanced technological society, the body of information needed by planners is not available unless markets function properly. Market socialists as well as advocates of the capitalist free market seem to agree on that. 6 Markets are thought necessary for the information they provide which cannot be found in any other way. In the second place, markets are said to provide incentives. Sometimes these are characterized as incentives for innovation, for inventing better mousetraps, and sometimes the incentives are said to be needed to motivate managers to follow the instructions of central planning agencies. 7 The Soviet planning process was hampered, say some of the advocates of markets, because there was no available method for making sure that managers followed the national plans. Markets yield essential information as well as incentives for creativity and for managers to follow national plans. But many socialists have also regarded markets with considerable suspicion and therefore propose alternatives that do not use markets. One example was the centrally planned economy in the Soviet Union and in Mao’s China. Today the proposal by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel is highly regarded in some quarters, characterized by a pyramid of organizations involved in planning. 8 At the lowest level there are block or neighborhood meetings to decide what people want to consume. These councils decide both on neighborhood expenditures, for instance, for a new playground or a Senior Center, and on the goods families will consume at home. Similarly, there will be planning meetings in workplaces where workers decide production goals and requirements for raw materials and machinery. These wish lists of local communities and workplaces will be passed on to higher level councils that try to reconcile the decisions of the local councils. The decisions, if irreconcilable, may have to be passed back down for further discussion; otherwise they are passed up to a regional and finally a national council. At each level there are discussions both at that level and with the lower levels that sent up suggestions. Out of this complex process a national plan would emerge.

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This planning process differs significantly from Soviet central planning because consumers and workers are consulted at every step of the way. This is not planning by experts on behalf of workers and consumers, but planning by all citizens for what they will produce and consume. Its advocates claim that the information problems resolved by functioning markets will be resolved equally well by this complex process of council deliberations. Will council communism also solve the various incentive problems? Council communists are not in doubt about this. With respect to all these different proposals we are tempted to ask: “Will it work?” But that is not a useful question because we do not, of course, have an answer to it. But it is legitimate to ask: Do we have any experiences that bear on the question whether this planning process will work? Albert and Hahnel point out that there are many multinational corporations whose annual budget exceeds that of many smaller countries. These corporations do their internal planning without the benefit of markets. The different units of the large corporation do not stand in the same relations to each other as actors in markets. This suggests that planning without markets for fairly large commercial units is possible. 9 But that argument needs careful evaluation. Large (and small) organizations plan internally, but hardly in the participatory manner advocated by Albert and Hahnel—and do not conduct internal markets. To be sure. But manufacturers, or Wal-Mart use the information about prices, about supply and demand provided by markets in their planning. It is not clear without a great deal of further reflection, that markets are completely dispensable. The conflict between market socialists and council communism has been debated more than most other questions about socialism. But the debate is not complete. Question #3: Market Socialism and Central Planning. What evidence do we have for preferring one to the other? This discussion obviously must address both the information and the incentive questions in their different forms.

TOPIC #3: DIFFERENT MARKET SOCIALISMS In our society there are many markets. A major disagreement among market socialists is about what markets a socialist society should permit. David Schweickart, like the advocates of the council planning system, opposes labor markets and markets in investment funds. In his version of market socialism, there are no labor markets because all workplaces are worker owned and controlled and thus no one is hired to do a job. John Roemer by contrast is one of a number of market socialists who abolishes the market in investment funds but does countenance a labor market. 10

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Roemer, like Albert and Hahnel, wants to establish a socialist society because it will provide the opportunity for full development for everyone. 11 Some socialists are quite certain that this ideal of fully developed citizens is unattainable where there exists a market for labor; others do not believe that. This clearly is a matter that requires further discussion. The concept of the full development of persons is too vague for the purposes of advocating, let alone constructing socialism. Even the U.S. Marine Corps advocates full self-development. (“Be all you can be!”) Question #4: What is full personal development and what is its relation to the market for labor. (Anatole Anton’s paper on the division of labor, below, addresses aspects of that question.) This question is also connected to some phenomena known to us. We can get some insight relevant to the effect of the labor market or its absence on individual self-development by studying existing worker controlled workplaces. 12

TOPIC 4: DEMOCRATIC CONTROL OF INVESTMENTS But a second question arises in the discussions between different forms of market socialism. For some socialists it is of central importance that socialism be democratic. (We will have a lot more questions about that below.) The precise nature of this democratic procedure in controlling investment decisions is open to debate. Schweickart envisages public debates that end in consensus or more often in a vote about national priorities for investment: shall we invest in military hardware, for instance, or in education, shall we give cash grants to the unemployed or, instead, create rewarding jobs for those who cannot find decent work. But some of the other market socialists leave those decisions to a quasi-market mechanism. Roemer, for instance, envisages a society where everyone is given, at birth, a voucher for a certain amount of social capital. These vouchers may be traded, but not for money—only for other vouchers. This, Roemer seems to think, allows for popular control of national investment resources and prevents the formation of a new class of capitalists. This raises Question #5: What does democratic control of investments consist of?

TOPIC 5: TRANSITION PROBLEMS Marx and Engels sometimes envisaged fighting on the barricades to rout the remaining members of the capitalist class. (In 1848 Engels actually returned to Germany in order to do so.) But having seen the effects of that, we believe today that the transition has to be peaceful. (So did

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Engels in his later years. 13) Many socialists partially blame the violent revolution in Russia in 1917 for the bloody dictatorship that followed. If the transition—so the thinking goes—is effected by military forces of some sort, the new socialist regime is predisposed to using force to establish its new social order. If, in addition, the principles of socialist construction legitimate the use of violent coercion, the socialist society that comes into being is likeley to be dictatorial. A democratic socialism needs to be constructed through democratic processes, not through coercion. (Venezuela, currently, is an interesting laboratory for this belief.) On the other hand, there exist historical precedents for the possibility of democratically restricting the power of the capitalists. One example is the environmental legislation passed in recent years, as well as legislation protecting wages and workers, or permitting union organizing. In each of these instances capitalists had to be dragged into accepting limitations. But sooner or later, at least some of them, see the regulations imposed on all and enforced by the state as being to everyone’s advantage insofar as it keeps capitalism going. But this argument is clearly one-sided. If the counter-revolution of the last 40 years, beginning with the election of Thatcher in Great Britain and of Reagan in the United States, shows us anything, it is that capitalists never forget and will, at the first opportunity, not merely roll back limitations that have been forced upon them, but try to expand their power as much as possible. The savage attack on labor unions, on environmental regulations, on the poor, and on ordinary working people, show that democratic procedures may, at times, limit capitalist power, but that capitalists will forever continue the class struggle in full force. It is then tempting to say that capitalism will not yield to democratic, non-violent action. If we are to reduce the power of capitalists or demolish it entirely, violence may well be needed. The questions about violence in the transition to socialism cannot be put aside quite as easily. Question #6: What is the role of violence in the transition to socialism? This question has important ramifications when we begin to think about alternative forms of democracy. Socialists often point to the collaborative budgeting process in Porto Alegre as the model for a kind of democracy that is a great deal more participatory than ours. But the transition to that sort of democracy is very different if it is to take place in an existing (capitalist) democracy. It can be put into place only if those who already have power—branches of government at some level and political parties—are seriously committed to a more participatory democracy and work at instituting it. That effort can work only if ordinary citizens are sufficiently mobilized to want to participate. 14

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TOPIC 6: SOCIALIST POLITICS Most of the socialists I know are political activists. But from looking at their political work you couldn’t infer their commitment to socialism. Since there does not exist a Socialist Party of any significance in the United States, you cannot recognize Socialists by their organizational memberships. (In Europe, where Socialist parties are even in some governments, their main efforts—currently—are to impose austerity measures on the poor and the working class.) You could recognize their commitment to socialism only from seeing that they work for it. But it is not clear that any of us are doing that. We seem to be immersed in thoroughly reformist work. That is not meant as a criticism but as a way of raising another question: Question #7: what sorts of things can one, should one do to promote socialism today? There exist some discussions of that in the literature about worker controlled workplaces and the special case of ESOP’s but more needs to be said here. 15 The classical answer to this question was provided in the Communist Manifesto, that socialists will fight for “immediate aims” as does everyone else but will at the same time be looking to the future, to a different social order. They will be doing the same political work as everyone else but will do it in a different way. But that reply is vague. It is not clear that this different way, namely always having one eye on the future revolution, makes any concrete difference. In recent years, under the influence of the Social Forum movement, Feminism and post-modernism, the view has once again gained ground that capitalism cannot be transformed by large mass movements striving for state power in order to alter the ownership of means of production. Instead, many anti-capitalists believe that local action creating alternative institutions will, eventually, transform the society into one that is less rapacious, less destructive of lives as well as of nature, that is more equal and genuinely democratic. 16 Question #8: Must we seek socialism by building mass movements to gain the power for transforming the entire economy, or must we put our energy into building alternative institutions locally? (Our answer to this question depends in part on the answer we give to question #1.)

TOPIC 7: THE PROBLEM OF MOTIVATION From the very beginning of the socialist movement, there was the question whether socialism would require different human personalities from those we have in a capitalist society. Marx, in his 1844 Notebooks, speaks

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about the Communist society as producing human beings with expanded perceptual powers. “The humanness of the senses—comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanized nature,” 17 and later, in the German Ideology he and Engels wrote: “. . . for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness . . . the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary. . . .” 18 Lenin, on the other hand, proposed to create a communist society with men and women as they are. 19 The same disagreement still exists. Roemer states explicitly that the socialist transformation he envisages will be brought about by people as they are. 20 Schweickart, insofar as he insists that the market is necessary to motivate men and women to work, to innovate, seems to assume a future in which human psychology is much like ours. On the other hand, Albert insists that human beings will change in the process of constructing a socialist society. That belief responds to the fear that if human beings do not change, the democracy in David Schweickart’s market socialist society will be as corrupt and as minimally democratic as ours. No one knows with certainty whether this fear is justified. But it is, on the other hand, not a silly fear either. It might prove well founded. There is good reason to agree with Marx, Engels, and many others that we must expect a change in human personalities in a socialist society. 21, 22, 23 But these issues need careful rethinking. In a certain way, it is a trivial truth, that social change brings changes in human persons. As we grow up we learn to thrive in the societies we grow into. Who we are, as well as our motivations, depend on the social settings in which we live. Human beings are relational, their “nature” is shaped significantly by their social context. The character traits and skills that made successful feudal subjects are different from those needed in a capitalist society. Capitalism requires that we compete, that we not mind too much if we take jobs that others want, or if our economic well-being depends on the poverty of others. We object to sweatshops but continue to wear their products. Successful competitors must be short on solidarity. That is true in spite of all the Jewish and Christian exhortations to love our neighbor like ourselves. These questions about motivation are of major importance because they affect the extent to which we allow ourselves to dream of a better world. Socialists whose hope for transformations of human beings are limited, will also scale down their expectations for socialism and its democratic processes. They will echo what Stephen Bronner had to say about the Swedish Meidner Plan and German projects for co-determination, “It can be plausibly argued that such plans were insufficient. But the truth is that no such plan is ever sufficient. Democracy is always insufficient. There is never enough freedom.” 24 Modest socialism hopes for, at best, an extension of democracy, of some sort, to the economy by reining in the worst excesses of multi-national capitalism.

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Socialists with higher hopes for human change may want to echo a passage from Chomsky: “The task for a modern industrial society is to achieve what is now technically realizable, namely, a society which is really based on free voluntary participation of people who produce and create, live their lives freely within institutions they control, and with limited hierarchical structures, possibly none at all.” 25 Socialists who have responded to changed institutions by lowering their self-regarding inclinations, whose choices are progressively less affected by anxiety about their own well-being, will blossom into human beings whose conduct is largely determined by sentiments of solidarity. Their socialist world will differ significantly from that of the modest socialists. It is useless to ask which of these visions of socialism is true, because we do not know that. Question #9: What information do we have about the possibility of human nature changing to facilitate socialism?

TOPIC 8: PROBLEMS OF DEMOCRACY Everyone agrees that socialism—the socialism we work for that differs fundamentally from the former “actually existing socialism” of the Soviet era—must be democratic. But the word “democracy” is very patient and often, what goes by that name in the Western world, takes an enormous expenditure of money to deceive people into thinking that they have a say in governments that clearly disrespect them. Lenin’s contemptuous phrase is appropriate here that democracy allows the proletariat to choose every four years who will oppress them. 26 Socialist democracy must clearly be different from capitalist democracy but it is not at all clear in what ways. This question has not been examined a great deal. Here are some topics for reflection. Topic 8A: Different Kinds of Democracy The word “democracy” refers to a number of quite different processes. 1. A process of policy formation through the participation of every member of a given group. That is often called “deliberative” democracy. 27, 28 2. As a method of forming policy where different parties advocate different policies. That is one of the roles of “electoral” democracy—majority rule. Here democracy is an alternative to violent methods for settling disagreements over policy. 3. As a method of selecting office holders. 29 Here democracy is the competition of candidates for election to various public bodies.

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Once they have voted, the citizens have no further job to do until the next election. 4. As a method for non-violent contestation for power. An example is, for instance, the struggle over abortion. Neither side is willing to compromise on this one but, with some notable exception, both sides want to win that fight without violence. Democracy here stands for each side gaining adherents, manipulating the political system in any way possible to get its way. 5. Today democracy, in whatever sense, has to do with public authorities—with the state. Socialists often say that their democracy applies also to the workplace, in schools and the family. Does it also apply in the operating room or in the admissions process to Harvard? There are probably other senses of “democracy.” Which of any of those will continue into a socialist society? Question #10: What kind of democracy is a socialist democracy? Topic 8B: Competition There is considerable debate among socialist theorists about the desirability of competition. Stiglitz is all for it, 30 and so is Schweikart. 31 Roselli is not so sure about it, 32 and Lebowitz regards it as a serious problem for socialists. 33 That is a debate that needs to be sorted out in considerable detail. Before that debate gets started, however, we need to make quite sure that we are clear about what competition is and about the different kinds of competition. 34 One kind of competition spurs everybody on to better performance—such as two people running together. Here winning is not important but doing as well or better than one had expected. The word “emulation” is sometimes applied to this sort of friendly competition. Competition in the marketplace is very different. The issue is “greater market share” and that means taking business away from the competitor and, in the end, putting them out of business altogether. The goal is victory; victory consists of complete destruction of the competitor. The competitive marketplace, for that reason, tend towards oligopoly because everyone is trying to reduce the number of competitors in any given market. Questions about competition in a socialist society arise in two different contexts: One, in the economy, there are a number of questions: Will there be competition in, for instance, a participatorily planned economy? What kind of competition will it be? Will all kinds of competition be acceptable? If not, how can we put an end to unacceptable forms of competition? What will be the nature of competition in a market socialist economy?

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Two, in the political arena, the democratic process—at least as we know it—is also competitive. What is more, it is competitive in this second sense. The competitor is to be eliminated. For that purpose, almost all means are acceptable—in practice even illegal ones like vote rigging are considered permissible by some participants in our democratic process. Certainly accepted political practices include misrepresentation of issues and personalities, stirring up emotions with racist or other slurs, appealing to emotional reactions with 30-second television spots, withholding information and many other techniques that make rational consideration of issues and personalities much more difficult. Will socialist democracy be different? The hopes of many socialists for a society governed primarily by sentiments of solidarity is utopian if socialist democracy will function like ours does today. But that raises another question about socialist democracy: Question #11: What will be the nature and role of competition in socialist democracy? Topic 8C: Limits of Transparency and Lack of Information “Participation” is an important word in the vocabulary of socialists. In democratic socialism, we are often told, everyone will participate in arriving at policies designed to benefit as many persons as possible. Quite clearly, such a goal can only be achieved if everybody has the best information available which is freely distributed by a group of news providers dedicated to enlightening everyone. Now this is a very different situation from ours where the manipulation of news, its misrepresentation and concealment are a definite part of the democratic process. Certain issues are never discussed and others are consistently misrepresented or presented in a biased and one-sided manner. Add to that, that in our democracy the government is consistently withholding information. A central characteristic of capitalist democracy is the distortion of news and information by anyone who is in a position to do so. A socialist democracy requires a very different set of mechanisms for providing news to all citizens. Question #12: What are the requirements for and the means of socialist news gathering and distribution? Answers to that question will differ with different socialist projects. In a socialist market society that allows competition between enterprises, what will be the effect of that competition on the objectivity of news and its presentation? If socialism is limited to particular regulations of investment capital, will one of the remaining markets provide unreliable news as do capitalist markets? If we think of socialism as planned, what will be the planning process for news gathering and presentation? Who will participate in that planning process?

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Topic 8D: The Special Power of the Expert Modern societies are immensely complex. No one is expert in more than a small area. When the people in a socialist society make their policy decisions, they must draw on many experts who derive influence or authority from their expertise. Ordinary citizens who are not expert are dependent on specialists for their judgment. It is difficult to prevent ordinary citizens from losing the power of decision making, allowing it to pass into the hands of the professionals. To the extent that that happens, of course, democracy is limited and replaced by a regime of specialized, trained professionals. Advocates of socialist democracy have addressed this challenge in very limited ways. Some suggestions have been made to raise the level of education of all citizens in order to reduce the power of experts. 35 While that is clearly a good suggestion, it can only have a very limited effect because the amount of knowledge needed to be expert in all areas is unmanageable for any single human being. We are left with the hope that experts and professionals will not abuse their special position. It seems legitimate to ask why we should trust them with that? Question #13: What will restrict the power of the expert? Topic 8E: Techniques of Settling Disagreements While socialists and democratic theorists of all stripes speak a lot about democratic participation, it is not really clear at all what that means. In any concrete situation we are familiar with, every party has their say and then a decision is made to conform to the opinion of those who have more power. If citizens, for instance, make a request to their city government, they may address the city council but that council, being more powerful than the individual citizens, will make its decision as it sees fit. In our existing democracy decisions are made, in any given situation, by those who have the most power. As a consequence the democratic process consists of a continual jockeying for power. In such a process, in democracies as we know them, talk about “participation”means very little. It may mean that everyone has the opportunity to express an opinion but not that everyone participates in making the decision. If socialist democracy allows participation for everyone not only in expressing opinions but also in making decisions, new techniques for settling disagreements and overcoming conflicts must be envisaged and developed. Question #14: What are more promising methods for conflict resolution than those used in current democracies? There exists a large body of information about this question as well as a variety of practices in mediation, arbitration, and conflict resolution.

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Topic 8F: Bureaucracy and Socialism Government fills two very different functions. It has a monopoly of violence (at least in theory) and it provides a great number of services such as schools, libraries, elections, streets, public housing, and many more. Providing these services requires coordination, record keeping, planning, giving orders to people to do certain things at certain times, supervising, etc. These seem essential activities for the functioning of the society but they call into existence a large body of persons who are only very incompletely under democratic control. If socialism is to be more democratic than capitalism, it must find ways of bringing administrative functions under tighter democratic control. The traditional answer is that the “administration of things replaces the domination of men” which we owe to Lenin, 36 but that phrase is hollow. The administration of things cannot help but dominate human beings. Rationing paper does in fact prevent some authors from printing their poems. Neglecting school buildings and schools supplies have for many years been methods for providing an inferior education to children of color. The administration of things is clearly very often oppressive to persons. Another approach suggests that we resolve the problem of bureaucracy by abolishing the division of labor. That would mean, presumably, that the administrative work that needs to be done, e.g., keeping voter rolls, preparing voting places for elections, buying and distributing supplies to schools, etc., will be taken care of by all citizens taking turns in doing this necessary work. 37 That is an interesting suggestion, reminiscent of Athenian democracy, where administration was done by all citizens, but it needs a much more detailed discussion. Personally, I am not sure that we can recommend socialism if it involves a whole lot more work for everyone. Modern societies do require a great deal of administration. Traditionally administrators are not elected and only indirectly subject to democratic control. Their accountability is often pretty feeble. Question #15: What is the role and nature of bureaucracy in a socialist society? How will socialist societies avoid the limitation of democracy by administrative decision-making? Topic 8G: Democratic Deal Making Albert thinks that majority rules keep everyone honest and considerate of the needs and wants of others. In the democratic planning process, he envisages, excessive consumption demands will be weeded out because the majority will understand that this one person’s needs are greater than anyone else’s and should therefore not be met. 38 How shall we think about that?

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If, in the real world, I am the senator from Alaska who wants to build a multi-million dollar bridge in order to relieve the 150 inhabitants of an island of the necessity of taking a ferry boat to the mainland, I will not just put in my request to the proper Congressional committee but I will promise fellow legislators to vote for their special requests, if they will vote for mine. Excessive and extravagant demands often are accepted because of promises that similar extravagant projects, proposed by other legislators, will gain support when their time comes. What guarantee do we have that such logrolling will not become standard practice in socialist democracy as it is in ours? If such deal making persists in a socialist society, then we must be much more cautious in our thinking about a planned economy. Modern capitalist economies involve a great deal of planning, but as the current bank bail-out shows, it is crony-planning where all try to get as much as possible for themselves and their friends to the detriment of outsiders. If standards of political morality are no different under socialism, what reason do we have for thinking that socialist planning will be any more equitable and will aim any more at the well-being of all than does capitalist planning? This is just one of the many problems regarding democracy that need to be raised. If you are a market socialist, can you simply claim that your system will be democratic and, moreover, will be democratic in a very different sense from that capitalist democracy which we know and are very critical of? may we not expect, on the contrary, that in a market society—even if it is a socialist market society—the markets will inevitably distort democracy? Very possibly socialist democracy may be a lot like the democracy we have today. If you do not believe that, let us hear your arguments for your view. Question #16: In any kind of socialist economy, whether of the market or council variety, will people regularly try to get advantages for themselves that they are not entitled to? Will such efforts distort democracy? And if there are those distortions how is socialist democracy so different from ours?

TOPIC 9: ALIENATION If we have a market society, will alienation not remain a problem? One answer is that, no, there will be no market in labor. and that’s enough to eliminate alienation. The assumption underlying that reply is that the commodification of labor is the only cause of alienation. But consider this: If you work in a large enterprise, whether capitalist or “worker-owned,” you may have some say in selecting managers but you are clearly under the direction of someone else for much of your work life. You are still taking orders most of the time. Here one needs to think of the workers at Mondragon or of different versions of ESOPs,

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even worker-managed ones, in the United States. Mondragon, consisting of a chain of co-ops owned by their workers, nevertheless, faces a good deal of worker dissatisfaction with their lack of power in running their workplace. 39 In many ESOPs the workers are the owners of their workplace but have minimal control over its management. 40 In neither case do you find real self-management—widely considered a necessary condition for abolishing alienation. The question about alienation is clearly connected to questions about the details of worker ownership-and-management. Question #17: Will large socialist enterprises be able to end alienation? Another aspect of this issue is commodification. Even if there is no labor market, there exists commodification in other departments of life such as when personal relations are replaced by purely commercial relations. Commercial relations can be quite impersonal; they may even be transacted through intermediaries, or by mail or over the internet, between persons who remain complete strangers in spite of their commercial contacts. Examples of commodification are paid-for-sex, buying a ready-made suit instead of having it made to order by a tailor, getting advice and comfort from a psychologist or counselor who gets paid for being sympathetic to the patient’s woes. Other examples of commodification: Commercial daycare, flu shots dispensed by the drug store, landscapers who come to your house and plant an entire garden of trees and bushes whose name you do not know. Markets tend to commodify services of all kinds. Commodification is, in many instances, the result of economic and technological developments. The tailor who makes a suit to order is displaced when technologies are developed to mass produce clothes that fit and look good. Under socialism, will clothes again be made to measure? Will those who suffer serious losses, once again, consult their family members, or their local minister whom they know well, rather than professional “grief counselors”? Will small children be nurtured by extended families or collectives? Will the landscaper teach you how to plant a garden and take care of it instead of just doing the work for you? The relations between commodification, as here defined, and capitalism/socialism are sufficiently complex that no simple generalization about commodification under socialism seem readily at hand. The following, therefore, is a legitimate question. Question #18: Does socialism reduce commodification, and if so how?

TOPIC 10: SOCIALISM AND EQUALITY Any writer advocating socialism will insist that socialist institutions do not permit patriarchal or racist distinctions. Some advocates of specific

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socialist plans believe that their plan will automatically eliminate sexist and racist inequalities. 41 Our experience suggests that government actions—from integrating the armed forces to outlawing Jim Crow legislation and instituting affirmative action programs—have a beneficial effect in the struggles against patriarchy and racism. But our experience also suggests that government actions alone do not suffice to assure all citizens full equality. Electing a black president inflames racist passions instead of pacifying them. It is not altogether clear, at this moment, what other means need to be employed to assure equality to all. In spite of government actions, there remains a large reservoir of sexist and racist feelings, attitudes, and practices. Question #19: What tools are available to socialist societies for enhancing equality for all, that are not available to capitalist societies?

TOPIC 11: SOCIALISM AND VIOLENCE Some authors claim that war is attractive because life in battle is more exciting and the relations between comrades more unqualified and unambiguous than in peace time. 42 If socialism manages to overcome alienation will it be able to reduce the attractions of war by making everyday life more exciting? Where is the information which would enable us to answer that question? Question #20: What information would support the claim that war would be less attractive in a socialist than in a capitalist society because everyday life and relationships are less boring or unsatisfactory? Another source of violence is the creation of pretend national identities. Amartya Sen points out in Identity and Violence that every person can describe herself in many different ways. 43 The unique identities we ascribe to ourselves and others, such as in “Proud to be an American,” are fictions. There is no such thing as a unique American, or French, or Indian identity. The inhabitants of the United States do not possess one or more common characteristics possessed only by them and no one else. But governments, especially in times of war or crisis, regularly appeal to these fictitious identities, often successfully so. Socialists have always said that they are internationalists—that nationalist appeals do not carry any weight with them. But what reason do we have for believing that? Question #21: Under socialism will the national-chauvinist patriotism, that capitalist governments invoke to persuade their people to go to war, be less persuasive? Will socialist governments refrain from inflaming national-chauvinist passions? It is often said that wars are caused by the efforts of large, today global, capitalist firms to gain access to raw materials or to markets, and to prevent their competitors from gaining equal access. One example of

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this is the theory that the war in Iraq was conducted for the purpose of assuring Western control over Iraqi or Mid-East oil. Will socialist countries not pursue such global control interests? Question #22: What will make socialist internationalism sufficiently strong for a given people to be willing to share scarce resources with another people at the other side of the globe?

TOPIC 12: SOCIALISM AND THE ENVIRONMENT Will socialist societies—societies that are not only more democratic than ours, but are democratic in a different sense—be better positioned to deal with the threatening ecological catastrophe? In a more democratic country, citizens’ choices are decisive for public policy. Will such a society be able and willing to save the environment? Responding to that question in the affirmative, many socialists assume that capitalism prevents ordinary persons from affecting environmental policy to a serious extent. They also assume that once capitalism is abolished, the majority of citizens, now firmly in control of government policy, will develop a firm ecological consciousness and a resolute dedication to do whatever is necessary to save the natural world. But these are, so far, unargued assumptions. Question #23: Is socialism at an advantage when dealing with the problems of the environment?

TOPIC 13: THE SOCIALIST STATE The state, enforcing laws and, for that purpose, wielding violence, has come under plausible attacks from anarchists. Question #24: Will a socialist state need coercive institutions to enforce the law? If we answer that question in the affirmative, we need to consider the various conceptions of the state in our tradition. There is, to begin with, the state of Hobbes and of Weber that uses violence to keep the peace. There is also Locke’s state which provides “impartial judges” to decide conflicts between citizens. The redistributive state of social-democracy takes from the rich to put a floor under the life of the poor. The capitalist state as we know it, finally, makes and enforces laws, rules, and regulation that most often favor the capitalist class. It will take the side of the working class if that promises to maintain the stability of the capitalist system. Question #25: Does socialism need any of these familiar forms of the state, or will it have a form of the state all its own? If so, what will that socialist state be like?

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NOTES 1. A recent version of that view may be found in G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). 2. Stephen Bronner, Socialism Unbound (New York: Routledge, 1990), 146; Michael Lebowitz, Build It Now: Socialism for the 21st Century (New Delhi: Monthly Review/ Daanish Books, 2006), 228–231; David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Andre Gorz, Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology (London: Verso, 1994). 3. I provide one answer to that question in a subsequent chapter, entitled “Beyond Capitalism and Socialism.” 4. Tony Smith, The Role of Ethics in Social Theory: Essays from a Habermasian Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991). 5. Carlo Roselli, Liberal Socialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 6. David Schweickart, After Capitalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 49. 7. Joseph E. Stiglitz, Whither Socialism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994). 8. Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, Looking Forward: Participatory Economics in the Twenty-first Century (Boston: South End Press, 1991). 9. Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, Parecon (London: Verso, 2003), 256. 10. John Roemer, A Future for Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 50. 11. Roemer, Future, 11. 12. Len Krimmerman and F. Lindenfeld, When Workers Decide: Workplace Democracy Takes Root in North America (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1992). 13. Frederick Engels, Introduction to Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France in Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 556. 14. Hilary Wainwright, Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy (London: Verso, 2003). 15. John Logue, The Real World of Employee Ownership (Ithaca: ILR Press, 2001). 16. Jenna Allard, Carl Davidson, and Julie Mathei, eds. Solidarity Economy: Building Alternatives for People and Planet (Chicago: Changemakers Publications, 2008). 17. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, 89. 18. Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, 193. 19. V. I. Lenin, State and Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1932), 43. 20. Roemer, A Future, 46. 21. Albert and Hahnel, Socialism, 21. 22. See also Milton Fisk, “Social Feelings and the Morality of Socialism,” in Toward a New Socialism, ed. Anatole Anton and Richard Schmitt (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 117–144. 23. Richard Schmitt, “Can We Get There from Here? Reflections about Fundamental Social and Human Change,” in Toward a New Socialism, ed. Anatole Anton and Richard Schmitt (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 145–159. 24. Bronner, Socialism, 154. 25. Quoted in Albert and Hahnel, Looking Forward, 13. 26. Lenin, State and Revolution, 40. See also Marx, Civil War in France, in The MarxEngels Reader, ed. Tucker, 633. 27. Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 28. James Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 29. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1950). 30. Stiglitz, Whither Socialism?. 31. Schweickart, After Capitalism, 59. 32. Roselli, Liberal Socialism, 94.

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33. Lebowitz, Build It Now, 76. 34. Helen Longino, “Competition: A Feminist Taboo,” in The Ideology of Competition, ed. Helen Longino and Valerie Miner (New York: Feminist Press, 1987). 35. Albert and Hahnel, Looking Forward, 24. 36. Lenin, State and Revolution, 38. 37. Katherine Ferguson, The Feminist Case against Bureaucracy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984). 38. Albert and Hahnel, Looking Forward, 78. 39. Sharryn Kasmir, The Myth of Mondragon: Cooperatives, Politics and Working Class Life in a Basque Town (Albany: State University of New York, 1996). 40. Logue, Real World. 41. Albert and Hahnel, Looking Forward, 143. 42. J. Glenn Grey, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967); Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (New York: Public Affairs, 2002); Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (New York: Back Bay Books, 1996). 43. Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

REFERENCES Albert, Michael, and Robin Hahnel. Looking Forward: Participatory Economics in the Twenty-first Century. Boston: South End Press, 1991. Albert, Michael, and Robin Hahnel. Parecon. London: Verso, 2003. Allard, Jenna, Carl Davidson, and Julie Mathei, eds. Solidarity Economy: Building Alternatives for People and Planet. Chicago: Changemakers Publications, 2008. Barber, Benjamin. Strong Democracy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Bronner, Stephen. Socialism Unbound. New York: Routledge, 1990. Cohen, G. A. Karl Marx’s Theory of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. Engels, Frederick. Introduction to Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France in The MarxEngels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978. Ferguson, Katherine. The Feminist Case against Bureaucracy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984. Fishkin, James. Democracy and Deliberation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Fisk, Milton. “Social Feelings and the Morality of Socialism” in Toward a New Socialism, ed. Anatole Anton and Richard Schmitt. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007, 117–144. Gorz, Andrė. Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology. London: Verso, 1994. Grey, J. Glenn. The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967. Grossman, Lt. Col. Dave. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. New York: Back Bay Books, 1996. Harvey, David. The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Hedges, Chris. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. New York: Public Affairs, 2002. Kasmir, Sharryn. The Myth of Mondragon: Cooperatives, Politics and Working Class Life in a Basque Town. Albany: State University of New York, 1996. Krimmerman, Len, and F. Lindenfeld. When Workers Decide: Workplace Democracy Takes Root in North America. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1992. Lebowitz, Michael. Build It Now: Socialism for the 21st Century. New Delhi: Monthly Review/Daanish Books, 2006. Lenin, V. I. State and Revolution. New York: International Publishers, 1932.

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Logue, John. The Real World of Employee Ownership. Ithaca: ILR Press, 2001. Longino, Helen. “Competition: A Feminist Taboo” in The Ideology of Competition, ed. Helen Longino and Valerie Miner. New York: Feminist Press, 1987. Roemer, John. A Future for Socialism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Roselli, Carlo. Liberal Socialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Schmitt, Richard. “Can We Get There from Here? Reflections about Fundamental Social and Human Change,” in Toward a New Socialism, ed. Anatole Anton and Richard Schmitt. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007, 145–159. Schumpeter, Joseph. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1950. David Schweickart. After Capitalism. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Sen, Amartya. Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Smith, Tony. The Role of Ethics in Social Theory: Essays from a Habermasian Perspective. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. Stiglitz, Joseph E. Whither Socialism. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994. Wainwright, Hilary. Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy. London: Verso, 2003.

TWO In Defense of Marxism Milton Fisk

Much of what I say will depend on the idea that Marxian socialism is not an ideal but a practical necessity. Those who see it as capturing all that is good and noble will find the reality of socialism disappointing. In the Marxian view, socialism attempts to put a stop to capitalism’s evermore serious threats to social life. As capitalism develops new powers, it damages further its own capacity to sustain society. The failures of socialism to establish a lasting and less distorted presence are useful lessons rather than signs of impossibility. The 20th century was one of socialist defeats, but also of new socialist initiatives built on lessons from those defeats. I refer extensively to Marx to suggest that his version of socialism is not vulnerable to common critiques of it.

SOCIALISM OR BARBARISM Goals lie behind our struggles. The goal that many of us on the left look for is not the best of worlds but a world with fewer threats of disaster. The imperative for change then comes from the goal of avoiding disaster. We are worried about wars, rape, economic crises, and global warming since they pose a threat to society itself. Deepening economic inequality worries us because of its potential to weaken the society through creating misery and bitterness. Since certain features are threatening present society, we on the left think we must try to change those features in order to avoid a path leading to social collapse. One needs to change the society’s culture of individualism and militarism, its racial, gender, and class bar23

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riers, and its sacrifice of nature for profits. The changes we advocate must be steps to avoiding social collapse. Isn’t saving society a conservative rather than a leftist undertaking? Conservatives certainly share with the left this goal of saving society. The difference is that in the name of defending society conservatives want to preserve features of society that may now favor certain groups but in the long run put the society itself in jeopardy. This may seem paradoxical. Conservatives will say that the left cannot change society without destroying it. This is because for them, saving society means keeping those features that the left wants to eliminate in order to save it. Societies can come with many different attributes. They may be Protestant, male dominated, poor, capitalist, or authoritarian. But beyond having attributes like these, which often change without a collapse of the society, societies of all different kinds have attributes of another kind. These are the attributes making up what we call the “social bond.” A breakdown of the social bond will involve people not trusting one another, not wanting to help one another, and not finding enjoyment in the company of one another. Where trust, solidarity, and conviviality cease to be widespread, a social breakdown is on its way. (The general point here does not depend on whether it is precisely these three features and not some others that make up the social bond.) The failures of certain other features of society can occasionally break down, but they do so through undermining one or another of the three features I have mentioned. A society needs to rely on diverse skills and resources. Without them members of the society will not wait to die while stoically maintaining the social bond. Rather some will see a chance to avoid starvation by preying on others. In this way they undermine trust, solidarity, and conviviality. Both conservatives and the left would like to avoid breakdowns of society. They will try to change those features of the society they believe contribute to the breakdown. They tend to disagree on what needs changing. There may be disagreement over the claim that continuing to release large quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will lead to food and water shortages that force people into mass migrations in search of life’s necessities. Those who accept this claim will say it is imperative to try to save society on Earth by taking steps that will reduce those releases. I now want to put aside controversies like this one about the environment in order to look from one side only at a less global threat. Wars in a country can be so disruptive that they lead to the breakdown of its society. The occupation of Iraq by the United States and others in 2003, led to a period of internecine conflict in which ordinary Iraqi citizens feared walking in the streets, suffered from failures of public services, and worried that a knock on the door might be that of the occupier. There was a social collapse, which had been in the making a decade earlier due to

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restrictions on imports intended to provoke a coup to oust Saddam Hussein. Such a social collapse does not rule out a rebirth of the society as conditions improve. The old customs and ways of organizing and enjoying life can return, but the period of collapse is a trauma during which there is no assurance of reconstruction. How does this relate to Marxism? Let us start with Marx’s notion of alienation, on which he based his early critique of capitalism. Alienation for him embodied the idea of social collapse. The reason is that both alienation from the product of work when the owner takes it away and alienation from life when earning a wage becomes its aim are “realized and expressed in the relationship in which a person stands to other persons.” That is, they show up in their effects on society. In saying how these forms of alienation show up, Marx does not mention anything purely internal to persons but instead he mentions the alienation of persons from their “species-being.” This for him meant alienation from social life, which is the life of the species. Thus, the alienation from speciesbeing resulting from the wage system is “the estrangement of person from person.” 1 The tendency of capitalist society toward social collapse is present en nuce in its wage relation. In later work, Marx points out how economic crises manifest this tendency toward collapse. One doesn’t wait until a social collapse is taking place to call people together to make needed changes in society. By then, the task becomes one of rebuilding a society from memories of what it was like to have had one. This was the task of the Darfurians after they fled in the mid-2000s from murder, rapine, and arson in Sudan to refugee camps across the border in Chad. Perhaps, there was nothing they could have done alone to avoid this collapse. But in general, it is imperative to anticipate a collapse by taking action to avert it. This involves changing the society without destroying it, despite the danger that in operating the patient will die. But the more likely danger follows from a failure to respond to signs of impending collapse by decisive action. There are signs of threats to social viability in capitalist societies. There is permanent warfare, deepening divisions between rich and poor, a reluctance to limit the burning of hydrocarbons, and an addiction of the major banks to fictitious capital—capital not backed up by the value of what is actually being produced. There is no guarantee that enough of us will recognize these threats and ask how we can avoid them. Socialists connect these threats to the tendency of capitalism for the unlimited growth of capital made possible by sharing as little as possible of that growth with labor. Marx and Engels said that in such circumstances, “Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism.” 2 However, socialism is not solely about economic change. Capitalism has weakened the social bond, thereby eroding trust, solidarity, and conviviality. Replacing the wage system with joint ownership of productive

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forces will be possible only if one takes steps to repair the damage done to the social bond by capitalism. We can strengthen trust through a system in which people know their voices count. Democracy in the workplace and in the public forum becomes another part of the socialist project since it builds trust and overcomes suspicion. We can strengthen solidarity by having a system in which people do not act only for their own race, class, or nation. So the socialist project will strengthen solidarity by incentives for people to view their capacities as social assets 3 rather than simply as a means of personal or group advantage. We can strengthen conviviality by education for enjoyment and not just for achievement. In sum, socialism is not merely a novel mode of production but is a kind of society defined as well by its brand of democracy, equality, and education. To save society, socialism must change it in these directions. Agitation for socialism is one among various possible kinds of joint action aimed at avoiding a social collapse. With few exceptions, all sides call for changes in the society that will allow it to avoid collapse. So, socialism as a new form of society is not a good we pursue for itself, but a means to avoid social collapse. Socialism can perform the necessary task of ending capitalism without being sufficient for setting aside all threats of collapse. Doing away with capitalism can avoid economic bubbles, rapid depletion of resources, unbalanced growth, and accelerated global warming. But ending capitalism is not sufficient since the society that a post-capitalist world inherits is a damaged one. To repair it, we must build trust through democracy and take other measures, including ending oppression. In the later section on affinity, I discuss the joining of movements against exploitation of labor and oppression of women and minorities within the socialist movement.

UTOPIANS AND SOCIALISTS There is, though, another tendency among socialists. For those in this tendency, socialism aims to provide humans with their highest level of development, with complete harmony, or with the greatest happiness. I call this the perfectionist tendency. The tendency I support adopts socialism because we need it to thwart the drift toward social collapse. I call this the minimalist tendency since the aim of socialism is avoiding threats to society rather than full human development, total harmony, or maximum happiness. For the minimalist, society must be the context in which people can pursue various forms of perfection. Society may have to change in order to be able to pursue full humanity, to pursue complete harmony, or to reach greatest happiness. But those changes are for those perfections rather than for saving the society. Of course, continued social existence will need a certain degree of freedom, harmony, and happiness without requiring full perfection. But

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then they are no longer ends for which society is a mere means, since they have become a means for social survival. Thus, the “free development of each,” as opposed to “the power to subjugate the labor of others,” is for Marx the condition needed to avoid the threat to society inherent in the subjugation of labor. 4 Shouldn’t we find this perspective perverse? For, it seems obvious that one would want socialism because it would bring freedom, equality, humanity, and justice. But Marx was right to criticize as utopian those reformers of his day who appealed to these values as the aim of socialism. Of course, he revered these values, but for him they made perfectly good sense when seen as values to guide us in a social struggle rather than the end of it. He said, “‘Justice,’ ‘humanity,’ ‘freedom,’ etc. may demand this or that a thousand times over; but if the thing is impossible it does not take place and in spite of everything remains an ‘empty figment of a dream.’” 5 Marx pointed to the “individual enthusiasts for universal suffrage” who promoted the Peoples’ Charter from 1838 right through to its final defeat in 1848. But to be more than an abstract dogma, Marx argued that universal suffrage “presupposed a long and arduous unification of the English workers into a class.” Yet this unification was precisely what was missing. Marx concluded that it was utopian to “separate political forms from their social foundations and present them as general, abstract dogmas.” 6 So in this case, we should work for the kind of society for which universal suffrage would be a useful support. This calls for some elaboration. We have been talking about two strategies for change. The one puts the emphasis on following some norm. This strategy starts from violations of a norm by an individual or an organization and offers returning to the norm as a solution. It fails to emphasize how circumstances, including features of the society, encourage those violations. 7 The result is that calls for fairness, peace, equality, and tolerance multiply without changing circumstances responsible for the violation of these norms. Banners and bumper stickers calling for fairness, peace, and other norms are no substitute for concrete plans to change certain features of society. So, this strategy is clearly utopian in a Marxian sense. The other strategy, which is Marx’s non-utopian strategy, emphasizes protecting society. It starts by taking note of the challenges. Unlike the first strategy, this one takes note of the circumstances, including the features of society, which can be the source of these challenges. Perhaps, a feature of the society is its tendency to make enemies outside it. Or perhaps it is alienating internal groups. So long as these tendencies are unchecked, they will undercut appeals for change coming from familiar ethical norms. In other words, the norms of fairness, peace, and respect for life will not be able to serve their purpose of protecting society. These norms will show up on banners, in the pieties of human rights reports, and at political conventions. But their effects will not go beyond these

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limited contexts. In order for ethical norms to serve their purpose, the circumstances must change. Challenges must weaken undisputed leaders. The aggrieved must organize. The press must assert its independence. Of course in this strategy, ethical values will work together with changing the social circumstances. The point is that justice, peace, and the rest will not have an important role if they lack ties to struggles for deep changes in the social circumstances. 8 The theme that Marxist socialism is a minimalist rather than a perfectionist project comes from Marxist opposition to utopianism. Perfectionist socialism would have socialism serve utopian ideals rather than social survival. Full human development, unbroken harmony, and the greatest possible happiness belong, as Richard Rorty says, to the language of poetry, not of politics. 9 Maintaining a viable society allows people to rely on a fundamental social bond. It does not assure them, as a perfectionist society would, that their society lacks flaws. Why not then opt for perfectionist socialism? The reason is that there are no realizable changes in actual social structure that would make it possible to have the values of development, harmony, and happiness that are inherent in perfectionist socialism. Without this possibility, the perfectionist option is utopian. Does the critique of utopianism help avoid mistakes? Engels admits that he and Marx were wrong about the socialist potential of both the revolution of 1848 and that of 1870. 10 They had overestimated the readiness of the working class to bring socialism. But these failures made them take into account the importance of circumstances they had underestimated. For example, by the third quarter of the century, Marx and Engels both felt that changed circumstances required adopting peaceful struggle alongside street action. But the strength of anti-utopianism did not become evident until later. Most of those who claimed to be Marxists failed to avoid Marx’s strictures on utopianism. The social democrats, many of whom acted in the name of Marx, made the reform of capitalism the value they pursued. Reforming it would end the destructive course of capitalism thereby eliminating the need for ending capitalism. But the social democrats could not realize this hope given the way the inherent drive of capitalism for growth had structured the society. So capitalism underwent only those reforms that did not cripple its inherent drive. Capitalism then threatened society everywhere by leading the world into the most horrific wars, the direst poverty, and an unprecedented assault on nature. Another form of utopianism that claimed to be Marxist was state socialism. It grew from the need a new socialist regime had to defend itself from internal and external opposition. But it turned the power to defend itself from a means into its leading value. The goal of saving state power replaced the goal of avoiding social breakdown. Without guidance by the aim of avoiding social breakdown, state power ultimately destroyed society.

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Trying to realize a value is not a utopian endeavor simply because one cannot realize it through a single campaign. Instead, it is always reasonable to try to realize a value provided one can envisage a series of steps, each plausibly leading to the one following it, which ends in its realization. We can illustrate this temporal approach by the process of getting broad acceptance for school integration in the United States. School integration would have been a utopian wish during the period of slavery. But Afro-American militancy after World War I led to a ban on white-only unions in the American Federation of Labor. The circumstances making that step possible had the potential to lead to circumstances in which desegregation in other areas could take place. So after World War II, President Truman integrated the U.S. military. These and other steps showed the potential for developing circumstances for advancing toward an end to school segregation. It was certainly no longer utopian to hold that Afro-Americans could win acceptance by most Americans for school integration.

OPPRESSION AND EXPLOITATION There are, to be sure, other forms of inequality and lack of freedom than those connected directly with the economy. There are various forms of oppression—national, racial, gender, bureaucratic, and homophobic. We express opposition to these forms of oppression in pleas for fairness. But the substance of these pleas for fairness comes from the worry that a society, small or large, weakens its resistance to collapse by addiction to any form of oppression. This worry encourages efforts to eliminate oppression, thereby eliminating a major source of social decline due both to agitation by the oppressed and internal decay of the oppressor. By stressing the effect on society, this approach does not deny the importance of compassion for the oppressed. But, compassion for those who suffer is not enough for justice. Liberals and socialists alike want justice for the oppressed and understand the damage that oppression can do to a society. Their differences arise not over the poisonous effects of oppression but over how to combat it. Must socialists view oppression as merely a side effect of exploitation? There is a relation between oppression and exploitation within a mode of production but the relation is not that oppression owes its existence to exploitation. In each economic age, the forms of oppression will have a distinctive character since they exist within the dominant economic context of that age. The general rule is that in different contexts, familiar actions will fail to have the same effects. Racial oppression in the U.S. South changed as wage labor and share cropping replaced slavery. In the slave context, acquiring labor is a capital investment involving a commit-

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ment to maintain it, whereas in the free labor context, acquiring labor is a commitment to pay for the use of labor power for a given time leaving laborers to purchase the means to maintain themselves. Marx illustrates through several examples the way a given economic context affects features also found in other economic contexts. No one of those contexts generates the affected feature. He says that the kind of economy is important in giving a society its dominant characteristic. Thus, ancient Rome had a political society, the Middle Ages had a religious society, and 19th-century England had a materialist society. 11 But politics, religion, and materialism were also present in all three societies. The different economies merely selected which of the three features would be dominant in any of the three societies. Thus, none of the three features was the product of any of the three economies. He makes a similar point about cooperation in production. For us today, cooperation is a kind of networking that goes on among a corporation’s employees, who may work in different facilities spread across the globe. This is very different from the working together that took place in a corporation of an earlier generation on a single factory floor. But Marx notes that co-operation is not limited to existing in the dominant form it has in any given period. It is a general form taking on a different character as modes of production change. 12 Can one end all oppression by economic change? We talked earlier about changing a society’s economic system to save the society. Is there an economic change that will sweep the society clean of drug addiction, fanaticism, racism, and honor killing? In searching for a remedy to oppression, we cannot focus exclusively on doing away with economic features such as poverty, imperialism, the unlimited pursuit of wealth, and economically induced global warming. Without a doubt, an economy of a given kind can both perpetuate oppression and affect the form it will have. For example, 19th-century English employers kept the wages of English workers lower by using low-wage immigrant Irish workers to compete with English workers for jobs. Yet the resulting lower wages rested on national antipathies that were already present. Marx says that the English worker feels himself a member of a ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the English ruling classes against Ireland. The English worker cannot join with the Irish worker against lower wages since the former “feels national and religious antipathies” toward the Irish worker. 13 This perpetuates national oppression, giving it an exploitative form, although without creating it. Likewise, the capitalist economy intensifies the oppression of those in poor nations by producing global warming. Oppression there goes back to colonial conquests and carries forward through the extraction of wealth by multinational corporations. Now, the unrestrained race for profits that characterizes capitalism is damaging nature through its reliance on burning hydrocarbons to fuel that race. 14 While rich nations burn

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hydrocarbons, many poor nations are suffering from inadequate supplies of water for drinking and agriculture. The nations producing the gases responsible for warming ignore the appeals of those nations, who in the near future will suffer the most. This intensifies the oppression of those poor nations rather than creating it. What then is the task of socialists? They need to recognize the tension involved in socialists’ confronting oppression. Capitalist exploitation is an obstacle to a viable society and this is what traditionally troubled socialists about it. There is a tension between moving directly against exploitation and possibly diluting this task by also moving against oppression. Overcoming this tension would be virtually impossible if dealing with exploitation and oppression were unconnected tasks. It would be like a nation on one continent, after starting to fight a war on a second continent, deciding to fight a war on yet a third continent. But hope of removing the tension comes from a connection between exploitation and oppression. Exploitation has an effect on oppression that provides the crucial connection. Exploitation shapes the form oppression will take in a capitalist society. We just saw how racial oppression had to change its form with an economic change; it had to change its form one adapted to slavery to one adapted to wage labor. This change did not take place without the resistance of slave holders. But it proved possible for racism to adapt itself to the capitalist mode of production. This adaptation rewarded capitalists while leaving white racist workers with their sense of racial superiority. In order to reduce oppression drastically, one must look for an economic alternative to capitalism to which oppressors would find it difficult to adapt. This is where liberals and socialists differ, since liberals ignore the need to go beyond capitalism to end oppression. The market within capitalism supposedly does not discriminate, but the profit motive in capitalism discriminates since it leads to lower wages for the oppressed, which in turn lowers wages for the rest. Lacking a profit system, socialism makes it more difficult for oppression to adapt to it. There is nothing gained in a socialist economy by setting workers against one another or by setting firms in one country against those in another. The socialist economy would run best not when there is hostility between racial, gender, and national groups but when there is cooperation between them. By denying the use of exploitation to defend oppression, socialism can draw those opposed to exploitation and those opposed to oppression together. Even if it is difficult for oppression to adapt to socialism, what is to keep oppressors from uniting to defeat socialism? To avoid perpetuating oppression in this way, we have to rely on the affinity between the exploited and the oppressed, which we shall now discuss.

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AFFINITY AND AUTONOMY What would a struggle for socialism be like? One of its important aspects will be breadth. The socialist struggle will take on the range of projects of those involved in narrower struggles. Despite the irreducibility of oppression to exploitation, a struggle for socialism must be broad enough to include struggles against both. Those who fight against exploitation and those who fight against oppression often go separate ways, even though there is a large overlap between the working class, which is exploited, and, for example, blacks and women, and immigrants, who are oppressed. However, they can act together based on parallels in the structures of their struggles. Each of these groups is fighting against a powerful group’s taking advantage of it, and in doing so each fights in its way for making a more viable society. This common structure is not just a unity of convenience, one in which groups join to help one another reach unrelated goals. It is a genuine unity, one deriving from each group’s fighting for a viable society by fighting against its own subordination. Capitalism will fight to block the realization of this unity by pitting white against colored, Hispanic against black, and male against female through different wages and legal status. But alone, each group’s struggle will be in jeopardy. Where there is a common structure of the above kind, there can be what Max Weber called an “elective affinity” between the groups. 15 The root idea is that in view of some commonality the groups elect to recognize one another as potential collaborators. The elective affinity between groups fighting exploitation and those fighting oppression depends on the common goal of overcoming threats to society coming from divisions in it. (Those among the oppressed who are of the capitalist class will have the same affinity. But they cannot make that affinity a basis for electing to act with those struggling against exploitation. They do not elect for solidarity with the exploited due to their class ties.) The oppressed link social justice with expanding freedom and equality, understood not as pure liberalism does but more as laid out by Rawls. 16 This enables the oppressed and exploited to come together under a banner of “social justice.” But they also recognize that what draws them to social justice is their common fidelity to society. I shall speak of a socialist movement in a way that recognizes the importance of elective affinity. Those in a socialist movement want an alternative to capitalism. They may want this alternative either because they are wage workers who make this their main goal or because they adopt this goal through elective affinity even though their main goal is ending oppression. Those whose main goal is ending oppression may themselves be wage workers. In many countries, women equal in number the men who depend for their livelihood on a wage. National and racial minor-

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ities complain that they suffer higher rates of unemployment than dominant groups. Males from indigenous communities leave their communities to become workers in rich countries. Admittedly, wage work does not extend to some housewives, peasants, informal workers, residents in a ghetto, or self-employed workers. Still there is a trend for more and more of the oppressed to become wage workers in the capitalist system. This facilitates the growth of affinity between the oppressed and the exploited. Even when the oppressed are not wage workers, they have occasion to recognize the affinity through the experiences of those who are wage workers and through their own encounters with finance and distribution under capitalism. It makes sense to conclude that there is an elective affinity between the oppressed and the exploited. We need to avoid trying to derive too much from the elective affinity between groups. First, having elective affinity does not mean that the exploited and the oppressed are united in a common struggle. It means they have a reason to unite to overcome their different kinds of subordination. Indeed, we have seen movement in the direction of unity and away from identity politics. Unions have come to include as a matter of principle practices supporting the oppressed, and many of the oppressed are supporters of labor rights since they are also wage workers. Second, threats to unity are also present within both the exploited and the oppressed. Workers don’t agree about whether there should be repressive measures against undocumented immigrants, and women don’t agree on the issue of abortion. However, with opposition to subordination as a common ground, it is feasible to attempt common actions prior to resolving all these divisions. While keeping in mind these two limitations, we can say that elective affinity allows for a broadening of the concept of working class. In urban areas the trend is for the oppressed to work for a wage to live, while in rural areas the trend is to flee to the cities in search of work as small plots no longer serve to make a living. Since so many of the oppressed either now or will soon need to work for a wage to live, the majority of the oppressed could reasonably elect for affinity with the exploited. Thus, we have a basis for treating the working class itself as not just the exploited but also the oppressed who are not actually capitalists. This does not mean that a socialist movement will ever gain adherence from all of the working class in this broader sense. But a socialist movement, in the broad sense I gave it above, will not be successful without strong support from this broad working class. Henceforth, I shall refer to this broad working class simply as the working class.

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STATE AND SOCIALISM I repeat that socialism is a means; the end is to secure social viability. This doesn’t distinguish it from capitalism, which prides itself on being the way to hold society together. But, this commonality does not imply that socialists accept the same political institutions as capitalists. Socialists, I argue, must have a state, but one in which power comes from below. And they must have a party, but one that is not an instrument for winning elections and ruling but for clarifying issues and advocating positions concerning change. Ultimately, these requirements have their justification in the failures of both capitalist and Soviet-style institutions. Marx held that one could not build a state compatible with socialism without destroying existing state power. The socialist movement must dismantle those features of the capitalist state engaged in limiting democracy, preferentially serving the wealthy, stimulating poverty, and underfunding public goods like education and housing. The effects of these features penetrate the entire state structure, leaving no alternative but to dismantle it. In Venezuela under Hugo Chávez, the vacillating nature of support for farmer cooperatives, for communal councils, and for worker committees is widely attributed to the continued support for capitalism within both the government ministries and significant segments of the society. At this point the state there is left-leaning but not socialist. It has attempted with mixed success to promote co-management between state managers and factory committees, between state funding sources and cooperatives on idle land, and between entrenched local governments and communal councils based on direct democracy. 17 The result is at best sporadic progress. So, where taking state power is possible, it will happen along with building a new state on a new foundation. As a movement of the great majority, it would be possible in some cases for the socialist movement to use an electoral victory to start building a new state. 18 One needs a new state since it has to serve the society and not primarily a single class in it. Why stop with doing away with existing state power; why not go on to do away with the state? Doing away with the capitalist state does not imply a stateless society, and certainly Marx’s talk of destroying existing state power does not imply it. 19 There are a number of reasons for having a socialist state. Revolutions must be prepared to defend themselves against external and internal attack. In speaking of the Paris Commune of 1870, Marx said, “This New Commune . . . breaks the modern State power. . . . The Communal Constitution would have restored to the social body all the forces hitherto absorbed by the State parasite.” 20 How can the Commune both break state power and restore its forces? The restored forces here are the legitimate functions of a society that would be wrested

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from the institutions of the non-socialist state and become functions of institutions of a socialist state. Defense is one of those functions, and Marx thought a socialist society could realize it without a standing army. The question is not whether a socialist society should try to defend itself, but what kind of institution is best for doing so. How should it constitute a defensive force and what are the limits on its use? A military force that would be unnecessary to protect a genuine socialist order would raise suspicions that state power is serving itself rather than a socialist society. Thus people use the expression “state socialism” in discussing events like Nikita Khrushchev’s sending tanks into Budapest in 1956 to crush a revolution and Fidel Castro’s arrest of 75 dissidents for peaceful activity in 2003. Defense is not the only common good that a state must ensure. Education, transportation, water, courts of law, health care, and housing are obvious candidates. One must have a state to ensure the adequacy and dependability of the means—the public goods—to supply these common goods. Marx refers to these public goods among others under the heading of things that serve “the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etc.” 21 The neoliberal privatization of public goods constructed to realize these common goods represents a desperate effort of capitalism to turn new spheres of human activity into capital as older spheres fail to generate increasing enrichment for capitalists. While an overarching state must assure the adequacy and dependability of public goods, their construction and maintenance could rely on local units of the state, such as communal councils. In addition to guaranteeing public goods, a socialist society needs to coordinate the different units within the society. Only a central political body can perform this function. It will coordinate finance with production, ensure that the production of goods and services is satisfying needs, set priorities among public goods in view of the scarcity of resources for them, and intervene to protect the structures of direct democracy. Just as supervision in socialist production serves the supervised, so too socialist political power embodied in the state serves its citizens rather than a class. This requires, as discussed later, building the state on direct rather than representative democracy. Forces with some promise of creating such a state have emerged at various times in the past century. But they faced formidable opponents and a major long-term victory has thus far eluded them. Is this a reason to declare that the project is utopian? I set two requirements in previously for a socialist project’s being non-utopian. One is contributing to social viability and the other is favorable circumstances for its execution. Being favorable did not mean being immediately available for realizing a project. It is enough if the present circumstances have a reasonable potential for leading to circumstances that support realizing the project.

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A state in which power comes from below is not possible where capitalism thrives. One condition for it is an inversion of the relation in capitalism between workers and those who organize their work. In socialism, supervisors and managers help carry out the collective decisions workers make in a given workplace or in a network of workplaces by helping them coordinate their individual efforts. But distinct workplaces must coordinate their efforts with one another. In this broader task, supervisors and managers will also be helpful, this time in countering the tendency of workers to focus on the issues of their own workplace and to engage in destructive competition with other workplaces. We are not talking here about commands but guidance workers have requested but are free to reject. This contrasts with orders from supervisors carrying out the decisions of managers who in turn are responsible to boards made up of a few of the society’s elite. It inverts the relation under capitalism, where supervisors and managers fashion their orders to satisfy the capitalist class rather than the society. Those orders are for strict obedience, promoting divisions, threats of lay-offs or closure, speed-up, and the like. Thus, the supervisor or manager and the worker are antithetical figures in capitalism, but need not be in socialism. 22 This inversion provides a starting point for talking about the legislative and executive parts of a socialist state. I begin by commenting on the differences between capitalist and socialist citizenship. In capitalism, you work, not as a citizen of a state, but as contracted with a boss. The distinction loses its sharpness in a socialist society. In socialism, the control workers exercise over production and other social activity fulfills part of their responsibility as citizens for running the socialist state. Otherwise, some other group could substitute for workers in running a state designed to serve all citizens. But any other group would have an agenda with narrower interests, whereas in socialism everyone will work in a context in which work is never just for an individual or a group without being for the society. The legislative aspect of the state begins where worker and communal assemblies discuss and vote on issues that are local, regional, and societywide. Without discussion and voting at the lowest level, we do not have rule from below but at best a system of voting for persons rather than issues. The alternative that socialism offers to voter manipulation by narrow interests is direct democracy. It begins at the workplace and community levels from which delegates communicate the positions taken there to a higher level, at least they will do so when those positions would also apply to other communities or workplaces. Local levels shall have executive powers sufficient to ensure meaningful local autonomy. There will be a need for departments or ministries at each level in order to implement legislative decisions. To keep executives from ignoring the people’s wishes, the head of each department or minis-

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try at a given level will be a delegate elected to a legislative body at the same level. 23

PARTY AND UNITY Why is there a need for political parties? Shouldn’t a variety of social movements suffice? Movements often focus on single issues and ignore the need for reaching a balance on various issues. They tend to ignore how their treatment of a single issue affects other issues. A political party takes responsibility for addressing many issues and hence for developing an approach that balances the treatments of the various issues. Within movements, the press of activity makes it difficult to pause in order to consider how to connect issues in a unified program. Social movements are important for throwing a light on neglected issues. But even when movements focusing on different issues form alliances, they have difficulty working out a common plan and remain merely supporters of each other’s actions. A party goes beyond a single issue to advance a systematic view of issues that a society will grapple with to determine whether it protects its viability. Another reason for having a party is the need for a strong advocate to increase support for the socialist project. A movement can attract some by exemplary action, but others through an account by a party of what the movement is about. A socialist party can provide a systematic way of attracting groups and individuals to a struggle for socialism. It can articulate the reasons why those in disparate movements would benefit from viewing their causes within a common anti-capitalist framework. Such a party can attract to the socialist movement those concerned with the environment, gender issues, issues of people of color, and imperialism by appealing to the affinity of their causes with that of overcoming exploitation. Moreover, it can make clear that, since the overwhelming majority of those in these movements have to sell their labor to live, they stand to benefit from the change in work relations socialism would bring. A socialist party’s advocacy can change not just individual citizens and movements but also institutions of the socialist state. Though a party is not an instrument of enforcement, its views offer guidance on issues of laws and state action. The state, as noted previously, includes popular bodies—communal councils, workers councils, and councils of cooperatives and the mechanisms for delegating people in these popular bodies to higher levels. In shaping its position on issues, the party must come before the citizens to discuss the stands it takes and the issues it prioritizes. Though a party is an advocate of certain positions, it leaves the state—including the popular bodies—to decide whether or not to adopt those positions.

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These important roles that parties play are compatible with having multiple parties. Prior to reaching socialism, the existence of multiple socialist parties can bring more people to support the socialist project. Marx and Engels took note of this potential of multiple parties when they said, “The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.” 24 Also, multiple parties provide a useful competition to help eliminate programs for reaching socialism that do not fit the circumstances. When several parties remain strong after such competition, they can negotiate a common position as a basis for action that will move them closer to socialism. Moreover once socialism comes, there is no reason to make multiple socialist parties illegal. Multiple views of how best to balance the various demands arising within a society can help avoid mistakes that would threaten the society. Having multiple views will also broaden acceptance of socialism. An issue as sensitive as multiple socialist parties is the status of nonsocialist parties. The demands of democracy trump the case against such parties. Not to allow them would call for creating agencies of suppression that would eventually choke out debate even among socialist parties. Of course, a democratic state would be free to act against parties that are in the hands of foreign counter-revolutionaries or are organizing an insurrection against it. Marx’s tolerance for non-socialist movements is apparent in his discussions of cooperatives. In 1867, Marx said the International Working Men’s Association should favor spontaneous movements of the working classes but should not “dictate or impose any doctrinaire system whatever.” 25 In particular, he urged the association to acknowledge the co-operative movement as showing that “the association of free and equal producers” can supersede the subordination of labor by capital even while falling short of bringing socialism. He objected in 1875 to the German Democratic Party’s making as a main demand of its program one for “the establishment of producers’ co-operative societies with state aid under the democratic control of the toiling people.” 26 Not making it a main demand, still allowed him to hold that co-operatives could play a transitional role toward socialism. The poor record in the 20th century of leftist parties has done a lot to convince leftists to avoid them. But this bad experience represents only a beginning, a beginning from which we on the left have already learned important cautionary lessons. We have learned to spot the danger signs. Prominent among them is a party leader’s conviction that saving the revolution he or she has helped make avoids the world historical defeat of socialism. If indeed the circumstances are unfavorable for saving the revolution, then making the effort to save it will eventually defeat it from

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within. Its failure at a given time will not keep a socialist movement from recurring under favorable circumstances.

THE SOCIALIST ECONOMY It is time to discuss production and distribution in a socialist society. A guideline for discussing them is that a socialist economy must contribute to avoiding social collapse rather than focusing on growth. Not being careful in fashioning distribution and production can lead to social collapse. We end up either with an economy that fails to provide the material requirements for social life or with one that reintroduces forms of inequality and exploitation reminiscent of capitalism. (I focus on requirements for a socialist economy, neglecting thereby Marx’s description and critique of the capitalist economy.) In facing the challenge of fashioning a socialist economy, one starts from the idea that, in doing away with capitalist property, production will be “concentrated in the hands of the associated individuals (der assoziierten Individuen).” 27 Concentrating production in their hands does not mean that the associated individuals come to adopt a comprehensive economic plan. Here associated individuals are ones who use their capacities as assets in the cooperative task of producing in a way that ensures a viable society. Concentrating production in their hands then means encompassing all production in one cooperative undertaking. The associated individuals enter into tasks the society needs. But whether it is plumbing, banking, or teaching, these tasks complement one another and must then be undertaken cooperatively. Small local enterprises seem adequate for many essential tasks, whereas other tasks call for large enterprises. What about remuneration, whether through social benefits or cash, for working at these tasks? It must cover important needs to ensure that people do not have to limit their cooperation in order to work competitively for their own interests. Moreover, standards for remuneration would aim at preventing harmful divisions from arising and as well at encouraging entry into new or neglected tasks. Though some of what is involved in putting production in the hands of the associated producers involves regulation, none of it involves a comprehensive plan for the economy. Instead, putting production in their hands suggests their being alert, from the level of work committees on up to ministries, to signs of unmet needs for products or services. Why won’t competition be vital for a healthy socialism? It can reduce waste and promote innovation. But competition under capitalism is highly wasteful; it decreases the time for obsolescence, kills millions in wars to get resources and markets, uses funds to finance cannibalizing competitors, and generates the extremes of poverty and wealth. Perhaps by doing away with the use of production for private gain, we could allow

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competition without such a waste of human and natural resources. We need to be aware, though, that competition has other effects that might offset these gains in efficiency. If socialist enterprises were to compete in markets, they could remain internally co-operative enterprises while externally competing with one another for sales of their products and services. 28 There are several possibilities to consider. The first is to try to avoid crossing the line to capitalism by claiming that gain to co-operatives is not private gain. But in reality these co-operatives would be for-profit enterprises keeping enough of their profit to grow faster, to command greater market shares, and to put members a notch ahead of others. This possibility raises the question of social unity because of two effects that competition has on for-profit co-operatives. One effect is that competition suspends co-operative relations between co-operatives by orienting the use of their members’ capacities toward their enterprise’s benefit rather than toward that of all. At best, this competition hurts some co-operatives to increase the aggregate benefit of all. The other effect is that members of a co-operative end up exploiting themselves in order to try to defeat competitors. The co-operative’s leaders appeal to its members to work harder so it can beat out its competitors. By working harder, the enterprise is better able to guarantee a decent living for its members and make a more persuasive case to the banks for funds needed for expansion. In this way, the members not only exploit themselves but diminish internal democracy by letting their leaders’ guide them toward competition and growth. However, the aim of struggling for socialism is not to create new divisions that threaten society but to give the exploited and oppressed the opportunity to become a “universal class”—and hence not a class at all. Its universality comes from the class’ acting for the society and not just for itself. 29 Fortunately, one can avoid these undesirable consequences through a second possibility for competition among co-operatives. Without seeking profit for themselves, co-operatives could compete through a market in the way some not-for-profits compete with one another within capitalism. They would compete for clients through quality of service or product. They could acquire the funds for expansion based on the social need for their product or service. This would serve as a test for expansion through borrowing whether for new production or for buying up existing enterprises. This implies that, on this second alternative, any profits enterprises make would be social assets, meaning that these assets would not be available directly to the enterprises making the profits. Instead, profits would go into a bank until bodies with power to allocate funds make their decisions. (These allocative bodies would derive their membership ultimately from enterprise committees and community councils.) They will base their decisions on judgments about where investing the funds

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will help strengthen the society. This would reduce efforts by enterprises to exploit themselves in order to grow or take over other enterprises. 30 Admittedly, there will still be a tendency for co-operatives to compete for investment funds by making a good showing before the allocative bodies. Increasing production and efficiency at an enterprise will make more profit, thus giving those in charge of allocation a reason to provide such an enterprise with funds for expansion. 31 Still where profits are social assets, the main incentives to work are restricted to the need individuals have to support a decent life for themselves and to the need they have to support society. Capitalism has helped occlude the need to support society by trying to replace it with a need to outdo others. I find this second possibility acceptable. The concession it makes to the market is a modest one, since it is a market in which the profit motive does not aim at private gain—the gain of an individual or of the many groups in society—but primarily at social benefit. It looks even more modest when we consider that public goods will occupy an even larger part of a socialist economy than they do of the current capitalist economy. This is because socialists find that many of the threats to society under capitalism arise from the small number and poor quality of its public goods. Public goods, as I use the term, are not goods we seek on a daily basis, but they are the systems or enterprises producing goods we all have a regular need for. What kind of product or service does a public good make available? It is a product that each of us wants for everyone, including oneself. So by participation with others in creating a public good, one hopes to secure its benefits for anyone who needs them. Socialists are ready to point to areas ignored or being privatized by capitalist societies where having public goods are essential for avoiding threats to society. 32 Among the areas requiring public goods are housing, food, education, justice, transport, and health. The promise of a public good to deliver a certain benefit to anyone in a society who needs it will require a public implementation and enforcement. A modern society will implement public goods by taxation and enforce them with oversight. The main difference between enterprises that are public goods and enterprises that are not is that the former make their services or products available to all in response to the widespread desire that everyone who needs them should get them. What is available to all has no market value since, if one gives it a price, someone else will undercut that price by giving it a lower price until the price finally drops to zero. Despite this, a public good, since it provides services and products, will need a source of financial support. People chip in with their taxes to provide it. Neoliberals within capitalism promote the idea that a public good should be a set of one or more for-profit enterprises. The result is rarely greater efficiency and commonly a failure to cover everyone. The same objection does not

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apply in socialism where one or more enterprises, other than state enterprises, might undertake the delivery of the benefits of a public good. In this case, the enterprises are not-for-profits. The society entrusts them with the task of getting services or products to people in a manner that realizes the aim of public goods. It will be difficult to allocate funds among public goods in a way that protects society. This difficulty exists for both socialism and capitalism. However, under capitalism, allocation favors those public goods that depend on major purchases from the private sector. Military defense depends on major purchases from industries. The budgets for education, though, focus on personnel. Under socialism, allocation among public goods takes place in a different context, one in which the enterprises are not-for-profit and the allocators are selected from a system of direst democracy. It is more likely, then, that the allocation of funds among common goods will protect the society.

SOCIALISM AND THE UNITED STATES In the United States, a socialist movement seems more distant than ever despite deteriorating conditions in the society. Wages have been stagnant, debt fills the gap, and businesses move to cheap labor. The economy comes to depend on the sale of unredeemable debt rather than on increasing production. Social democratic remedies are dead on arrival in legislatures. Immigrants lose basic services as retribution for lowering wages and taking jobs. Religious fundamentalism flourishes on the insecurity created by the crumbling of gender and racial hierarchies. With fear abounding, people look for reassurance in causes bankrolled by the superrich. They look for ways to undercut others to save themselves. There are though some bright spots. The labor movement showed some signs of awakening from its torpor when legislatures recently mounted campaigns to destroy it. The fight for survival forced labor leaders to turn to solidarity and away from the insular view that only the local union mattered. Even before this recent jolt, rank-and-file groups, like Teamsters for a Democratic Union, were fighting for union democracy. This is a key demand since socialism will depend on democracy that begins at the base. But is it feasible to go from struggles for solidarity and democracy among workers to demanding an alternative to capitalism? If Michael Moore’s film, Capitalism: A Love Story, could raise the issue of socialism before large and approving audiences, rank-and-file groups could follow up with actions that challenge capitalist institutions. We already have an anti-capitalist agenda that on paper the AFL-CIO voted to support. It calls for ending the capitalist health insurance industry. Alongside rank-and-file labor groups, there are social justice, human rights, anti-discrimination, and environmental groups that continue to

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spread awareness of abuses and to effect reforms. Capitalism has no easy time meeting the demands of such groups. For it, inequality and poverty translate into low wages. Unequal educational opportunity safeguards class division. Denying human rights in crowded prisons is less expensive for the for-profits running them. As long as it can last, the devastation of nature will allow the unlimited pursuit of profit. These groups are part of the transition to a socialist movement since they recognize the capitalist context of the abuses they wish to remedy. But, will their identifying capitalism as problematic lead them to want socialist change? They will remind themselves that socialist revolutions have been failures leading to bloodshed, impoverishment, and/or dictatorship. But think back earlier to the false starts before capitalism settled in. By the 16th century, feudalism had won back any gains made against it by the republicanism of Italian city-states that dated from as early as the end of the 11th century. A decisive victory against feudalism in Europe had to wait until Bonaparte drove feudalism’s armies from the field across Europe to the East. Expect capitalism to hold on as tenaciously as feudalism did. In 1852 Marx wrote, “Proletarian revolutions . . . criticize themselves constantly, interrupting themselves constantly in their own course . . . deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again. . . .” 33 The lessons from these “lost causes” will show us what to discard and what to embrace. Socialists in the United States can also take advantage of international developments. One of them is the new socialist movements around the world. No decade goes by without a strong movement—in some sense socialist—emerging. Now Venezuela and Bolivia have movements among their lower classes alongside governments opposed to the neoliberal capitalism promoted by the United States. Within these countries debates go on over the nature of socialism. Defining the relation of state power to their movements becomes the occasion for ongoing internal struggles. For fear of spreading revolution in Latin America, the United States is cautious about how it intervenes in Venezuela and Bolivia. Revolutions elsewhere have always played an important role for U.S. socialists. Their existence testifies to the vulnerability of the capitalist system and to the non-utopian nature of socialism today. Another international development to take advantage of is the growing intensity of the North/South conflict. I am referring to conflicts between these regions over medicines and intellectual property rights generally, economic development and cheap labor, extraction of natural resources, and reparations for damage done by climate change. Behind these conflicts is a conflict over capitalism. They are conflicts between the multinational pharmaceutical companies of the North and people of the South who cannot afford their drugs, between multinational corporations

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and the cheap labor in their plants and mines, between production for export and the need for balanced development; and between the rich nations’ use of carbon fuels and the water shortages in poor nations. Many of those in the United States trying to resolve these conflicts do so to relieve suffering, but long-term success at this depends on a diagnosis of the North/South conflict in class terms. Making this diagnosis would be an important step in the process of building a U.S. socialist movement. University Students against Sweatshops is making this step, as exemplified by its victory over the sportswear manufacturer Russell, who it forced to respect labor rights in one of its Honduran plants. Another example is the cross-border work of unions like the United Electrical Workers in Mexico and the Steelworkers Union in Spain, Mexico, and Africa.

NOTES 1. Karl Marx, “Estranged Labor,” in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Marx/Engels Collected Works, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975–2001), 277. 2. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Communist Manifesto, in MECW 6, pt. 1, 490. 3. “Social asset” is John Rawls’s felicitous phrase used in discussing whether gains from natural talents belong to those with them. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), sec. 17, 107. 4. Communist Manifesto, in MECW 6, pt. 1, 500. 5. Marx, “Democratic Pan-Slavism,” in MECW 8, 365. 6. Marx, “The Débat Social on Democratic Association,” in MECW 6, 539. 7. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Henry Holt, 2007), 118–21. 8. This view did not originate with Marx; Hume adopts it where he speaks of the circumstances of justice. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), bk. 3, pt. 2, sec. 2. 9. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 34, 43; and Essays on Heidegger and Others (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 17–20. 10. Engels, “Introduction to Karl Marx’s The Class Struggle in France,” in MECW 27, 510–13. 11. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, in MECW 35, chap. 1, sec. 4, 92n. 12. Capital, vol. 1, in MECW 35, chap. 13, 330–32. 13. Marx, “The General Council to the Federal Council of Romance Switzerland,” in MECW 21, 88. 14. John Bellamy Foster, “Why Ecological Revolution?” Monthly Review, vol. 61, no. 8 (January 2010): 1–18. 15. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T. Parsons (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1958), chap. 3, 91–92. I interpret Weber’s concept of “elective affinity” (Wahlverwandschaft) in the way Michael Löwy does in his Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe: A Study in Elective Affinity, trans. H. Heaney (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 8–13. 16. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, sec. 11, 60–65. 17. Iain Bruce, The Real Venezuela: Making Socialism in the Twenty-first Century (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 62–63, 157–58, 179–83.

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18. Marx, “On the Hague Congress, Sept. 8, 1872,” in MECW 23, 254–56; and Marx, “Letter to Hyndman, Dec. 8, 1880,” in MECW 46, 49–50. Marx’s comments in these documents provide a basis for saying that, though he thought a non-electoral revolution possible, he was reluctant to say it would be necessary to reach socialism. 19. Marx, The Civil War in France, in MECW 22, pt. 3, 332–33. 20. The Civil War in France, in MECW 22, pt. 3, 333–34. 21. Critique of the Gotha Program, in MECW 24, pt. 1, 85. 22. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, in MECW 37, chap. 23, 381–84; and Capital, vol. 1, in MECW 35, chap. 13, 335–38. 23. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in MECW 11, pt. 2, 116–17. 24. The Communist Manifesto, in MECW 6, pt. 2, 498. Caution is in order since the Marx “party” here means a political tendency found within a movement. Such a tendency might become part of a coalition with other tendencies in the movement. See Hal Draper, State and Bureaucracy, in his Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, vol. 1 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 153n, 332n. 25. Marx, “Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council,” in MECW 20, 190. 26. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, in MECW 24, pt. 3, 93. 27. Communist Manifesto, in MECW 6, pt. 2, 505. 28. Critique of the Gotha Program, in MECW 24, pt. 1, 85; pt. 3, 93–94. 29. Capital, vol. 3, in MECW 37, chap. 27, 438. Marx says here that co-operatives “naturally reproduce . . . all the shortcomings of the prevailing system” but are still “transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one.” 30. In discussing “directly associated labor,” Marx employs as an analogy “the patriarchal industries of the peasant family” in Capital, vol. 1, in MECW 35, chap. 1, sec. 4, 88–89. He treats the peasant family as consuming the product it produces except for what goes to the capital goods it renews. This is like a modern co-operative with its “directly associated labor” except that the modern co-operative will be more specialized and thus depend on selling more of its product in exchange for the necessities of life. 31. Michael Lebowitz, Build It Now: Socialism for the Twenty-first Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006), chap. 6. For a discussion by Marx of for-profit co-operatives, see “Instructions for Delegates, February 20, 1867,” in MECW 20, 190. 32. See also Marx and Engels, “Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League, March 1850,” in MECW 10, 286. 33. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in MECW 11, pt. 1, 106–7.

REFERENCES Bruce, Iain, The Real Venezuela: Making Socialism in the Twenty-first Century (London: Pluto Press, 2008). Foster, John Bellamy, “Why Ecological Revolution?” Monthly Review, vol. 61, no. 8 (January 2010): 1–18. Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739). Klein, Naomi, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Henry Holt, 2007). Michael Lebowitz, Build It Now: Socialism for the Twenty-first Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006). Löwy, Michael, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe: A Study in Elective Affinity, trans. H. Heaney (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). Marx and Engels, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volumes 1–48 (New York: International Publishers, 1975–2001). Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

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Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). ———, Essays on Heidegger and Others (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T. Parsons (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1958).

THREE But What Is Your Alternative? Reflections on Having a “Plan” David Schweickart

Not long ago I received a call from my sister-in-law, a fundamentalist Christian, conservative on social issues but not particularly political otherwise. She made a surprising request. Her pastor has taken recently to railing against socialism. But she knows that I am a socialist and not a terrible person, so something didn’t seem right. “Could you explain to me,” she asked, “what socialism is?” “Don’t refer me to a book,” she added. “Just write up a few pages.” So I took up the challenge. I didn’t attempt an academic treatise. I made no distinction, for example, between “socialism” and “communism,” nor did I attempt a short history of these terms or movements. I gave her, in essence, a brief account of my own version of “socialism,” which included some institutional specifics, since the question, “What is your alternative?” has been the central focus of my research and writing since graduate school days. Here’s my multi-part answer to her question.

WHAT SOCIALISM IS NOT Socialism is not anti-religious. The fundamental values of socialism (set out below) are in no way incompatible with the basic moral principles of Christianity or any of the other major religions. That the most influential of the early socialists, Karl Marx, was an atheist is a historical accident. Marx, while a student, came under the influence of a group of 47

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German atheists (the Young Hegelians), but he eventually broke with them because he didn’t buy their line that religious superstition was the cause of Germany’s problems. For Marx it was the economic structure, not religion. Socialism is not opposed to freedom or individuality. To the contrary, classical socialism regarded capitalism as a hindrance to real freedom and genuine individuality. In Marx and Engels's words, we want a society in which “the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all.” 1 Socialism is not anti-democratic. Prior to the advent of the Soviet Union, socialism was explicitly democratic. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels urge workers to “win the battle of democracy.” 2 Socialism is not what developed in Russia and Eastern Europe in the 20th century. Marx expected socialism to triumph first in the advanced capitalist countries that had already industrialized and developed sophisticated technologies. Instead, the first “socialist” revolution occurred in a backward country surrounded by hostile powers (who had intervened against the revolutionaries during the Civil War). Feeling the need to industrialize rapidly, the leadership (primarily Stalin) put the country on authoritarian, military footing, and proceeded—at horrific human cost—to do just that: industrialize at breakneck speed. When, following WWII, the Russians insisted on keeping the Eastern European countries, which they had occupied in driving back the Nazis, in their “orbit”—for self-protection—they were equally ruthless. The democratic component of socialism—central to authentic socialism—was quashed. Socialism is not opposed to inequalities based on genuine differences of productive contribution to society. Marx called the leveling down of everyone to a common level, “crude communism,” a form inferior to capitalism. 3 Democratic socialists recognize the need for economic incentives to encourage people to develop their talents and to employ them productively. What we don’t want are massive inequalities that keep compounding when you “put your money to work,” so that the more you have, the more your fortune grows. Socialism is not about the wholesale replacement of competition with cooperation. Socialism wants a balanced mix of the two. Certain forms of competition are healthy: we want enterprises to compete to see who can use their materials most efficiently, who can innovate most productively, who best responds to what consumers need and want. Other forms of competition are not healthy: status competition based on consumption levels, regional competition for capital, and above all competition among workers to see who will work for the lowest wage.

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THE CORE VALUES OF SOCIALISM Meaningful Work It has been from the beginning a fundamental tenet of socialism that work is essential to human dignity. Work allows one to contribute to society. Good work allows one to develop one’s skills and talents. Not to be able to find work is devastating to one’s self-respect. Society is in essence saying to you, “There is nothing you have to offer that we want. We may deign to keep you alive, but you are essentially a parasite, living off the work of others, contributing nothing.” (Is it any wonder that unemployment breeds social pathologies.) Intergenerational Solidarity Socialism recognizes the social nature of human beings, and our profound dependence on one another. No one is truly “independent.” All of us were once children. Most of us will get sick. Most of us will need to be cared for by those younger than we are, just as we have cared for those younger than us. Since none of us chooses his or her parents, or chooses to get sick, or chooses to grow old, socialism asks that we assume collective responsibility for each other. Socialism asks that we, in some way, regard all the children of society as “our” children, all the sick as “our” relatives, and all the elderly as “our” parents. Of course we have special obligations and feelings for our intimate relations, but we have larger collective obligations as well, which can be met by assuring quality prenatal care, child care, education, health care and pensions for all members of our society—and ultimately, for all human beings everywhere. Participatory Autonomy People have the right to participate in the decisions that affect them. This is the core principle of democracy—and yet, under capitalism, it does not extend to the economy. In particular, it does not extend to the workplace, where the employer exercises near-complete authority, nor does it extend to our society’s investment priorities, even though such decisions—where to invest or not invest, in what to invest or not invest— will affect the long-term structure of our economy and all our lives. Socialism aims at overcoming these “democratic deficits.” Ecological Sustainability We need an economy that will work in harmony with our increasingly fragile natural world. We need to regard ourselves as stewards of nature, not masters.

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WHY SOCIALISM? Because the capitalist free-market economy, for all its undeniable accomplishments, no longer works—at least not for the vast majority.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH FREE-MARKET CAPITALISM? Here’s a partial list: Staggering inequality. In the United States the top 1% now take home 25% of the income and own 40% of the wealth—and the gap grows larger every day. Rising unemployment, which is structural in nature, and hence not temporary. “Labor-saving” technologies now throw more people out of work than are required by new industries. Jobs are increasingly outsourced to lower-wage parts of the world. There is no end in sight to this process. Intensification of labor—for those who have jobs. A visitor from another planet would surely be puzzled that so many people in our society want to work but can’t find jobs, whereas those who do have jobs are working harder, and often longer hours, than they would like. “Why not just spread the work around?” our visitor would wonder. But we know why. The higher the unemployment rate, the more anxious people who have jobs become, the harder they work, and the greater the profit for the owners—whatever the cost to workers' psychological, physical, and/or family well-being. Growing poverty in the midst of unprecedented material wealth. It was once believed that we, the richest nation on earth, could eliminate poverty. We obviously have the resources. And yet poverty has not been eliminated—and no one even pretends anymore that it can be. In fact, it is growing, not decreasing—at home and in the world at large. Economic instability—bubbles and recessions that have nothing to do with the “real” economy. Why should that fact that Lehman Brothers, an investment bank, bought some weird financial derivatives result in a near-economic-collapse, requiring billions of bailout dollars to avert? Our “economic crises” are not caused by wars or plagues or natural disasters, which would disrupt the real economy of people and natural resources. Why should those mysterious “financial markets” have such power that they must be appeased at all cost, i.e., at whatever “austerity” is deemed necessary to keep them happy? They shouldn’t have such power—yet they do. Degradation of democracy. As everyone knows, money talks, louder now perhaps than ever before in the history of our country. Our political system is no longer one-person, one-vote, but one-dollar, one-vote. Campaigns cost so much now, and the lobbyists are so numerous, with so

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much money to dole out. Is it a surprise that politicians do favors for those upon whose donations their political future depends? Is it any wonder that successful politicians—and their financial backers—oppose reforms that would undercut the very system that they have worked to their advantage? Degradation of our natural environment. As is well known, capitalist economies must either grow or fall into recession. But as the economist Kenneth Boulding once remarked, “Only a madman or an economist thinks exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world.” 4 Resources are limited. Moreover, ever increasing consumption does not make people ever happier—as every great religious tradition has long pointed out. We need an economic structure that does not force us to choose between economic recession and ecological catastrophe.

CAN SOCIALISM PRESERVE COMPETITIVE CAPITALISM BUT ALSO ELIMINATE OR AT LEAST MITIGATE RESULTING PATHOLOGIES? The answer to this question is yes—it is a form of socialism that extends democracy to the economy itself. Consider the structure of free-market capitalism. It consists, essentially, of three kinds of institutions: • Markets for goods and services: enterprises compete with one another to provide consumers what they need or want. • Wage labor: In order to work, one must have access to “means of production,” i.e., a place to work, equipment with which to work, materials with which to work, etc. These means of production are usually owned by people other than those who are hired to work them. People must compete for jobs (i.e., access to means of production), and, once hired, do what they are told to do. • Private allocation of investment funds, via private financial institutions that raise money from those who have excess, and allocate it to business promising the highest profitability. Let us imagine a form of socialism, which we will call Economic Democracy, that keeps the first set of institutions, i.e., competitive markets for goods and services, but a) replaces (most) wage labor, by cooperative labor, and b) replaces those out-of-control financial markets with a democratic allocation of investment. Let us add c) the government as employer-of-last-resort, and d) public provision of basic education, health care, and pensions. Thus our new economy would have: • a competitive market economy • democratic workplaces

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• transparent public banks, answerable to their communities, that allocate investment funds in accordance with long-term development needs • full-employment • basic human needs guaranteed Such a socialism would be economically viable, and would not suffer the massive evils of capitalism. Another world is possible. A better world. And it begin with “S.”

DO WE NEED A “PLAN”? The reader will notice that in defining “socialism,” I proposed a specific structural alternative to capitalism. Most socialists would not do that. For there is no consensus among socialists as to what an alternative to capitalism should look like. There is broad agreement as to the values an alternative should embody but little as to what institutional reforms would be necessary to instantiate those values. It is not that the left is deeply divided on this issue. To be sure, there have been alternative models proposed, and there have been debates, but these have been confined to a relatively small number of people, mostly academics. Among those on the left who would self-identify as “socialist,” most simply mean “anti-capitalist,” and this anti-capitalism manifests itself as a critique of the existing order, an ethical critique appealing to socialist values. Marx, of course, was equally skeptical of mere ethical critique and of constructing “recipes for cookshops of the future.” 5 Marx had a Hegelian faith that humanity’s historical trajectory was toward an ever more rational society, a society that would eventually overcome the increasingly obvious irrationalities of capitalism, taking us from the realm of necessity (where we are governed by impersonal economic forces) to the realm of freedom (where we govern ourselves). And he identified the agent of such a transformation, that new, ever-expanding class of wage laborers— who would eventually come to realize that they had the power to change society so as to eliminate the “contradictions” of capitalism and would exercise that power. Few of us today share Marx’s confidence that a bright future awaits the human race. We rightly affirm “Another world is possible,” but few (any?) would assert that “A better world is inevitable.” It is quite clear now—as it was not in Marx’s day—that our species may well self-destruct, either in nuclear holocaust or ecological catastrophe. Or—this possibility cannot be ruled out either—a grim and ugly stabilization might occur: the rich and the rest, the former comfortable, the latter adapting to ever more squalid circumstances.

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But another, better world—much better—is possible. This is no small fact. The scientific evidence seems clear: our planet still contains sufficient resources to allow each human being a decent, satisfying, fully human life. This is a contingent fact. Research needn’t have reached that conclusion. It might have turned out that there are simply too many of us now, or that we have sufficiently upset the balance of nature that huge numbers of us will have to die prematurely. Another better world is materially possible—but is it institutionally possible? Many have argued, myself among them, that a humane, sustainable world is not possible so long as the basic institutions of capitalism remain in place. But are there other institutional arrangements that could be put in place in the foreseeable future, operated by the flawed, non-angelic human beings that we are, which would allow the human race to sustain itself and thrive? Having grappled with this question for most of my academic life, I am convinced that the answer is yes! This is no small fact either. For TINA has been the mantra for more than three decades now: “There Is No Alternative.” Many on the left have agreed with this grim assessment. In 1992, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Princeton philosopher Richard Rorty intoned, “We are going to have to stop using the term ‘capitalist economy’ as if we knew what a functioning non-capitalist economy looked like.” 6 In 2000 Jeffrey Isaac, writing in the New Left Review, endorsed Anthony Giddens’s claim that “no one has any alternatives to capitalism”: Now we might not like this, but Giddens is alas correct. To say this is not to regard contemporary capitalism as a “trans-historical feature of human existence” or “second nature.” It is simply to remark that given the history we have inherited and the world that human beings have created, there exists no credible wholesale alternative to capitalism. The same could be said of water purification, modern medicine, electronic communication, industrial technology with all its wastes and hazards, and also civil liberties and representative government of some sort. These are all historical achievements we cannot imagine transcending. 7

These claims are not only demoralizing, they are false. Nearly a century has passed since socialism first moved, on a national scale, from theory to practice. We now have a wealth of experience and data—which Marx did not have—regarding what works and what doesn’t. We can say now, at least in broad outline, what a viable alternative to capitalism would look like. We do not have to stand tongue-tied when confronted with the question, “What is your alternative?” nor be reduced to mouthing platitudes. In my own work I have offered a rather specific set of institutions that could form the basis for a viable, desirable socialism. I think it important

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to be able to be fairly concrete, so that the proposed model can be examined closely for possible flaws. I do not claim that the model I propose is the only one that could possibly work. I do claim that there is at least one that would. Another, better world is not only materially possible. It is institutionally possible.

ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY: THE BASIC MODEL In my response to my sister-in-law I sketched the basic elements of what I call “Economic Democracy,” but let me be more specific about several of them. I won’t attempt to justify my claims that Economic Democracy is economically viable, and would not suffer the defects of capitalism listed above. I have done that in detail elsewhere. 8 But to see how such a model fits with existing struggles for social change and existing experiments in alternative ways of living, let me lay a few more cards on the table. Let me begin, not with the model, but with what we now know in light of the economic experiments of the past century. We now know that competitive markets are essential to the functioning of a complex, developed economy. This is the negative lesson of the socialist experiments of the 20th century. Markets cannot be replaced wholesale by planning. 9 It follows that Economic Democracy will be a competitive market economy. We now know that some sort of democratic regulation of investment flows is essential to rational, stable, sustainable development—for individual countries and for the world economy as a whole. This is the negative lesson of the neoliberal experiments of the last thirty years, now culminating in a global meltdown. (Can anyone now say with a straight face that financial markets allocate capital efficiently?) There is something else we know—at least those of us who study such things. Actually, most people do not know this important fact. We now know that productive enterprises can be run democratically with little or no loss of efficiency, often with a gain in efficiency, and almost always with considerable gain in employment security. This is the positive lesson of a great many recent experiments in alternative forms of workplace organization. 10 With the right structures in place, workplace democracy works. Not perfectly. Bad managers are sometimes appointed. Bad decisions are sometimes made. Democratic firms sometimes fail. But Winston Churchill’s dictum appears to hold: “Democracy is the worst form of government—except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.” What changes might we envisage that would transform our current capitalism into a democratic economy, one that preserves the efficiency strengths of capitalism, but mitigates its most distressing features? Let’s begin with the basic model. This is a simplified picture. Any real-life

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instantiation will, of course, be more complicated. But to begin to envisage a viable alternative to capitalism, we need to start with a relatively simple design. In essence, a free-market capitalist economy consists of three types of markets: • Markets for goods and services • Labor markets • Capital markets Economic Democracy retains the first set of markets, but replaces the latter two with more democratic institutions. The basic model of Economic Democracy thus has three components: • A market for goods and services, which is essentially the same as under capitalism. • Workplace democracy, which replaces the capitalist institution of wage labor. • Democratic control of investment, which replaces capitalist financial markets. Let me elaborate briefly on each of these key institutions. First, historical experience makes it clear that markets are a necessary component of a viable socialism. Central planning does not work for a sophisticated economy. The knowledge and incentive problems are too great. (How are planners to know, in fine-grained detail, what consumers want? How do we motivate enterprises to use their resources efficiently, and workers to work conscientiously? How do we incentivize innovation?) But these markets should be largely confined to goods and services. They should not embrace labor or capital. And, of course, they should be regulated so as to protect the health and safety of both consumers and producers. Second, enterprises in Economic Democracy are regarded, not as entities to be bought or sold, but as communities. When you are employed by a firm, you have the right to vote for members of a worker council. This council appoints upper management and oversees major enterprise decisions. Although managers are granted a degree of autonomy, they are ultimately answerable to the workforce, one-person, one-vote. All workers share in the profits of the enterprise. Indeed, workers receive, not a contractual wage, but specified shares of the company’s profits. These shares need not be equal, but everyone’s income is tied directly to the performance of the firm—hence the incentive to work diligently and efficiently—and to see to it that your co-workers do the same. (Almost all studies of cooperatives find fewer supervisory personnel employed than in comparable capitalist firms.) Third, some sort of democratic control of investment is essential if an economy is to develop rationally. But control of investment is exceedingly difficult if the investment funds themselves are privately generated. The solution to this problem is conceptually simple. Don’t rely on private investors. When you do, you become hostage to

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their confidence and goodwill (as recent events so amply attest). Generate your investment funds publicly—via taxation. A capital-assets tax is the best tax for this purpose—a flat-rate property tax on all businesses. This tax is collected by the central government. These revenues constitute the national investment fund. All of these revenues are reinvested in the economy. They are not used for other governmental services. A separate income or consumption tax will fund ongoing governmental expenses. Each region of the country gets, as a matter of right, its fair share of the national investment fund (in most cases its per capita share). Regions do not compete for capital. Each and every year they get their rightful share of the capital-assets-tax revenue. These funds go to public banks, which channel them back into the economy, utilizing both economic and social criteria—including, importantly, employment creation and environmental sensitivity—when making loans. Coherent long-term investment planning at the national, regional, and community levels becomes possible. 11 Would an economy so structured work? As I argue in After Capitalism, the empirical data now available strongly support the claim that such an economy would work better than capitalism. We know a lot now about regulating a market economy. (We know that laissez-faire doesn’t work.) There is a vast literature now extant on worker-owned or worker-managed enterprises. (We know what problems are likely to arise, and how these can be addressed.) There have been many attempts at macro-economic planning, often involving the allocation of investment resources. We know that intelligent investment planning is possible.

ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY: TWO SUPPLEMENTS The three basic institutions, markets for goods and services, workplace democracy and social control of investment constitute the defining features of Economic Democracy, but there are other structures that should be part of our “new socialism.” Let me comment briefly on two of them. The Government as Employer of Last Resort It has long been a tenet of socialism that everyone who wants to work should have access to a job. Everyone should have a genuine right to work. Long-term involuntary unemployment is not only socially wasteful but psychologically devastating. The solution is simple enough. The government will serve as the employer of last resort. If a person cannot find work elsewhere, the government will provide that person with a job, low-wage, but decent, doing something socially useful.

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An Entrepreneurial-Capitalist Sector In my view, Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism remains unsurpassed, but there is an important economic issue that Marx neglected, namely the function of the entrepreneur in society. Marx’s analysis of capitalism focuses on the capitalist qua capitalist, i.e. as the provider of capital. This is a passive function, one which can readily be taken over by the state—as is the case in our basic model. But there is another role played by some capitalists—a creative, entrepreneurial role. This role is assumed by a large number of individuals in a capitalist society, mostly by “petty capitalists,” who set up their own small businesses, but by some “grand capitalists” as well, individuals who turn innovative ideas into major industries and reap a fortune in the process. Any society that aspires to be technologically innovative must provide incentives for this kind of initiative. It is quite clear from the experience of Soviet socialism that such incentives were sorely lacking in their non-market, centrally planned system. So it might well be good to have some capitalists in our socialist society. Although workplace democracy should be the norm throughout society, we needn’t demand that all businesses conform to this norm. The petty capitalist, after all, works hard. He is anything but a parasite. It takes energy, initiative, and intelligence to run a small business. These small businesses provide jobs for large numbers of people, and goods and services to even more. Petty capitalists may provide important services to society, but they do not provide much in the way to technological or organizational innovation. There is also an honorable role to play in a socialist society for entrepreneurial capitalists who operated on a grander scale. Such an entrepreneurial capitalist class need not pose a serious threat to a society in which democratic workplaces are predominant. Democratic firms, when they have equal access to investment capital, need not fear competition from capitalist firms. On the contrary, since capitalist firms must compete with democratic firms for workers, they will be under considerable pressure to at least partially democratize their own operations by instituting profit sharing and more participatory work relations. Moreover, there is a rather simple legal mechanism that can be put in place to keep this capitalist class in check. The basic problem with capitalists under capitalism is not their active, entrepreneurial role (which relatively few capitalists actually play), but their passive role as suppliers of capital. Economic Democracy offers a transparent, rational substitute for this latter role—the capital-assets tax. So the trick is to develop a mechanism that would prevent the active, entrepreneurial capitalist from becoming a passive, parasitic one. Such a mechanism is easy enough to envisage: a simple, two-part law stipulating that a) an enterprise developed by an entrepreneurial capital-

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ist can be sold at any time, but only to the state (for a sum equal to the value of the assets upon which the capital-assets tax is paid), and b) the enterprise must be sold when the owner retires or dies. (No bequeathing it to heirs.) When the state purchases an enterprise, it turns it over to the enterprise’s workers, to be run democratically. Thus the entrepreneurial capitalists serve two socially useful functions. They are a source of innovation and an incubator of new democratic enterprises. Entrepreneurial capitalists have an honorable role to play in our democratic socialist economy.

ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY AND THE CURRENT CRISES I argue at length in After Capitalism that Economic Democracy is preferable to capitalism across a wide array of economic and non-economic values. Economic Democracy would not only be efficient and innovative, it would be: • • • • • •

vastly more egalitarian than capitalism less plagued by unemployment less prone to fostering overwork better able to address both domestic and global poverty more stable far better situated to deal with problems of environmental degradation and much more democratic

I won’t repeat the detailed arguments here, but I do want to highlight two conclusions: First, Economic Democracy would not be vulnerable to the kind of economic crisis we are now experiencing. Second, Economic Democracy is far better situated than capitalism to deal with our ecological crises. Economic Democracy is not vulnerable to the kind of economic crisis we are now experiencing for two reasons. The first is simple. There are no private financial markets in Economic Democracy. Markets for goods and services remain, but there are no stock markets, bond markets, hedge funds, or private “investment banks” concocting collateralized debt obligations, currency swaps, and the myriad other sorts of derivatives that preoccupy investment bankers today. Thus, there is no opportunity for financial speculation. Our financial system is quite transparent. A capital assets tax is collected from businesses, then loaned out to enterprises wanting to expand or to individuals wanting to start new businesses. Loan officers are public officials, whose salaries are tied to loan performances. The loans they make are a matter of public record, as are the performances of those loans. There is nothing mysterious about finance in an Economic Democracy.

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Even more important, it is not vulnerable to the deep problem underlying our recent economic turmoil: insufficient effective demand, due ultimately to the fact that wages have not kept pace with increases in productivity. Wages are a cost of production in a capitalism firm, and so capitalists strive to keep wages down. If they can’t succeed to their satisfaction in a given community, they will move their production elsewhere—outsourcing certain jobs, moving facilities to lower wage parts of the world. (Wages in the United States have been essentially flat since the mid-70s. Purchasing power has been maintained by borrowing—credit cards, home equity loans, automobile loans, student loan—i.e., by the capitalist class loaning money to workers instead of raising their wages— an unsustainable “solution.” 12 ) But wages are not a cost of production in a democratic firm. Workers receive a specified share of the firm’s profit, not a wage—so all productivity gains are captured by the firm’s workforce. Worker income always keeps pace with productivity gains. Moreover, the threat of plant relocation is non-existent in democratic firms. Workers won’t vote to relocate their facilities abroad. 13 Capitalism faces an even deeper problem than the one responsible for the economic crisis now holding us in its grip. Should we succeed in getting our economies growing again (indeed, even if we don’t), we will soon find ourselves in an ecological crisis—more precisely, ecological crises—large global ones, many smaller, more regional ones. Economic Democracy is far better positioned than capitalism to avoid ecological crises—for three reasons. First of all, democratic control over investment means control over development. We can aim for healthy, equitable, sustainable development (which is not the same as economic growth), no longer putting our trust in a system structured to encourage the mindless consumption that fails to make people happy. Secondly, as has long been recognized in the theoretical literature, democratic firms do not have the expansionist tendency inherent in a capitalist firm. (Democratic firms tend to maximize profit-per-worker, not total profits. A successful capitalist firm can double its profits by doubling its size, whereas a comparable democratic firm, if it doubles its size, doubles the number of workers with whom the profits must be shared—and so per-worker income remains unchanged.) So democratic firms do not try to destroy their competitors or buy them out. They do not face the “grow or die” imperative to which most capitalist firms are subject. Thus democratic firms are structurally compatible with a steadystate economy. Thirdly, since funds for investment in an Economic Democracy do not come from private investors, the economy is not hostage to “investor confidence.” We need not worry that an economic slowdown will panic investors, provoking them to pull their money out of the financial mar-

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kets, triggering a recession. Economic Democracy can be a healthy, sustainable, “no-growth economy,” whereas capitalism cannot be. Actually, “no-growth” is a misnomer. Productivity increases under Economic Democracy and can be translated into increased leisure instead of ever-increasing consumption. When introducing a more productive technology into their enterprise, workers in a democratic firm have a choice not available to their counterparts in a capitalist firm: they can choose to take those productivity gains in the form of short workweeks, or longer vacations, rather than higher incomes. Given the ecological importance of scaling back excessive consumption, the government can encourage such leisure over consumption choices. It can do so without having to worry about provoking a recession. The economy will continue to experience “growth,” but the growth will be mostly in free time, not consumption.

WHY HAVING A MODEL MATTERS Do we really need a “plan” for an alternative economy now, when we are in no position to implement such a plan? Aren’t discussions and debates about alternative models distractions from the important activities in which so many activists are currently engaged? I think we do need, not simply a vision of a better world, but a sense of how that world might be structured institutionally. But before defending this claim, let me be clear: the numerous, often disparate efforts now underway to build a better world are not counterproductive, diverting energy from the revolutionary struggle to replace capitalism with a humane social order. To the contrary, they are essential. The model I propose should, I hope, make this clear. The fundamental structural changes that define the model I have been describing involve democratizing the economy (hence the name “Economic Democracy”). More specifically, it involves democratizing the workplace and democratizing investment allocation. But these changes in no way determine what decisions the relevant democratic constituencies will make. If we are going to achieve a truly human world, it must be more than just a democratic world. People could, for example, decide that they want ever more consumption, choosing to ignore the ecological consequences of these decisions. A democratic workforce could decide to discriminate against gay or female or minority workers, perhaps even firing them. A democratic electorate, concerned about their taxes, could decide to cut the wage paid to those last-resort government employees to the bare bone. As socialists we want more democracy, but we want more than just democracy. We want a decent, meaningful life for everyone. We want more community, less selfish individualism. We want our society to be a

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caring society that is committed (as noted above) to intergenerational solidarity. Many of us think we should be developing technologies that make our work more, not less, skill intensive, and hence more meaningful. Many of us think that we need to develop a deeper connection to the land, and to the food we eat—more small farms, organic agriculture, urban gardens. Many of us think it is important to rebuild our manufacturing base, with an emphasis on high-skilled production. Many of us think we need shorter workweeks, more vacation time so that we have the free time to cultivate the personal relations and artistic skills that allow us to develop fully as human beings. The abstract model of Economic Democracy in no way guarantees any of these developments. In Economic Democracy, communities have choices to make, workers have choices to make. Each year every community receives its share of the national investment fund. So funds are available for experimentation. Different communities will make different choices. We will come to see what works and what doesn’t. There will be space for democratic discussion and debate each year as to what our priorities should be, what our collective vision for our community should be. Mistakes will doubtless be made, but mistakes aren’t irrevocable, since more funds will be available the following year to chart a different course if necessary. Workers too can experiment: with various labor-leisure tradeoffs, with job redesign, with job rotations and income differentials. Workers in a given enterprise can see what other workers are doing, and learn from their successes and disappointments. Given that the basic institutions of Economic Democracy allow for so many possibilities, it is vitally important to engage now in activities that foreshadow a new way of life. It can scarcely be denied that a major change of consciousness must occur—away from the mindless consumption continuously fostered by the capitalist sales effort—if we are going to live sustainably on this earth. We can’t wait until “after the revolution” for this change to occur. We have to begin now, not just abstractly, with books and blogs, but concretely in our daily lives. 14 We must also develop a sense, through local efforts at ending racism, sexism, homophobia, militarism, poverty, etc., that we can, if we work collectively, effect significant changes. At the same time, we must acknowledge that restricted, local efforts in and of themselves are not enough. Shoots of a new world are indeed developing in the interstices of the old, but sooner or later (sooner rather than later, given the urgency of the problems we face) the fundamental institutions of the existing order much be transformed. This is becoming clear to even mainstream thinkers. Consider Brian Barry, one-time editor of Ethics, the preeminent English-language journal of moral philosophy, and, at the time he wrote these words, Lieber Professor of Political Philosophy, Columbia University, and Professor of Political Science, London School of Economics:

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Chapter 3 One thing can be stated with certainty: the continuation of the status quo is an ecological impossibility. The uncertainty lies with the consequences of this fact. It is quite in the cards that the response will be the further retrenchment of plutocracy within countries and an ever more naked attempt by the United States, aided and abetted by a “coalition of the willing,” to displace the costs onto poorer countries. Whether it succeeds or fails, the results will be catastrophic. . . . The need for another revolution should be obvious to all those who are not willfully blind. It is not, I fear, probable. But without doubt it is possible. 15

Or Gustave Speth, former Dean of the Yale School of Environment and Forestry: We need to reinvent the economy, not restore it. The roots of our environmental and social problems are systemic, and thus require transformational change. . . . For the most part, reformers have worked within this current system of political economy, but what is needed is transformative change in the system itself. The case for immediate action on issues like climate change, job creation, and unemployment extension is compelling, but the big environmental and social challenges we face will not yield to problem-solving incrementalism. Progressives have gone down the path of incremental reform for decades. We have learned that it is not enough. 16

Or Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen: The big challenges that capitalism now faces in the contemporary world include issues of inequality (especially that of grinding poverty in a world of unprecedented prosperity) and of “public goods” (that is, goods people share together, like the environment). The solution to these problems will almost certainly call for institutions that take us beyond the capitalist market economy. 17

If these assertions are true—and I certain think they are—then, if we are to persuade enough people to generate a mass political movement without which such changes are unthinkable, we must be able to move beyond critique. Too many 20th-century experiments with radical change have turned out badly. We need to be able to say, not only what kind of world we want, but what realistic institutional changes would make this better world we want possible. There are at least two other reasons for embracing a realistic, positive model of an alternative to capitalism. First of all, the model itself suggests concrete reform proposals. Economic Democracy suggests, for example, technical and start-up support for cooperatives, democratization of Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), regional and national public investment banks—reforms that move us in the direction we want to go. 18 Secondly, a model such as Economic Democracy makes it clear that a democratic transition to a new economy could be made, if economic and

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political conditions are right, that would not entail massive, immediate, disruptive changes in people’s daily lives. It is important, I think, that we be able to imagine a peaceful transition to a qualitatively different world. Consider one scenario: 19 Suppose the United States were to suffer a major stock market meltdown, and that the electorate, sick of bailouts and other failed remedies, bring into power a new party with a new vision. What might that new government do? Well, it could • buy controlling interest in our publicly traded companies (whose stock prices had plummeted) • transfer control rights to the workers 20 • nationalize the banking system 21 • institute a government-as-employer-of-last-resort program These are fundamental changes, but not beyond our technical competence. The day after “the revolution” the vast majority would continue on as they did the day before. Ownership of many of our workplaces has changed, but the work we were doing still needs to be done. Daily life goes on—and yet institutions are now in place compatible with a qualitatively different world. Let me be clear. Having as part of a movement’s intellectual arsenal a relatively concrete proposal for an alternative economy is by no means sufficient to ensure success, though I do think it a necessary component. We also need a compelling vision of the world we want, details drawn from the successful experiments already underway. It is also crucial that people have a sense that, while engaging in concrete, particular, often local projects, they are also part of a global project, not just to save the world from catastrophe, but to create a far, far better world than the one we inhabit at present. An impossible dream? A far, far better world is not materially impossible. We have the necessary material resources. It is not institutionally impossible. We can assert, with a high degree of confidence, that a viable democratic economy could be constructed that would not suffer capitalism’s glaring defects. Is it politically possible? After all, income and wealth have become concentrated at the top to an almost unprecedented degree.

It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz insists that we face these facts. In a remarkable article appearing in the May 2011 issue of Vanity Fair, he goes on to document the disastrous effects of the massive growth in inequality, then turns his attention to the uprisings in the Middle East:

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Chapter 3 In recent weeks we have watched people taking to the streets by the millions to protest political, economic and social conditions in the oppressive societies they inhabit. Governments have been toppled in Egypt and Tunisa. Protests have erupted in Libya, Yemen and Bahrain. The ruling families elsewhere in the region look nervously from their air-conditioned penthouses—will they be next? They are right to worry. . . . As we gaze out at the popular fervor in the streets, one question to ask ourselves is this: When will it come to America? In important ways, our own country has become like one of these distant, troubled places. . . .

He concludes his article with these words: The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.” 22

Will the good guys win? Maybe. Maybe not. There are no guarantees. But another world is possible, and to struggle for it, win or lose, to work with other good people for serious change, will not be in vain—not if having a meaningful life is, well . . . meaningful. (Do something. Then do something more.) And we shouldn’t forget the fable Pete Seeger often liked to say: Imagine a big seesaw, with a basketful of rocks sitting on one end. That end is down on the ground. At the other end, up in the air, is a basket half full of sand. Some of us are trying to fill it, using teaspoons. Most folks laugh at us: “Don’t you know the sand is leaking out even as you put it in?” We say that’s true, but we’re getting more people with more teaspoons all the time. One of these days that basket of sand will be full and you’ll see this whole seesaw just tip the opposite way. People will say, “Gee, how did it happen so suddenly?” Us, and our goddam teaspoons. 23

NOTES 1. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Verso, 1998), 62. 2. Communist Manifesto, 60. 3. Karl Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” in Lawrence Simon, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 70 4. Cited in Mancur Olsen and Hans Landsberg, The No-Growth Society (New York: Norton, 1974), 97. 5. Karl Marx, Capital, v. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 26. 6. Richard Rorty, “For a More Banal Politics,” Harper’s (May, 1992), 16. 7. Jeffrey Isaac, “Marxism and Intellectuals,” New Left Review 2 (March–April 2000), 114.

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8. Most recently in After Capitalism, 2nd Edition (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefied, 2011). (Subsequent references to After Capitalism are to this revised edition.) 9. This claim is not as contentious as it once was, but it is far from universally accepted on the left. For a sampling of the debate, see Bertell Olman, ed. Market Socialism: The Debate among Socialists (New York: Routledge, 1998). In this volume James Lawler and I defend market socialism, Bertell Olman and Hillel Ticktin oppose it. 10. For a sampling of the evidence see After Capitalism, Section 3.2. 11. More and more relatively mainstream thinkers are beginning to think about alternatives to private financial markets. John Wooley, Head of the Wooley Centre for the Study of Capital Market Dysfunctionality at the London School of Economics, asks, “Why on earth should finance be the biggest and most highly paid industry when it’s just a utility, like sewage or gas?” In questioning so sacred a cow as finance, Wooley admits, “What we are doing is revolutionary.” Quoted by John Cassidy, “What Good Is Wall Street?” New Yorker (November 29, 2010). 12. This argument is elaborated in more detail in After Capitalism, Section 5.1. 13. To deal with low-wage competition from abroad while maintaining international solidarity, Economic Democracy will institute a policy of “socialist protectionism,” tariffs that inhibit wage competition accompanied by rebates to the poorer countries, supplemented by other policies aimed at eliminating global poverty. For details, see After Capitalism, Sections 3.6 and 4.5.2. 14. There is a large literature on good things being done now to build a better world. See, for example, Gar Alperovitz, America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty and Our Democracy (New York: Wiley, 2005); Frances Moore Lappé, Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity and Courage for the World We Really Want (Cambridge, MA: Small Planet Media, 2010); and Juliet Schor, Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth (New York: Penguin, 2010). See also Yes! Magazine. Every issue is full of ideas and examples. 15. Brian Barry, Why Social Justice Matters (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), viii, 272. The latter two sentences are the closing words of this beautiful, angry book. 16. Gustave Speth, “Vision: A Focus on Growing People’s Well-Being, Rather Than Profits,” YES! Magazine (July 12, 2011). 17. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999), 167. It must be said—this remark is buried rather deeply in the text, and not elaborated further. But Sen hinted at that earlier remark more recently, while commenting on the European conference on “A New Capitalism,” hosted by Nicolas Sarkozy and Tony Blair. “Should we search for a new capitalism,” he asks, “or for a ‘new world’ . . . that would take a different form?” Amartya Sen, “Capitalism Beyond the Crisis,” New York Review of Books (March 26, 2009), 27. 18. For more details and more examples, see After Capitalism, Section 6.2. 19. For others, see After Capitalism, Section 6.3. 20. Such a procedure could have been followed when General Motors went bankrupt in 2009. The government did, in effect, nationalize the company, receiving 60 percent of the stock in the “new GM” that was created when the “old GM” collapsed. 21. Both Norway and Sweden did so, temporarily during crisis periods in the early 1990s. It is interesting to note that Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, in spelling out his own plan for economic recovery following the 2008 meltdown, observes that “it will come close to full temporary nationalization of a significant part of the financial system”—though he is quick to add, “this isn’t a long term goal, a matter of seizing the economy’s commanding heights: finance should be reprivatized as soon as it is safe to do so.” He doesn’t say why—apart from considerations of political expediency. He does not want to be branded a closet socialist, “for nothing could be worse than failing to do what is necessary out of fear that acting to save the financial system is somehow ‘socialism.’” Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (New York: Norton, 2009), 186. 22. Joseph Stiglitz, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” Vanity Fair (May, 2011).

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23. Pete Seeger, Where Have all the Flowers Gone: A Singer’s Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies (Bethlehem, PA: Sing Out Publishers, 1993), 261. My thanks to Harry Targ for the quote.

REFERENCES Alperovitz, Gar. America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty and Our Democracy. New York: Wiley, 2007. Barry, Brian. Why Social Justice Matters. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005. Cassidy, John. “What Good Is Wall Street?” New Yorker, November 29, 2010. Isaac, Jeffrey. “Marxism and Intellectuals,” New Left Review, March–April 2000. Lappé, Frances Moore. Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity and Courage for the World We Really Want. Cambridge, MA: Small Planet Media, 2010. Krugman, Paul. The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008. New York: Norton, 2009. Marx, Karl. Capital, v. 1. New York: International Publishers, 1987. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto. London: Verso, 1998. Ollman, Bertell, ed. Market Socialism: The Debate Among Socialists. New York: Routledge, 1998. Olsen, Mancur, and Hans Landsberg. The No-Growth Society. New York: Norton, 1974. Rorty, Richard. “For a More Banal Politics.” Harper’s, May, 1992. Schor, Juliet. Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. New York: Penguin, 2010. Schweickart, David. After Capitalism, 2nd Edition. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefied, 2011. Seeger, Pete. Where Have all the Flowers Gone: A Singer’s Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies. Bethlehem, PA: Sing Out Publishers, 1993. Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. New York: Knoff, 1999. ———. “Capitalism Beyond the Crisis,” New York Review of Books, March 26, 2009. Speth, Gustave. “Vision: A Focus on Growing People’s Well-Being, Rather Than Profits.” YES! Magazine, July 12, 1011. Stiglitz, Joseph. “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” Vanity Fair, May, 2011.

FOUR Romantic Couple Love, the Affective Economy, and a Socialist-Feminist Vision Ann Ferguson

There are tensions in the way our sexual and affectionate social relations are organized in contemporary Western capitalist patriarchal societies. I hope to shed light on what factors in our affective economy—that is, how we produce and manage the necessary human goods of love and affection—are impeding the development of greater gender justice for women on the one hand, and yet on the other, may create opportunities to resolve these tensions or contradictions through types of radical change that could bring us closer to the goal of gender justice. I argue that feminists should strive to replace the overemphasis on romantic couple love by prioritizing other relationships that involve friendship and solidarity for social justice. This does not mean feminists should not be in sexual and/or companionate love couples, but it does mean that to be effective agents for gender justice and to continue to empower women we have to find ways to mitigate the negative effects of the mainstream ideology and internalized love expectations of the romantic couple ideal. Further, gender justice as a long-term goal will have to include a radical transition in our political economy toward a socialist feminist society.

THE AFFECTIVE ECONOMY My general assumption is that there is an affective economy that generates, transmits, and circulates caring, loving, and passionate energies be67

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tween persons. In hetero-patriarchal societies the control of these interpersonal energies, whether they are between men and women, or between parents and children, or between children and other children (e.g. siblings) is generally in the hands of men. As a consequence girls, women, and/or those in the social role of women do more of the loving, affectionate and caring labor to generate and keep affection and love energies circulating but under conditions that, because of their lack of control of the love energies produced, give them less self-esteem and social power in relation to men. As a result the life forces of all genders of people, including men, women, and transgendered people, are constricted into channels that diminish their potential strength. The increase of love and affectionate energy that would occur if caring labor were shared by the genders would radically enhance the joys of human social life, as well as our relation to other living things and the environment. The metaphor I use for the affective economy is of a circulating affective current of energy, as opposed to the exchange metaphor used to describe the material production of things to be exchanged and consumed to meet various human needs. This metaphor allows us to think of a domination relationship in the affective economy as one which partially blocks a positive life-enhancing current that would otherwise increase. Picture a dam which keeps some energy from circulating while it allows the owner of the dam more control over the non-circulating energy. The removal of the dam could allow for a democratic control of the flow, and a liberating affective economy could then increase the energy flow in the whole system. 1 As to why the flow of love and affectionate energy is controlled and impeded by men more than women in patriarchal affective economies, we can learn from the insights of a radical approach to psychoanalysis provided by Deleuze and Guattari to which we add a feminist perspective. 2 To make a long story short, Deleuze and Guattari argue that children in the capitalist patriarchal nuclear family are taught to channel their polymorphous sexual desires into desires for the opposite gender, and in the process of the repression of their general libidinal desiring energies, they are taught a desire for and love of authority, which has been represented by the male gender in the father position (or the fatherfigure) who is seen as having this power over them. Power over others’ desires in the way the father has power over the desires of the mother and the children becomes invested with desire, what Deleuze and Guattari call a “desiring-investment.” While a girl who conforms to the compulsory heterosexual norm learns to invest her erotic desires in some male lover seen as powerful with whom she can realize her desire-forauthority by possessing him, a heterosexual boy learns to realize his desire-for-authority in becoming like the father, and having that authority in relation to a female lover who subordinates herself to him as his mother did to his father. Thus, in the classical Oedipal family, it is the fact that

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the object of one’s love is erotically desired as a power-holder (man) or a power-supporter/giver(woman) that creates the domination love relationship between heterosexual lovers in a patriarchal society. In Freud’s words, we don’t just have an object of sexual desire, we also have an aim, or what we want from the object and how we want to have it done, and this can be either active (what I am calling power-holding or authoritative) or passive (what we could call power-supporting or submissive). Unlike Deleuze and Guattari, I interpret the Freudian story of the creation of the gendered self and sexual identities as a story about social practices of power and socialization, primarily of children in the patriarchal nuclear family. This means that as this structure changes there is hope that internalized domination relations built into gendered sexual desires can change. Luckily, this classical Oedipal family, where the father has erotic power over the mother and children in part because he is the sole breadwinner, is becoming the exception rather than the rule in advanced capitalist societies, since most women are working at least part time in wage labor. But even in gay and lesbian partners who tend to have more equal economic power in the family, there is the ongoing question of whether the ideal of the romantic married couple relationship, originally learned when we were children through the media and culture and our relations with our usually heterosexual parents, still carries a destructive psychological charge which allows for internalized sexism. This destructive charge causes many women’s desires (those who are feminine-identified) to be erotically attracted to men or a masculineidentified partner who will have authority over them. Similarly, many men are erotically attracted to submissive women or feminine-identified partners. There may be other reasons, having to do with the valuing of caring labor itself, which will continue to keep women in unequal love relations with men, and in exploitative parenting relationships, as I will discuss below. In order to analyze structures of the patriarchal affective economy associated with advanced capitalist social formations, I will distinguish several different sets of affective relationships, each with their own structures, contradictions, and opportunities for feminist resistances and alternatives. All of these relationships involve types of love, and all of them at present tend to be structured by a gender division of the caring labor necessary to generate and maintain their affective energies. I will focus first on Couple love, including Sexual, Companionate, and Friendship versions, second on Parental and Intergenerational Kinship love, and finally on Solidarity love.

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THE ROMANTIC LOVE IDEAL: SEXUAL/EROTIC AND COMPANIONATE LOVE The ideology of the companionate couple in our societies could be called romantic individualism, in which a couple chooses to commit themselves to each other for life in a monogamous married relationship that is supposed to be both erotic and companionate for both individuals. This romantic ideal is widespread throughout the media, in religions and in popular culture generally. The recent campaign for gay marriage in the United States and elsewhere shows that it is not simply an ideal for heterosexuals but for lesbians and gays as well. It also is applied to all couples, whether heterosexual or not, who live in committed relationships outside of marriage. Scholars have argued that this particular romantic ideal, of couple love as a passion that fulfills an important aspect of one’s personal identity, is not universal but a particular form which developed during industrialization in the United States and Europe, where the emphasis on individualism displaced earlier identities based on kin relationships or social position. 3 Radical feminists have critiqued this ideal as part of the way that male dominant heteronormative power relations get reproduced. Ti-Grace Atkinson argues that (heterosexual) love is the hysterical response of the victim to the rapist. 4 Simone de Beauvoir maintains that heterosexual women are socialized to see freedom through the sacrifice of self in love: “She chooses to desire her enslavement so ardently that it will seem to her the expression of her liberty . . . she will enthrone him as supreme value and reality. . . . Love becomes for her a religion.” 5 And Shulamith Firestone wrote: “Love, perhaps even more than childbearing, is the pivot of women’s oppression today.” 6 Heterosexual marriage based on the romantic couple ideal has other problems besides those suggested by its feminist critics. One of the basic tensions in the contemporary institution of monogamous marriage in Western capitalist societies is that between lust and companionate love. One problem with the Romantic Couple Love ideal is that lust for, or being-in-love with, another person can be a relatively short-lived phenomenon, while companionate love tends to persist for much longer. Indeed, one of the problems with the Western Romantic Couple ideal is that it ignores the fact that there seem to be really two kinds of love involved which are not compatible in the long run. 7 The passionate overwhelming state of being-in-love, if reciprocated, gives each person in the couple a strong sense of being symbiotically connected, according to Freudian feminist writer Wendy Langford. 8 In this short-lived state, those in love experience the sense of unity and unconditional love they felt from their mother as an infant, and also to express vulnerabilities to each other that bypass norms of masculinity and femininity. But this kind

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of love does not last, and the more manageable companionate love which allows for nurturance of the other without involving strong sexual passion tends to find women and men slipping back to gendered identities and desires that eroticize masculine power and feminine subordination to this power. Even where the man and woman both espouse feminism, deep-seated masculine tendencies to detachment or separation as a strategy to deal with frustrations or conflicts, and feminine tendencies toward caring for and dependence on closeness in the relationship, perpetuate what we can call an Autonomy/Dependency gendered dialectic that undoes the previous psychological equality of the couple. It is in this stage where women typically end up being dominated by men, and/or giving more than they get in affectionate nurturance, although they may fool themselves they have equal or more power by playing the “mother” role in the relationship. 9 The disappearance of the lust or erotic love connected to being-in-love gives rise to the possibility of affairs based on erotic attraction by one or both of the couple outside of the marriage relationship. Patriarchal norms of behavior have always tolerated men having such affairs; in fact, double-standard monogamy (monogamy prescribed for women but not for men in committed heterosexual relationships) has been the norm in most patriarchal affective systems involving marriage, including polygamous marriages. These sexual double standard gender norms also express the principle that good men—those with hegemonic masculinity—have rights to experience lust in more energy channels with more people than do good women, what Connell calls “emphasized femininity.” 10 Women’s growing economic independence due to increasing wage labor for women has opened more possibilities for both married and nonmarried women to have sexual affairs. However, the sexual double standard still persists so that dominant patriarchal gender norms label women who openly pursue such relationships “sluts” and bad women, while men are not labeled “bad men” for having affairs while also in supposedly committed monogamous relationships. The achieving of gay marriage rights in some nations and in some states in the United States has not resolved the tension between lust and companionate love for lesbians, bisexuals and gays who also experience this conflict. Rather, developments in capitalist work and family relationships have exacerbated lust-companionate love tensions for love couples whether straight or gay. A labor market that requires mobility, and the increasing requirement that both members of a household couple must work in wage labor to make ends meet, means that often couples are separated by long commuting days, or even must maintain separate households to work and then commute to see each other. Such regular spatial distance increases the opportunities for one or both of the couple to engage in sexual affairs in these separate spaces. Sexual affairs add

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jealousy as a problem for the couple if they are open, or duplicity and emotional distancing, hence diminished affectionate energy, if they are concealed. Parenting takes intimacy time away from the couple. In addition we will need to consider below the particular type of affective exploitation involved if the caring labor in the parenting is disproportionately done by one parent. Since this is almost always the woman or the one designated as the primary mother in a same sex couple, I call such a person the “social woman” regardless of their biological sex. There are various cultures of resistance that have arisen in response to the tensions that continue within hetero- or homo-normalized marriage regarding lust vs. companionship. One involves marriage resisters, both hetero- and GLBT couples, who refuse to marry for feminist, queer, and/ or anarchist reasons. Some of these latter explicitly identify as queer (either gender-queer or sexual-queer or both). They may have committed monogamous relationships or open non-monogamous relationships, and some of them are included in those communities that call themselves “polyamorous.” These communities have evolved their own norms as to how to regulate the lust-companionate love tension, such as primary and secondary relationships, etc. 11 The polyamorous solution, while it may succeed in reducing the tensions between lust and companionate love, may run into other problems when it comes to combining it with parenting or solidarity love. Managing what may be a rather complicated network of affective commitments takes time away from other activities and commitments. It is particularly difficult for women with children because the sex/affective triangle of time constraints and jealousies discussed below as a contradiction between couple love and parenting may be even worse when a mother is trying to find the time for several adult love relationships. Time constraints are also placed on other activities, including career development, leisure time devoted to self-development, and political activism connected to solidarity love, also discussed below.

COMPANIONATE FRIENDSHIP Marriage resisters who do not engage in polyamory or serial monogamy include those single women, and sometimes men, usually without children but sometimes single parents, or women whose children have grown, who have chosen to prioritize friendships rather than sexual or romantic relationships as their primary affective practices. We can call such a solution the Companionate Friendship solution, and note that it can include prioritizing a companion animal (pets such as cats or dogs) instead of children. Juliet Mitchell argues that the reduced pressure to be mothers in advanced capitalism has increased the possibility for econom-

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ically independent women to prioritize companionate friendships with women rather than love and household relations with men. 12 The Companionate Friendship solution is quite compatible with the kind of solidarity love necessary for engaging in feminist activism of various sorts, and so would seem to be an advantageous affective lifechoice if we grant that the kind of public patriarchy connected with advanced capitalist societies will not be eliminated simply by alternative affective economies in private relationships. Instead we need to support sustained social movements of resistance that in turn require a commitment to solidarity love of various sorts that we will discuss below. 13

PARENTING AND INTERGENERATIONAL LOVE Affectionate Energy as a Common Good Caring labor is a necessary part of the reproduction of the material economic system not only in the minimal sense that human babies and children must receive affectionate energy to survive and thrive enough to become future workers, but also in the sense that the cooperation needed to produce and exchange material goods together presupposes some minimum human bonding that is based on positive affective energy. As necessary labor in the sense described above, caring labor can be measured and compared in terms of its relative exploitation in the labor exchange in which it is involved, whether it is the family household, or in the firm or community. The structural gender division of labor, including paid and unpaid work, can be said to position men to exploit women in contemporary capitalist societies, 14 although this is a generalization, not a universalization about individual relations between men and women, since not all households involve men doing less overall necessary labor than women to supply the needed material and affective goods. Interestingly, however, some studies of gay and lesbian parenting couples have found that there tends to be one partner who does more of the caring labor for children and general housework than the other partner (Gabb 2004, Giddings et al. 2011). 15 This mix of the private exploitation of caring labor in the material economy and the common sharing of the affective energy in the affective economy is what gives Love its mystical and ideological effect in reproducing male domination. The rewarding nature of caring work in generating shared love and affectionate energy tends to make any exploitation involved in the exchange of this work invisible, both to those who receive and those who give the care. This means that many women are happy to do more caring labor in the family than male partners and fathers do because they find the emotional good it produces, love and affection,

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valuable for its own sake. This also explains why conservative women choose to stay in patriarchal and even physically abusive relationships. It is this feature of the affective economy, that its product, affective energy directed to another, is experienced as desirable for its own sake and hence is not given a value to be measured in terms of the quantity of any caring labor exchange necessary to produce it, that distinguishes the logic of the affective economy from that of the market exchanges in material economies, whether they are economies based on use or commodity exchange. What can be theorized as exploitative, however, is what I characterized in earlier writing as a “sex/affective triangle” in which one parent (the “social man,” that is, the male parent or the parent in the male gender role in a same sex or transgender parenting couple) does not do equivalent caring labor to generate the affectionate energy needed by the child that the “social mother” (the female parent or the mother role parent) does. 16 Christine Delphy 17 defines this as an exploitative exchange of parental care labor, and notes that it can be exacerbated when parents split up and the single mother/social woman is doing not only most or all of the unpaid caring work but also working in wage labor in the material economy as the main family breadwinner. 18 We could extend this insight to the greater quantity of care that adult women provide for elderly parents or relatives than do their male siblings or partners. Often, for example, it will be the wife or social woman partner in a couple who will provide elder or invalid care for not only her own parents, siblings, or other older kin but also for the parents, siblings, and kin of her social man partner, while this latter provides little or no care. 19 In advanced capitalist societies, blended families where some children are stepchildren to at least one of the parents are increasingly common, and such situations are even more likely to create the sex/affective triangle conflict which is experienced as a contradiction in love energies by both parents: he because he is jealous of the time she spends with the child that he is not bonded to, and she because she loves both of them and feels guilty that she cannot meet both of their needs for love and affection. 20 Many women will not be convinced to challenge gender inequality in their love and parenting relationships until they are convinced that there is a solution that will preserve and augment caring relationships. Therefore, feminists need to theorize not merely the need for more love and the wider distribution of love energy to those who lack it (for instance, orphaned, neglected, or abused children) but also the “commoning” of the material physical and emotional work needed to produce the common good of shared love and affective energy. This will require thinking about ways to reorganize parenting work, not only between parents but also between parents and non-parents in a gender just society. But I need to say more about parenting love in order to make this clearer.

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Parenting Love and Affective Energy In her dystopian and utopian novel Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy distinguishes between pillow love, hand love, and parenting love. 21 Pillow love is that bodily erotic attraction to some particular other person also called lust, and is explicitly a sexual energy. Hand love, on the other hand, is a companionate love characterized by affectionate friendship. In her utopian world, pillow and hand love are not required to overlap, and parenting is thought of as a separate enterprise. Parenting love is organized by three co-mothers, or co-moms, which can be women or men or both, who make a commitment to raise a child together. There is no assumption in this utopian feminist world, as there has been until recently in the capitalist patriarchal institution of marriage, that lust, companionate love, and parenting must all be relationships between the same couple, whether heterosexual, bisexual, or homosexual. It is fascinating that recent gains in the acknowledgment of the rights of gays and lesbians to marry and to be parents has created new legal openings for the development of co-parenting rights that allow more than two parents, some of whom are not biological parents, to have legal parenting rights. For example, the San Francisco Superior Court in the United States recently allowed Matty Person to be the adoptive third parent of a child she is raising with her lesbian spouse, Sharon Tannenbaum, along with the other biological (and gay) parent Bill Hirsh, who has once-a-week visitation rights. And in January 2007 the Ontario, Canada Court of Appeals granted full parental status to both members of a lesbian couple as well as their sperm donor. 22 A Feminist “Commoning Love Energy” Solution Some feminist households are combating parental caring-labor exploitation by breaking down the division of caring labor that generates affective energies between parents and children, and committing themselves to contribute equal caring labor to produce this common familial and social good. In the United States such reorganization of family care and affection-creating is a privilege only available to a few, mostly those in professional jobs, because of the rigid time requirements of most full-time jobs that do not allow the flexible work schedules necessary for care reorganization. 23 Nonetheless, the parental work leave policies of some women-friendly nations like the Scandinavian welfare states give fathers incentives to take parental work leave as well as mothers and such public policies may be creating a redefinition of masculinity in corporate and public culture that encourages more gender-egalitarian circulation of affective energies between parents and children. 24 The hope would be that such public policy efforts would create the new cultural paradigm of the ideal citizen as both a breadwinner and a care-giver, what Nancy Fraser

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calls the Universal Caregiver model of citizenship and gender justice. 25 But I maintain that such a new ideal of the androgynous citizen will not really be practically available to all, given class and ethnic restrictions in the ability to practice such a radical co-parenting circulation of affective energy, until we transition to a democratic socialist society. Only such a political economy can escape capitalist pressures for economic growth and corporate profit that keep working and middle-class families on a treadmill of overwork that would prevent flex time work/parenting job schedules. Even when women-friendly social welfare states like Sweden are successful in redefining the social norms of masculinity toward more fatherinvolvement in child caring work, we need also to consider whether such familial communing of affective energy between parents and children might serve to lessen the time available for political solidarity work for social justice. To the degree that it may do this, it would be an individual solution to gender injustice in the familial affective economy that would not solve the wider problem of gender injustice in the national and global affective economies linked to the material social relations of capitalist production.

TRANSITIONS TO DEMOCRATIC FEMINIST SOCIALISM: DILEMMAS OF SOLIDARITY LOVE We can speak of solidarity love between individuals when they create affectionate and political love bonds between themselves to fight another group or a social structure that is seen to be oppressive or socially unjust to the first group. 26 Unfortunately solidarity love can be either progressive or reactionary and the reactionary type creates what we can call a Solidarity Love dilemma. First let me discuss the two types of solidarity love. Progressive Solidarity Love In positive solidarity love the individuals related may be of a similar economic class or social race or ethnicity or gender engaged in a common project, such as a trade union or an economic cooperative, or they may be individuals who have social privilege they judge as unjust or unmerited in relation to those with whom they are bonding in solidarity, and they take themselves to be responsible to ally with these others to oppose this unjust social inequality. In this sense they are defining themselves as either members of, or in support of, one social group and in opposition to one or more social groups which are oppressing or harming them. 27 Examples may range from men who define themselves as feminist, people from wealthy Northern countries engaging in fair trade purchases

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and networks with people and products from poorer Southern countries, and those who are white and middle or upper class objecting to toxic waste disposal which environmentally disadvantages poorer communities of color. Anti-war activists who protest their own government’s war policies against other peoples and nations are also promoting a solidarity love with those harmed by the perpetuation of the war. Solidarity love also occurs in alternative economic projects such as economic cooperatives that may have initially been formed in opposition to other powerful groups, for example, wealthy landowners and the neoliberal Mexican state who wanted to break up the common lands or ejidos owned by indigenous families in Chiapas whom the Zapatistas opposed, or Argentinean corporations such as the Zanon tile factory that wanted to close it and fire all the workers in the financial crisis in 2001, or wealthy hacienda owners in Brazil hiring farm workers at wages too low for subsistence. In each of these cases a social movement formed in resistance, took over land or factories, and established economic cooperatives: the Zapatistas farm their ejidos cooperatively although still menaced by Mexican soldiers, workers from the Argentinean MTD (Movimiento de Trabajadores Desemployados) took over abandoned factories and formed worker-owned cooperatives, and the Landless Farm Workers (Movimiento sin Tierra, or MST) in Brazil established squatter communities on nonused land of wealthy landowners and farm it collectively. Corporate globalization has created global communication technology which has provided tools to create global solidarity networks in resistance to the incursion of global corporations and neo-liberal trade and financial policies. Technologies such as the Internet and cell phones have facilitated the coordination of global anti-war protests and face-to-face conferences such as those held by the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, and the various world and regional social forums for leftist activists. We can see these autonomous solidarity networks as generating alternative values based on alternative economic relationships in socialized markets such as those involved in fair trade networks. Typically, these involve economic cooperative producers and consumers selling and buying their goods not based on a capitalist logic of competitive prices at the expense of exploited labor. Instead they are promoting a different principle— what I have called, following Marx, the Solidarity principle of Justice— from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. This represents a type of radical or revolutionary love, since it is based not on selfinterest but on concern for the others involved. These kinds of socialized market networks can alter capitalist power relations between (relatively) wealthy consumers and (relatively) poor producers, as fair trade rules allow the producers to set a fair price independent of market prices. Global solidarity networks between social movements have had a feminist result internally in many social justice movements whose initial

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organizing issue has not been around women’s interests or rights per se. For example, the global network for food sovereignty called Via Campesina was focused initially around stopping multinational agri-business corporations from taking the power away from local producers to produce and consume a secure, local food supply. However, as a result of its organizing food producers and its members coming to realize that over 60% of them are women and also in the poorest world population, they include as one of their definitions of food sovereignty, ending violence against women. 28 Such violence includes not only the ongoing economic violence of rural poverty due to neoliberal agribusiness but also the familial violence that occurs to women as men in farm families take out their despair on women. The Brazil MST has established a gender commission which formed a rule for their squatter communities that any man guilty of domestic violence while in the community would have to leave. The Zapatistas have been quite influential among other global social justice movements in their exemplary efforts to allow women in their group to reconstruct their indigenous traditions so as to challenge patriarchal aspects of it. The Revolutionary Law of Women, put forward by women Zapatista militants, includes the right to voluntary marriage, to education, to control their own reproduction, and to live independent lives. Solidarity love, then, can be transformative in the social relations between members in the solidarity group as it allows the unmet needs of worker dignity and gender equality blocked in capitalist relations to be achieved in these oppositional movements. 29 Another example comes from an ethnography done among contemporary social movements in Argentina by Graciela Monteagudo. 30 She discusses how gender power relations changed to egalitarian when a balloon factory was taken over by the workers. The workers now have a female manager and cite as a reason for this that the women were in fact more militant about seizing the factory and setting up the cooperative, and both women and men in the group also acknowledge that the women are more responsible and efficient in their management styles. One of her informants also says that the spirit of solidarity between workers, of thinking of themselves as compaňeros/as or comrades, has lessened the various jealousies and critical judgments that the women previously used against each other for sexual affairs and flirtations with the male workers. They also tend to judge each other now not on their old standard of how much they could slack off on the job but their new solidarity standard of seriously making good use of their time on the job as a collective benefit to all. They call this new work ethic in the cooperative, compaňerismo. The Problem of Reactionary Solidarity Love Politics The examples I have given above are all of the direction of positive, loving energy toward others with the aim of benefiting them materially

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and socially. But affective economies can also be organized around solidarity love relations toward a group one identifies with in a way that directs negative energy, whether contempt, fear or hate, toward another group. When contempt is involved, it is usually because the group in solidarity has defined itself against the other group in such a way that it is able to maintain social status and privilege in relation to that group by excluding their members from the social prerogatives maintained by the first group. Examples include privileged men bonding to defend hegemonic masculinity in male-defined political, military, corporate, or other social space in order to exclude women as well as homosexual and other nonhegemonic masculinity men so as to maintain their status prerogatives and social power over them. This kind of homosocial solidarity between hegemonic men is a reactionary kind of solidarity that promotes public patriarchy and heterosexism. When hate is involved, the political goal is not at all to promote social equality between the two groups, but to eliminate or expel the other group altogether. Sara Ahmed calls this the politics of hate in the name of love. 31 She gives examples of reactionary nationalist movements, such as the Aryan Nation group in the United States, who define themselves as white and Christian, and direct hate against non-white, non-Christian groups, such as African Americans, immigrants of color, or Muslims. These groups are felt to endanger or do potential harm to the loved national, ethnic, or racial group. One of the contradictory political outcomes of neoliberal capitalist policies that are supposed to allow for more opportunities for individuals to use their market freedom to get ahead, is the rise of the reactionary politics of Christian conservatives seeking to strengthen the patriarchal nuclear family. For most in such groups, this form of the family is coded as white, and must be defended by denying civil rights such as reproductive rights or marriage to feminists, gays, and lesbians. The existence of what Safri and Graham call “global households” of immigrants that migrate back and forth to their home countries and send remittances to support relatives at home reinforces the racialized affective economies of reactionary nationalists in the receiving nations. 32 Such racial and ethnic nationalists aim to develop communal networks of solidarity love for those perceived to be of the same race, religion, and ethnicity. 33 These communities are explicitly racist and/or ethnicist, and define themselves by their hatred of the feared Other, often a foreigner or immigrant, who is racially, ethnically, and religiously different. Such group hatred takes as its rationale opposition to immigrants in such global households, since the affective communal and familial allegiances of the latter are perceived to be to their nation of origin not to their nation of residence.

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What Is to Be Done? Feminist Radical Love Politics I raised the question at the beginning whether we should end couple love, at least that based on the ideal of the romantic monogamous married couple. My answer is that while couple love may be here to stay, we can change its form and weaken the male-dominant effects of the romantic love model by prioritizing other relationships, including companion friendships, child-free or commoning parent relationships, feminist lesbian and gay relationships, feminist polyamorous networks, and solidarity activism. Is there a way that feminists can use a Solidarity Love politics to challenge various types of Reactionary Solidarity politics? A progressive Love Solidarity politics, one that defines itself as “revolutionary love” (Ferguson 2010, Hennessy 2010), is at pains to distinguish itself from the reactionary Solidarity politics that may also describe their mission as involving solidarity love. 34 Progressive solidarity groups should not define themselves by generating hatred, that is, a negative affective energy, toward those they judge to be engaged in unjust actions. While they may oppose others for doing these actions, for example, the military who may be harming civilians in an unjust war, they should criticize the power structure, for example, the military-industrial complex, that puts soldiers in positions of having to harm civilians, rather than the soldiers themselves. This kind of solidarity love Anti-War politics is more like that of Gandhi and Martin Luther King’s nonviolent civil disobedience movements for national and racial social justice which defined love and solidarity between what King called “the beloved community” in the search for justice. These advocates of radical love for those oppressed racially and nationally were at pains to argue against a politics of hate toward the British colonialists or to white people, even racist white people. Similarly, the feminist U.S. anti-war group Code Pink does acts of positive solidarity toward civilians harmed in U.S.-led wars and also particularly toward women civilians who are organizing to defend women’s interests in conflict situations, but they don’t define themselves by hatred of members of the U.S. military. To resolve the Solidarity Love dilemma that haunts oppositional movements, then, feminist social justice activists will have to be prepared to combat the politics of fear, contempt, and hate in our oppositional affective economies and to network across class, race, and ethnic/religious differences in solidarity with those threatened by such politics, whether it be non-hegemonic masculinity men, immigrants, Muslims, people of color, or people from a different class background than ourselves. In addition we will have to keep alive the spirit of progressive group solidarity in our various activist projects as this continues to be weakened by family and couple loyalties, jealousies, and other de-energizing affective tendencies. Finally we will have to keep articulating a

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socialist-feminist vision of society, in spite of the move to the right caused by the victories of neoliberal capitalist globalization. For more detailed discussion of how such a vision might need to reorganize private and public work, see my previous discussions. 35 This is not easy to do, and it may have to be revived again and again, but another world is possible!!

NOTES 1. I will not elaborate here on the advantages of the energy flow metaphor as opposed to the economic exchange model used by other materialist feminists to understand male domination of the affective economy. Indeed I am not even arguing that we need to substitute one model for the other. Rather we need to add the energy flow model to the exchange model in order to understand how the love and affectionate energies necessary to human well-being work. That is, we need to posit both a material economy which organizes the production and exchange of material goods and services, as well as an affective economy operating by the production and circulation of various forms of affective energies, including erotic love, companionate love, friendship, parental and kin love, and affection and solidarity love. The circulation, control, and distribution of these affective energies can both reproduce but also undermine the bonding relations that enable the needed social cooperation underlying class-exploitative material economies like capitalism as well as patriarchal and racial domination relations. As feminists we cannot afford to be reductive in our understandings of these systems and their interaction if we are to understand the persistence of sexism, racism, and class exploitation. 2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 3. Jessica Langford, Revolutions of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1999), 2. 4. Ti-Grace Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey (New York: Links Books, 1974). 5. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 653. 6. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (London: Paladin, 1972), 121. 7. Stevi Jackson, “Even Sociologists Fall in Love: An Exploration in the Sociology of Emotions,” Sociology 27 (1993): 201–220. 8. Langford, Revolutions. 9. Langford, Revolutions. 10. See R. W. Connell, Gender (Oxford: Blackwell’s Publishing, Ltd., 2002). 11. Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy, The Ethical Slut (Berkeley: Celestial Arts/ Random House, 2009); Sandra A. Miller “Beyond Monogamy,” Boston Globe Magazine (January 3, 2010). 12. Juliet Mitchell, “Procreative Mothers (Sexual Difference) and Child-Free Sisters (Gender),” in The Future of Gender, ed. Jude Browne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007): 163–188. 13. It would seem that in practice many radical feminists have accepted this option, and are accused in part for this reason as being “anti-sex” by other feminists who value a more polyamorous lifestyle. The Companionate Friendship solution is not ideal however to the extent one values an erotic sexual relationship as an affective good in itself. It requires one of three problematic choices: first, eschewing erotic love, an admitted good, altogether; or second, the conversion of the companionate friendship into a romantic sexual-companionate friendship with the tensions we have already discussed. The third choice is to have occasional sexual liaisons with others, but these have the problem that they may lead to the jealousy of the primary companion if openly acknowledged, duplicity if not, and in either case, there will be the time problem mentioned above if pursued more extensively.

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14. See Nancy Folbre, Who Pays for the Kids? Gender and the Structure of Constraint (New York: Routledge, 1994). 15. Jacqui Gabb, “Critical Differentials: Querying the Incongruities within Research on Lesbian Parent Families,” Sexualities 7 (2004); Lisa Giddings, John Nunley, Alyssa Schneebaum, and Joachim Zietz, “Children, Family Size and Household Specialization: A Comparison of Different-Sex and Same-Sex Couples Using Matching Techniques,” presented at the Allied Social Science Association Annual Conference, Denver, CO, on 8 January 2011. Under review at Demography. 16. Ann Ferguson, Blood at the Root: Motherhood, Sexuality and Male Domination (London: Pandora/Unwin/Hyman, 1989); Sexual Democracy: Women, Oppression and Revolution (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991). 17. Christine Delphy, Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984). 18. There has recently been some empirical research that suggests that even gay and lesbian couples if they have children will have a designated parent whose work load is greater than the other parent. (See Gabb, “Critcal Differentials”; Giddings et al., “Children, Family Size.”) 19. Affective exploitation can occur if the masculine gender role partner demands and receives affectionate energy from the mother-partner for themselves without equivalent caring labor to maintain the couple love relationship or to adequately meet the needs for affection and material well-being of the child. The lover-parent-child (or kin-elder) triangular relationship is even more problematic if the father is jealous of the caring time and affectionate energy the mother shares with the child, children, or invalid parent or kin, since the latter may feel guilty as the one expected by the dominant gender norms for mothers to give everyone the affectionate energy they need. See Ann Ferguson, Sexual Democracy: Women, Oppression and Revolution (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1991). 20. It certainly is possible that a social father brings a child from a former partner into a subsequent partner household, and that the stepmother does not bond with this child and thus feels jealous of the time the father spends with the child and/or overburdened by care work she must do for him or her. But much more likely is the situation where the stepmother does bond with the child, in part because of gender norms and skills which influence her to do so, and the father, instead of feeling grateful that his partner has taken on a caring and affectionate relation with his child, ends up feeling jealous that she is spending time with that relationship that may take away from the couple’s intimate time. This is not to deny that there are successful blended feminist families where both partners give equal care time and affection to all the children, whether they are biological, adopted, or stepchildren. 21. Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Knopf, 1976). 22. Drake Bennett, “Johnny Has Two Mommies—and Four Dads,” www.boston. com/bostonglobe (Oct. 24, 2010). 23. It should be noted that there are existing alternatives to the relatively isolated nuclear family raising of children typical of Western capitalist societies, even within these societies depending on class and racial/ethnic cultural patterns. For example, many working-class immigrant families still handle parenting in a way that involves many kin, not just the biological parents. Whole communities can do hands-on caring for children. Examples would include the “other-mothers” of grandmothers, aunts, and female neighbors characteristic of many urban African American families, and particular communities, like foster-parenting networks. But while these examples mitigate the caring work that individual mothers have to do for children and elders, the sharing is typically among women and not equal between women and men. 24. Katrin Bennhold, “In Sweden, the Men Can Have It All,” New York Times (June 10, 2010). Accessed August 15, 2011 at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/ europe/10iht-sweden.html?src=me&ref=general. 25. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Post-Socialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997).

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26. It might be argued that solidarity is not correctly categorized as a type of love since it can often be more of a moral commitment and involve less felt sense of attachment: indeed, one may not even like individuals one feels solidarity toward! (I owe this example to Richard Schmitt.) In answer I would argue that solidarity is a type of love because it involves an energy that connects one to another person or persons, one which can be felt in the body when those persons are attacked or endangered by others. In this sense solidarity as a form of love takes one outside of oneself and motivates one to connect to others, even if one feels an active dislike for them! It may be a good example of the phrase from the song “I don’t like you, but I love you”!! 27. Ann Ferguson, “Feminist Paradigms of Solidarity and Justice,” Philosophical Topics 37 (2009): 161–176; Ann Ferguson, “How Is Global Solidarity Possible?” In Sexuality, Gender and Power, ed. Anna G. Jónasdóttir, Valerie Bryson, and Kathleen B. Jones (New York: Routledge, 2010): 243–258. 28. Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy (New York: Picador, 2010). 29. Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2000). 30. Graciela Monteagudo, “Politics by Other Means: Rhizomes of Power in Argentina’s Social Movements.” Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2011. 31. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004). 32. Julie Graham and Maliha Safri, “The Global Household: Toward a Feminist Postcapitalist International Political Economy,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 369 (2010): 99–122. 33. Ahmed, Cultural Politics. 34. Ferguson, “Global Solidarity”; Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure. 35. Ann Ferguson, Blood at the Root: Motherhood, Sexuality and Male Domination (London: Pandora/Unwin/Hyman, 1989).

REFERENCES Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004. Atkinson, Ti-Grace. Amazon Odyssey. New York: Links Books, 1974. Bennett, Drake. “Johnny Has Two Mommies—and Four Dads,” www.boston.com/ bostonglobe (Oct. 24, 2010). Bennhold, Katrin. “In Sweden, the Men Can Have It All,” New York Times (June 10, 2010). Online at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/europe/10iht/sweden. htmlsrc=me&ref=general. Connell, R. W. Gender. Oxford: Blackwell’s Publishing Ltd., 2002. De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. New York: Pantheon, 1988. Delphy, Christine. Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984. Easton, Dossie, and Janet W. Hardy. The Ethical Slut. Berkeley: Celestial Arts/Random House, 2009. Ferguson, Ann. Blood at the Root: Motherhood, Sexuality and Male Domination. London: Pandora/Unwin/Hyman, 1989. Ferguson, Ann. Sexual Democracy: Women, Oppression and Revolution. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991. Ferguson, Ann. “Feminist Paradigms of Solidarity and Justice.” Philosophical Topics 37, 2 (Fall 2009): 161–176. Ferguson, Ann. “How Is Global Solidarity Possible?” In Sexuality, Gender and Power, edited by Anna G. Jónasdóttir, Valerie Bryson, and Kathleen B. Jones. New York: Routledge, 2010: 243–258. Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex. London: Paladin, 1972.

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Folbre, Nancy. Who Pays for the Kids? Gender and the Structure of Constraint. New York: Routledge, 1994. Fraser, Nancy. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Post-Socialist” Condition. New York: Routledge, 1997. Gabb, Jacqui. “Critical Differentials: Querying the Incongruities within Research on Lesbian Parent Families.” Sexualities 7 (2004): 167–182. Giddings, Lisa, John Nunley, Alyssa Schneebaum, and Joachim Zietz. “Children, Family Size and Household Specialization: A Comparison of Different-Sex and SameSex Couples Using Matching Techniques.” Presented at the Allied Social Science Association Annual Conference, Denver, CO, on 8 January 2011. Under review at Demography. Graham, Julie, and Maliha Safri. “The Global Household: Toward a Feminist Postcapitalist International Political Economy.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36, 1 (Fall 2010), 99–122. Hartmann, Heidi. “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism.” In Women and Revolution, edited by Lydia Sargent. Boston: South End, 1981: 1–44. Hennessy, Rosemary. Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism. New York: Routledge, 1981. Hennessy, Rosemary. “Bread and Roses in the Commons,” work in progress for the 2010 GEXcel conference, Dec. 2–4, 2010, Örebro University, Örebro, Sweden. Jackson, Stevi. “Even Sociologists Fall in Love: An Exploration in the Sociology of Emotions.” Sociology 27, 2 (May 1993): 201–220. Langford, Jessica. Revolutions of the Heart. New York: Routledge, 1999. Miller, Sandra A. “Beyond Monogamy,” Boston Globe Magazine (January 3, 2010). Mitchell, Juliet. “Procreative Mothers (Sexual Difference) and Child-Free Sisters (Gender).” In The Future of Gender, edited by Jude Browne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007: 163–188. Monteagudo, Graciela. “Politics by Other Means: Rhizomes of Power in Argentina’s Social Movements.” Ph.D. thesis, anthropology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2011. Patel, Raj. The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy. New York: Picador, 2010. Piercy, Marge. Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: Knopf, 1976.

FIVE Socialism, Post-Capitalism, and the Division of Labor Anatole Anton

Thesis X: the standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity. 1

In our introduction to this anthology, we called for a set of alternative [socialist] institutions that we can build. We insisted that, “we need not only ask ourselves how we imagine a better world but also how we are going to construct it. . . .” We called for an abandonment of “comforting generalities of the past and the pleasing fantasies with which we maintain our sanity in an insane world.” We asked for nothing less than “concrete strategies of transformation.” Implicit in this approach is the idea of socialism as an ongoing process. The many failures and disappointments of a wide variety of socialisms lead us to focus on the search for a process-oriented account of the transition from the present state of capitalism to a post-capitalist future that might plausibly be called “socialist.” What then are the terms in which we should conceive of socialism? How can we avoid being misled by tendencies, parties, or states that call themselves “socialist”? How exactly will socialism provide the sorts of tests and challenges to change the world in the direction of freedom, equality, community, security, ecology, and peace? I will take a stab at speaking to these questions at the end of this paper. What I want to do first is to advance the idea that Marx’s conception of the division of labor is the real key—socially, politically, philosophically, economically, culturally—to taking socialism seriously. There are of course scholars such as Terrell Carver who deride the very idea of overcoming the division of labor as misguided and who suggest that Marx 85

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did not take this idea seriously, but I will assume in this paper that Sean Sayers’s critique of Carver is well taken. 2 In other words, I suggest that socialism has to be understood as the critique of an existing division of labor and as a proposal in the five contexts mentioned above for moving in the direction of a socialist overcoming of the division of labor. We are talking about a division of labor that embodies the beginning of an end to the functional division of labor in both of what have been called its horizontal and vertical forms together with its oppositions between mental and manual as well as urban and rural labor. Sadly, it is now common practice to talk about socialism without so much as mentioning the division of labor, much less the overcoming of it. In other words, the prevailing point of view seems to be that we can achieve socialism within the form of our present divisions of labor. So-called socialist tendencies, parties, and states typically call for redistribution and reform but fail to address the need for re-conceiving the changes (ecological, technological) in the division of labor that would underlie such redistribution and reform. What is needed more than anything is a transformation of the division of labor in the direction of evenness as part of that transformation; what is needed, in other words, are transformed workers for a transformed division of labor with an increasingly worker and ecologically friendly technology.

MARX’S LEGACY: THE CONCEPT OF THE DIVISION OF LABOR There is widespread agreement among scholars that Marx didn’t fully become a Marxist until the spring of 1845 when he dashed off a kind of outline for his polemical chapter on Feuerbach in the German Ideology, a book which was to be co-authored with his friend Friederich Engels but in fact, was never published and, in Engels words, was “left to the gnawing criticism of the mice.” 3 In the preceding years, Marx tried to work out a Feuerbachian interpretation of the philosophy of the state (especially Hegel) and of political economy (including Adam Smith’s pin factory). By 1845, however, he had broken with Feuerbach. He accused Feuerbach of “presupposing an abstract—isolated—human individual.” 4 He goes on to note the limitations of Feuerbach’s approach: “Essence, therefore, can be comprehended only as ‘genus,’ as an internal, dumb generality that unites the many individuals.” 5 Human species being, he tells us in effect, should by contrast be conceived “as practical, human—sensuous activity.” 6 [Italics added] If we read for Marx’s term “essence,” “humanity” as an abstract universal, the point becomes clear. Common humanity is a product of human activity; it unites people in their cooperative activities. The pronoun “we” rather than “I” is primary for understanding human activity. That is why Marx tells us in The German Ideology: “Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or any-

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thing else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step that is conditioned by their physical organization.” 7 In other words, human beings are conceived of as collectively selfdefining creatures and the development of a division of labor, as we shall see, is part of that self-definition. In all revolutions up till now the mode of activity always remained unscathed and it was only a question of a different distribution of this activity, a new distribution of labour to other persons, while the communist revolution is directed against the preceding mode of activity, does away with labour, and abolishes the rule of all classes with the classes themselves. 8

But the depth and magnitude of these changes require self-change of an extraordinary degree. “This revolution is necessary,” Marx proclaims “not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.” 9 What then is this muck of ages? What is it that stands in our way to collective self-definition? Marx raised this question again 30 years after first addressing it in the writing of the Theses on Feuerbach and the chapter on Feuerbach in The German Ideology. Famously, in his Critique of the Gotha Programme in 1875, Marx speaks of transcending the division of labor, of a time when human life will be for the “all around development of the individual” and one might say human beings will not be defined by their society but, quite the reverse, society will exist for human self-definition. . . . after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative life flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety, and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! 10

The division of labor to which Marx refers in both 1845 and 1875 is functional. That is, every person is, so to speak, defined in terms of specific functions that they can perform (e.g., as carpenter, shepherd, poet). Society is experienced as a coercive pressure on the individual to meet socially defined needs (i.e., functions) while needs as part of a formula for redistribution are neglected. That is to say that the injunction to each according to their needs has no place. A carpenter, for example, is defined in terms of her function but the human needs of that carpenter are of no consequence.

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Chapter 5 For as soon as the distribution of labor comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, cowherd , or critic. 11

Commentators have frequently remarked on the youthful exuberance [27 years old] that informs this passage, but the main point should be clear. Marx is proposing a norm of many-sided (rounded) development; he is speaking out, one might say, against uneven development among the producers of development and, of course, that which is the result of what has been developed. He is challenging the kinds of specialization that is built into a labor market, for example, where the narrowly specialized tend to win out as against the many-sided. It is an attack on narrowness and a call for creation of the ground works of communication and mutual understanding. After all, a strict functional division of labor ensures the absence of common grounds or experience or a sense of the whole. For example, the computer field is home to many experts on different and changing aspects of the computer—software, hardware, firmware, physics of chips, etc.—but there is little room for discussion of the whole package in its effects on our relations with nature and our fellow human beings. Indeed, the different kinds of experiences we have each had (or not had) in our exclusive sphere of activity drives a wedge between us, a wedge in which the left hand doesn’t understand what the right hand is doing. Deskilling, for example, as it is associated with Taylorism and the detail division of labor, fails this test of wholeness and the creation of what one might call an inter-communicative workforce. 12 The industrialization of agro-business has a similar effect. Indeed, there is an extensive literature that debunks the idea that the functional division of labor and the market society that accompanies it is somehow more efficient than its rounded, even, many-sided alternative. 13 Similarly military construction often embodies hierarchy and secrecy in which specific modules are produced that are disconnected parts of a weapon system. The worker typically does not know the larger context of what is being produced and, therefore, has no responsibility for his/her production.

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THE DIVISION OF LABOR AS A CRITICAL CONCEPT To pick a well-known example, Marx’s critics have opposed the language of The Communist Manifesto when it seems to demean the peasantry. Marx speaks, for example, of “the idiocy of rural life” while his defenders have argued that the Greek root of the word “idiot” lies in the concept of selfabsorption. Typically the peasant mode of life, given its specific structure and demands leads to narrow, localized self-absorption, as opposed to a broad, inclusive view of the world. 14 This narrowness is rooted in the division of labor created by the breaking up of feudal estates in the establishment of the free holding system that came with the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. After the first revolution had transformed the peasants from semi-villeins into freeholders, Napoleon confirmed and regulated the conditions under which they could exploit undisturbed the soil of France which had only just fallen to their lot and slake their youthful passion for property. But what is now causing the ruin of the French peasant is his small holding itself, the division of the land, the form of property which Napoleon consolidated in France. It is precisely the material conditions which made the feudal peasant a small holding peasant and Napoleon an emperor. Two generations have sufficed to produce the inevitable result: progressive deterioration of agriculture, progressive indebtedness of the agriculturalist. The Napoleonic form of property, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century was the condition for the liberation and enrichment of the French country folk, has developed in the course of this century into the law of their enslavement and pauperization. 15

Marx explains the absence of what we called an inter-communicative work force in a way that explicitly relates to the division of labor. Their field of production, the small holding, admits of no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and, therefore no diversity of development, no variety of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient; in itself directly produces the major part of its consumption and thus acquires its means of life more through exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. 16

The division of land into small holdings severely limited the possibilities of the division of labor. It limited the extent to which there could be special returns to science, technology, talent, diversity, or social relations. Obviously Marx did not mean that there was literally no division of labor. He meant that possibilities of innovation were extremely limited. There was little room for innovation. Peasant life was harshly coercive. It was governed by a multiplicity of inescapable functions. There was no chance for the sort of rounded life for which Marx called. Indeed, Marx

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famously compares the great mass of the French nation to a sack of potatoes formed by “simple addition of homologous magnitudes,” “much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes.” There is no place in this agglomeration of free holdings and villages made up of free holdings for collective self-understanding and hence self-representation. Limited by their division of labor, the French peasants, though a class in themselves, could not function as a class for themselves. Ultimately this incapacity was explained in terms of the division of labor. The free holding peasants, organized in family units, are incapable of grasping, much less enforcing, their class interests in their own name. The secret of Bonaparte’s rule, according to Marx, is that the free holding peasants cannot represent themselves, “they must be represented.” 17 The grotesque mediocrity, Bonaparte, caricature of his uncle, is merely a way that the executive power of France can subordinate society to itself and that the peasant majority of France can find leadership, albeit at its own expense. Nonetheless, social and political control requires that the peasant “class” be addressed, even if only through spectacle. One of the central ways in which this exchange takes place is what Marx called “the imperialism of the peasant class.” 18 What is unmistakable is Marx’s prescience on this matter. What has been called “the populist underbelly” of recent wars and crises can be seen by analogy as a kind of “peasant” refusal of a failed consumerism. As living conditions spiral downward, budget cuts proliferate, “the American dream” becomes increasingly precarious; inequality grows ever more steeply; we cannot represent ourselves and therefore search among grotesque mediocrities for some kind of plausible representation. Not unlike the French peasants during the Bourbon and July monarchies we are incapable of seeing the way in which the division of labor underlies our present crises. The possibility of socialism is invisible.

THE DIVISION OF LABOR AS A SEMINAL CONCEPT The division of labor is a seminal concept in the sense that it continually leads to new theoretical developments. One might say that the concept morphs in association with social, political, and technological changes. A recent author states—referring to debates about such concepts as “mass culture,” “consumerism,” “the new class,” “the culture industry”—that these phrases are all related attempts to grasp “the emergence of modern mental labor.” 19 When oriented toward the future, they are driven by the attempt to imagine and implement a politics of mental labor but when oriented to the past, these concepts are all elaborations of “a fundamental antinomy of mental and manual labor.” 20 Liberal economists such as Robert Reich have in recent years paid much attention to symbol processing as a kind of work, while in the thirties and forties, philosophers such

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as Ernst Cassirer, Suzanne Langer, Kenneth Burke, and many others developed a way of understanding the symbolic dimensions of reality and communication. For the moment, this is not the direction of contemporary work in philosophy, but consideration of the division of labor suggest, at least, that it may well return. At any rate, Reich’s account of the newly emerging capitalist division of labor makes it clear that only one small (20%) part of the labor force, the fortunate fifth, what he calls “the symbolic analysts” or “mind workers” can plausibly offer their services in the global economy and accordingly expect to be increasingly advantaged in the future. Since routine production workers and care giving workers are not competitive in the global market “we are now” according to Reich, “in different boats, one sinking rapidly [production workers], one sinking more slowly [care workers], and the third rising steadily [symbolic analysts].” 21 In this situation, those who Reich labels “symbolic analysts” “are quietly seceding from the large diverse publics of America into homogenous enclaves, within which their earnings need not be redistributed to people less fortunate than themselves.” 22 Suburbanization only reinforces this tendency. Clearly, the search that began in the twenties for a politics of mental labor needs to be focused and intensified. In this way, a socialist option might become visible once again. But the socialist option is also invisible, because the theory in terms of which it was most often formulated, Marxist theory, has remained inadequately developed and thought out. The connection between the concept of the division of labor and socialism has not been fully explicated. Alfred Sohn-Rethel has made this point in his book Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology but few others have taken up his pointers to the seminal nature of the concept of the division of labor. Sohn-Rethel calls for an extension of Marxist theory. He argues that such “an extension is needed for a fuller understanding of our own epoch.” 23 And he is clear in his meaning of “our epoch”: “We understand ‘our epoch’ as that in which the transition from capitalism and the building of a socialist society are the order of the day.” 24 Marx, he reminds us, was “engaged in the capitalist process of development; its theoretical perspective was limited to the trends pushing this development to its limits.” 25 It is a huge stretch to say that building socialism is the order of the day, especially now in the contemporary slide to the political right, but the point to be noticed is that capitalism is not only in crisis, it is failing by objective measures: controlling unemployment, homelessness, poverty, providing food security, economic stability, peace, an ecologically sound relationship with nature, etc. As we have said, the problem is why in these circumstances a socialist option is invisible. Sohn-Rethel’s answer to this question is interesting, if highly speculative. “The antithesis between intellectual and physical labor will not vanish before the private and fragmented labor of commodity production has been turned into re-socialized labor.” 26 Thus, his focus

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is on overcoming the division of labor but in a new way. “The re-socialized labor must become the societizing force which must bring about the unity of head and hand that will implement a class-less society.” 27 What is at stake, then, is nothing less than the commodity form of need satisfaction. So Sohn-Rethel suggests that the commodity form and the traditional division of labor are in the end inseparable. It is true that capitalism has been in crisis before and proven itself resilient, but what is striking now about contemporary capitalism is a sense of having broken limits. In Marx’s day, one might say that the limits of capitalist production were being measured and explored; today, one might say that these limits have been reached. One way of making this point concerns technology. Science in Marx’s time followed technology. Technological possibilities such as engines, electrical apparatuses, weapons, etc. were typically developed before the scientific theory that explained them was discovered or fully understood. But by the time of World War II, technology came to follow science. Science opened the way to technological possibilities that were previously unimaginable. Thermonuclear weapons, the computer chip, DNA, plate tectonics, lasers, x-rays, fiberoptics, etc. led the way to applications of all sorts. The division of labor assured the fortunate fifth a steady stream of jobs, but also assured ongoing unevenness in the society as a whole. Sohn-Rethel warns of the tendency toward a technocratic society as opposed to a socialist one: “The creation of socialism demands that society makes modern developments of science and technology subservient to its needs. If, on the other hand, science and technology elude historical materialist understanding, mankind might go, not the way of socialism, but that of technocracy; society would not rule over technology, but technology over society.” 28

To repeat, it follows from what we have said that what is at stake is the commodity form of need satisfaction and the class structure in which the fortunate fifth encounter science and technology. In reality, according to Sohn-Rethel these are “intrinsically connected with closely corresponding forms of division of head and hand. . . .” 29 For example, in contemporary farm work massive doses of pesticide are used at exorbitant social and human costs but at low wages for “hand labor.” The mind workers in this scenario are for the most part comfortable and out of danger. The challenge of a socialist redesign of agriculture, selectively using biological controls, for example, is available but doesn’t make sense in terms of capitalist cost accounting. Farm workers would have to be paid as skilled workers in a way that is comparable to doctors or nurses for their understanding and use of antibiotics and other drugs. Not only would the division of labor be redesigned but more choice would be available to

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workers as to how they would fit into, change, or shake off the existing division of labor.

THE DIVISION OF LABOR AS CONTRADICTORY We have suggested that to understand socialism, one must understand a socialist approach to the division of labor. We have also suggested that there is something wrong with a conception of socialism that does not include a socialist approach to the division of labor. Yet, in reality the concept of socialism is more complex than I allowed initially. The fact is that contemporary political discourse usually argues for a modified socialism. Thus, we speak of democratic socialism, eco-socialism, feminist socialism, humanist socialism (“socialism with a human face”), anti-racist socialism, market socialism, and so forth. In making those arguments we modify our defense of socialism. Our conception of the modifier of socialism (democracy, ecology, feminism, anti-racism, humanism, market) is that it is embedded—legally, culturally, economically, philosophically— into the socialism we advocate, and that, under ordinary circumstances, we would not advocate socialism that was not democratic, ecological, feminist, humanist, anti-racist, etc. Despite the fact that the claims of Nazi socialism to be socialist were not well founded, for example, we would not have advocated Nazi socialism to begin with. What bearing does this have on our conception of the division of labor? It suggests that old ways of conceiving of labor have to be abandoned. Capitalism’s exclusive reliance on the wage relation has to be abandoned, when, for example, the work of farmers, as we discussed above, comes to resemble the work of doctors. Agricultural workers, Rachel Carson argues, should be actively engaged in the use of biotic controls and entomology just as doctors dispense drugs in an intuitively guided but scientifically based manner. The advantages of this procedure in agriculture are of great moment. To take an old example: “Biological controls of scales and mealy bugs is estimated to save California several millions of dollars a year—indeed one of the leading entomologists of that state, Dr. Paul DeBach has estimated that for an investment of $4,000,000 in biological control work California has received a return of $100,000,000.” 30

But to gain these results throughout the agricultural sector, one would need an army of highly trained agricultural workers. These workers would be comparable to medical doctors in the extent and depth of their training as well as their reliance on well honed diagnostic abilities. The one thing that isn’t typically discussed in this context, however, is its implications for a transformation of the wage relationship. Such implications are deep. In the case of agricultural workers, they amount to a call

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for a red/green professional working class, aiming at increased social efficiency at the expense of so-called economic efficiency. Farm workers would become highly skilled and presumably highly paid workers. They would have claims on respect and status that do not exist today. More important, however, they would calculate the real costs of our agricultural practices and so would be aware of inefficiencies due to the social and human costs of private production. A related point can be made about the implications of a socialist approach to a democratic division of labor. For it is frequently noted that one of the most arduous tasks of employee owned and managed cooperative firms is the amount of time meetings about store policies and social relations require. Democracy is time consuming. The democratic socialist worker on the shop floor is a far more expensive worker than capitalist workers, who after all, are systematically deskilled. Similar arguments can be made about reorganizing the labor force around anti-racist, feminist, and humanist demands. One only need imagine the reorganization of the labor force in response to anti-authoritarian demands in clinics and hospitals, schools, and families. We actually made this point in discussing Robert Reich’s account of the decline in the financial fortunes of care laborers in today’s economy. In each case, capitalist criteria are used to enforce racist, sexist, and inhuman divisions of labor. Reich of course only discussed the economic side of what we called care labor, but it is easy to see that as the economic fortunes of care laborers decline, their regard for democratic and humane working conditions is likely to diminish. Trying to introduce purely economic efficiencies into care labor is likely to increase what we might call social and human inefficiencies in the form of resentment, overwork, and stress. The full meaning of the tensions between democracy and the economy has been explored by Michael Albert in his development of the idea of a participatory economy that he names parecon. 31 Suffice it to say for the purposes of this paper that these tensions require deep scrutiny of the division of labor and much thought about the place of deliberative discussion within the division of labor.

CONCLUSION I have argued that the idea of overcoming the division of labor is indispensible for understanding the meaning and nature of socialism. In the first place, the concept of overcoming the division of labor connects us to Marx’s emancipatory, egalitarian, and communal legacy. Secondly, it functions as a critical concept in calling attention to the connections between exploitation and domination. We can see, for example, the reasons for the invisibility of socialism for the French peasants after the Napoleonic wars and thus of the paralysis of their critical capacities. Thirdly, it is

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seminal in that it suggests applications to the contemporary situation that go far beyond the original situation that they were intended to analyze. Thus, the imperialism of the peasants expresses a contemporary reality, albeit one that has its roots in an older reality. And finally, it suggests concrete ways in which labor can and should be reorganized and where possible self-organized. It answers to our need to rebuild society in a noncapitalist way and gives meaning to Marx’s 10th thesis on Feuerbach, which refers to a human standpoint in contrast to the standpoint of civil society. We are encouraged then to conceive of society as disentangling itself from a division of labor and dispensing with hierarchy, for example, in the name of rounded development. It is noteworthy that contemporary struggles around social identity have their origin in the predominance of the division of labor. Racism, sexism, national chauvinism, for example, can be traced to locations in the division of labor. This is especially obvious in relation to the connection between social identity and the historical realities of slavery, gender, and colonialism. The failure to see the need to abolish the division of labor behind these struggles for identity is a huge oversight. As is notorious, the so-called old left did not grasp the connection between anti-capitalist politics and the social identities of race and gender. But these connections become available by consideration of the division of labor. In sum, the degree to which a society faces the challenges of post-capitalism together with the possibilities of socialism is the measure in which it is genuinely democratic or self-determined. Only by facing the challenge of simultaneously working for freedom, equality, community, security, ecology, and peace can we think realistically about overcoming the division of labor and thereby getting closer to socialism.

NOTES 1. McLellan, David. 2000. Karl Marx Selected Writings, 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 173. 2. Sayers, Sean. 2011. Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 3. McLellan, Karl Marx Selected Writings, 173. 4. McLellan, Karl Marx Selected Writings, 173. 5. McLellan, Karl Marx Selected Writings, 173. 6. McLellan, Karl Marx Selected Writings, 173. 7. McLellan, Karl Marx Selected Writings, 177. 8. McLellan, Karl Marx Selected Writings, 195. 9. McLellan, Karl Marx Selected Writings, 195. 10. McLellan, Karl Marx Selected Writings, 615. 11. McLellan, Karl Marx Selected Writings, 185. 12. Braverman, Harry. 1974. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: MR Press. 13. See, for example, Marglin, Stephen. 1975. What Do Bosses Do? Part I and II. Available at www.stephenmarglin.com/articles.shtml Accessed 9/7/11.

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14. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1998. Introduction. In Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. New York: Verso. 15. McLellan, Karl Marx Selected Writings, 348–349. 16. McLellan, Karl Marx Selected Writings, 347. 17. McLellan, Karl Marx Selected Writings, 347. 18. See Robin, Corey. 2011. The War on Tax. In London Review of Books, Vol. 33, Number 18, 9/22/11. 19. Denning, Michael. 1998. The Cultural Front. New York: Verso, 96. 20. Denning, The Cultural Front, 96. 21. London, Scott. 1993. Book Review of the Work of Nations by Robert B. Reich. Available at http://www.scottlondon.com/reviews/reich.html. Accessed at 9/7/11, 2. 22. London, Book Review of the Work of Nations by Robert B. Reich, 2. 23. Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. 1978. Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1. 24. Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor, 1–2. 25. Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor, 2. 26. Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor, 3. 27. Sohn-Rethnel, Intellectual and Manual Labor, 3. 28. Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor, 3. 29. Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor, 9. 30. Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 292. 31. Albert, Michael. 2000. Moving Forward: Program for a Participatory Economy. San Francisco: AK Press.

REFERENCES Albert, Michael. 2000. Moving Forward: Program for a Participatory. San Francisco: AK Press. Braverman, Harry. 1974. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: MR Press. Carson, Rachel. 1962. Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Denning, Michael. 1998. The Cultural Front. New York: Verso. Hobsbawm, Erik. 1998. Introduction. In Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, New York: MR Press. London, Scott. 1993.Book Review of the Work of Nations by Robert B. Reich Available at http://www.scottlondon.com/reviews/reich.html. Accessed 9/7/11. Marglin, Stephen. 1975. What Do Bosses Do? Part I and II. Available at www.stephenmarglin.com/articles.shtml Accessed 9/7/11. McLellan, David. 2000. Karl Marx Selected Writings, 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press. Robin, Corey. 2011. The War on Tax. London Review of Books, vol. 33, number 16, 9/25/ 2011. Sayers, Sean. 2011. Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sohn-Rethel, Alfred. Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.

SIX Socialism and Human Nature Karsten J. Struhl

All those who have written upon civil institutions demonstrate (and history is full of examples to support them) that whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasion for it. If their evil disposition remains concealed for a time, it must be attributed to some unknown reason; and we must assume that it lacked occasion to show itself; but time, which has been said to be the father of all truth, does not fail to bring it into the light. 1

It is not unusual to hear people say that socialism may be a fine idea in theory but that human nature is against it. The logic of this claim has many variations but goes something like this. Human nature is greedy, selfish, competitive, and aggressive. Human beings are innately motivated by power and desire for dominance. Therefore, any attempt to establish a society based on collective cooperation and social equality is doomed to failure. The attempt to organize a society without classes in which people freely share what is produced will, in reality, simply produce another form of hierarchical society in which a collective elite controls production and uses its power to maintain a materially and socially privileged position. Furthermore, the idea of equalizing wealth or creating a society in which each would receive according to his or her needs would, it is claimed, undermine our incentive to produce. Here is a typical example of this claim: Under socialism, incentives either play a minimal role or are ignored totally. A centrally planned economy without market prices or profits, where property is owned by the state, is a system without an effective incentive mechanism to direct economic activity. By failing to empha97

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What are we to makes of these claims? It is tempting simply to dismiss them as anti-socialist ideology and to counter them with the claim that there is no human nature and that what we identify with human nature is, in fact, socially and historically constructed. In this paper, I shall argue that such a point of view is mistaken and that the advocacy of socialism can survive a more robust view of human nature. I will begin with Chomsky’s response to an interviewer’s question in 1995. The interviewer, Kevin Doyle, asked Chomsky to explain why his political understanding was informed by a view of human nature, since the idea of human nature is generally taken to be something regressive and limiting. Here is Chomsky’s reply: The core part of anyone’s point of view is some concept of human nature, however remote it may be from awareness or lack articulation. At least, that is true of people who consider themselves moral agents, not monsters. Monsters aside, whether a person who advocates reform or revolution, or stability or return to earlier stages, or simply cultivating one’s own garden, takes a stand on the grounds that it is “good for people.” But that judgment is based on some conception of human nature, which a reasonable person will try to make as clear as possible, if only so that it can be evaluated. So in this respect I’m no different from anyone else. . . . There is nothing regressive about the fact that a human embryo is so constrained that it does not grow wings, or that its visual system cannot function in the manner of an insect, or that it lacks the homing instinct of pigeons. The same factors that constrain the organism’s development also enable it to attain a rich, complex, and highly articulated structure, similar in fundamental ways to conspecifics, with rich and remarkable capacities. An organism that lacked such determinative intrinsic structure, which of course radically limits the paths of development, would be some kind of amoeboid creature, to be pitied (even if it could survive somehow). The scope and limits of development are logically related. . . . Take language, one of the few distinctive human capacities about which much is known. We have very strong reasons to believe that all possible human languages are very similar; a Martian scientist observing humans might conclude that there is just a single language, with minor variants. The reason is that the particular aspect of human nature that underlies the growth of language allows very restricted options. Is this limiting? Of course. Is it liberating? Also of course. It is these very restrictions that make it possible for a rich and intricate system of expression of thought to develop in similar ways on the basis of very rudimentary, scattered, and varied experience. 3

Several things stand out in Chomsky’s answer. First, I take him to be saying that if we are to justify our political position, a view of human

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nature must be a component of that justification. Second, the idea that we have a specific human nature that distinguishes us from other creatures is in one sense an obvious truism, as the human embryo “does not grow wings.” However, in the context of this interview and Chomsky’s analysis of language, the real point of this claim is that the human embryo’s genetic structure has built into it certain kinds of cognitive and perhaps affective capacities which distinguish our species from other species, capacities which also make possible the diversity of individual characteristics and cultural variations. Third, the idea that the concept of human nature is necessarily regressive fails to understand the way in which the factors in our nature which constrain us are also the factors that allow us to develop a “rich, complex and highly articulated structure.” Here again, this is not only a point about our physical structure but is equally true of our cognitive and perhaps our affective capacities. Chomsky’s main example for this is our linguistic capacity. For Chomsky, all human beings have an innate universal grammar which constrains the forms that language can take but which also makes possible the development of the multitude of languages and the creative use of language. By extension, whatever cognitive and affective structures are innate within us both limit the forms of our possible intellectual and emotional development but also make possible the variety of cognitive and affective styles that is manifested in the diversity of cultures and of individual human beings. What does all this imply for the possibility and desirability of socialism? Are there cognitive and affective components of human nature which are incompatible with socialism or which, at least, limit the kinds of socialism that are possible? What kinds of assumptions about human nature would make socialism not only possible but also something intrinsically fulfilling? Does the possibility of socialism require that “human nature” must change?

AN ANCIENT CHINESE DEBATE: IS HUMAN NATURE GOOD OR EVIL? It may seem strange at this juncture to go back to ancient China, as certainly the socialist project was not then on the agenda. However, one of the problems of human nature that the socialist project must confront was fiercely debated by two Confucian philosophers—Mencius and Hsün Tzu—and their respective answers can, I believe, offer some interesting insights. Mencius, who claimed that human nature is fundamentally good compared it to water which has a natural tendency to flow downward. However, Mencius also makes clear that this tendency can be countered. “Now you can strike water and cause it to splash upward over your forehead, and by damming and leading it, you can force it up hill. Is this the nature of water? It is the forced circumstances which make

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it do so. Man can be made to do evil for his nature can be treated in the same way.” 4 Mencius reinforces this observation with other analogies that point to the way in which the social environment can fail to develop or may even destroy the good in human nature. In other words, what Mencius is really claiming is not that human nature is immediately good but that it has within it the seeds of what can develop into a good person under the right social conditions. 5 What are these seeds? Mencius names four but puts emphasis on what is sometimes translated “commiseration” but could also be translated “empathy,” “compassion,” or “benevolence.” 6 Each of these seeds, he claims, can, with proper social nurture lead to a fully developed good character trait. Hence, the initial seed of empathy may at first be simply empathy for the suffering of those with whom one is in immediate contact but, with proper nurturance and support, can become a more generalized benevolence for all of humanity. How are these seeds to be nurtured? For Mencius, as a Confucian, the answer is moral education in a wide sense, which would include not simply the teaching of specific moral rules but the inculcation of rules of etiquette and of propriety, social conventions, and a variety of social rituals. Mencius is also aware that the political and economic structure of the society plays a significant role in the development of these good seeds. 7 Mencius offers an interesting thought experiment to defend the claim that we have the initial seed of empathy which takes the form of our immediate reaction to human suffering: “Now when men suddenly see a child about to fall into a well, they all have a feeling of alarm and distress, not to gain friendship with the child’s parents, nor to seek the praise of their neighbors and friends, not because they dislike the reputation [of lack of humanity if they did not rescue the child].” 8 What the thought experiment asks us to do is to reflect on what our immediate reaction to such an occurrence would be and to recognize that empathetic distress is elicited by the situation without ulterior motive and independent of egoistic interests. As we shall see, there is some contemporary psychological evidence which supports the claim that such empathetic distress is innate. In contrast, Hsün Tzu claims that human nature is evil. Here is his description of the seeds that are innate within us and their consequences if left unchecked. “The nature of man is such that he is born with a fondness for profit. If he indulges this fondness, it will lead him into wrangling and strife, and all sense of courtesy and humility will disappear. He is born with feelings of envy and hate, and if he indulges these, they will lead him into violence and crime. . . . Man is born with desires of the eyes and ears. . . . If he indulges these, they will lead him into license and wantonness.” 9 He concludes from this that human beings are like warped pieces of wood which if allowed to indulge these feelings and desires will be in continuous and violent conflict with each other.

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For Hsün Tzu, the only way to make the human being good is to use a “straightening board” which can overcome our evil tendencies. The straightening board in human society is what he calls “ritual principles,” which encompass all of the forms moral education in the wide sense that Mencius would employ to cultivate the “good” seeds that are within us. This has implications not only for how a child should be raised but also for how we organize society. If Mencius is correct, then we may rely on our human nature to support cooperative activities and to develop character traits which, under the right social and economic conditions, need little state intervention to prevent anti-social behavior. If Hsün Tzu is correct, we can assume that even with the right training and no matter what the social and economic conditions our selfish, competitive, and violent nature will always be in danger of reasserting itself; and that we will always need a repressive state apparatus that can mete out harsh punishments. Before concluding this section, it is important to notice that there are significant areas of agreement between Mencius and Hsün Tzu’s positions and that we need to qualify the attempt to put them in stark opposition to each other. Joel Kupperman observes that Mencius “does not assert that initial human nature includes a tendency to be generally and consistently benevolent. He is well aware that we have various selfish motivations.” 10 Similarly, it would be a mistake to see Hsün Tzu as saying simply that human nature is evil, as he too is concerned with a transformation process. This also means that we have in some sense a potential to become at least somewhat good people, even though, for Hsün Tzu, there may be something unstable about what we achieve. There is, furthermore, another way in which the opposition between the two views of human nature need not be so sharp. It may be that human beings have innately both “good” and “bad” seeds. Specifically, human beings may have initial empathetic responses to suffering and also a degree of self-interest that could override these empathetic responses. The question then is how we can construct social conditions and habit formations which can organize these innate impulses in a constructive way.

HOBBES AND KROPOTKIN: WHAT CAN THEY TEACH US ABOUT HUMAN NATURE AND SOCIALISM? Hsün Tzu’s view of human nature is echoed by Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes asks us to imagine human beings with no political restrictions that would prevent them from acting on their desires. He then proceeds to demonstrate that such a “state of nature” would be intolerable and that, therefore, it is necessary for individuals to come together and establish a social contract which subjects them to the rule of a political authority who they

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will allow to have absolute authority. Why is the state of nature so intolerable? Hobbes’s assumption is that in such a situation whenever “any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless, they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their end . . . endeavor to destroy or subdue one another.” 11 The state of nature, then, is a continual state of war in which every human being is the potential enemy of every other human being. It is a horrible state of existence in which “there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain . . . and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” 12 Self-interest, competition, and greed are the fundamental characteristics of human nature, and the state of nature is a competitive struggle for survival. It should be clear that, even though this was not his explicit intent, Hobbes’s view of human nature also provides a legitimation of capitalism. In the 19th century, Charles Darwin’s phrase the “survival of the fittest” was given a Hobbesian twist in what came to be known as “Social Darwinism.” Herbert Spencer, the British philosopher and sociologist, who first used the phrase “survival of the fittest” after reading Darwin, attempted to apply evolutionary theory to society. 13 While Spencer himself was a utilitarian, he believed that social progress entailed that it was a mistake for the state to attempt to interfere in the economic life of the society. In this way, he thought, individuals would be able to experience the “natural” consequences of their actions. This view, in a more popularized form, equated the results of economic competition with “the survival of the fittest,” the “fittest” being identified with the economically prosperous. 14 The implication of this was that social welfare measures would tend to retard social progress and the rich deserved to be rich. Needless to say, this point of view provided a way of justifying the increasing concentration of wealth in late 19th-century America, and was subsequently embraced by the major capitalists of that era, such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller is quoted as having said, “The growth of a large business is merely the survival of the fittest. . . . It is merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.” 15 Thus, the idea of “survival of the fittest,” in its Social Darwinist form, became an ideological apology for the most rapacious kind of capitalism. The first major challenge to Social Darwinism in terms of evolutionary theory was developed by Peter Kropotkin in his classic work Mutual Aid, 16 which was based in part on his work as a field naturalist in Siberia from 1862 to 1866 and was published originally as a series of articles from 1890 to 1896. 17 What provided the initial impetus for these articles was an article published by Thomas H. Huxley entitled “the Struggle for Existence in Human Society” and which, since Huxley was a major interpreter and proponent of Darwin’s theory, provided a scientific respectability for the Social Darwinist interpretation of “survival of the fittest.” In this article, Huxley characterizes prehistoric men as “savages” in which “the

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weakest and the stupidest went to the wall, while the toughest and shrewdest, who were best fitted to cope . . . survived. Life was a continual free fight, and beyond the limited and temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of existence.” 18 What Kropotkin does in his critique of Huxley’s view of Darwin is to offer a different interpretation of the concept of “survival of the fittest” based both on his field work in Siberia and on his analysis of the implications of evolutionary theory. He offers the following thought experiment. What is more likely to enable a species to survive—mutual aid or ruthless competition among its members? A moment’s reflection should make it clear that the former has a great survival advantage of the latter, as animals who can support each other, work together, and protect each other are more likely to survive and reproduce then those who are constantly at each other’s throat. He then proceeds to provide a number of examples from the animal kingdom in which, among members of the species, cooperation and mutual aid are the norm. While admitting competition sometimes exists, he insists that it is limited to exceptional situation, as “natural selection, continually seeks out ways for avoiding competition as much as possible.” 19 What makes a species fit to survive then is precisely the opposite of Huxley’s view. Don’t compete!—competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it! That is the tendency of nature, not always realized in full, but always present. That is the watchword that comes to us from the bush, the forest, the river, the ocean. Therefore combine—practice mutual aid! That is the surest means for giving to each the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual, and moral. 20

Kropotkin’s reasoning, however, goes beyond a general analysis of “survival of the fittest” within the animal kingdom. He recognizes that it is important to make a separate argument concerning the human species. This argument takes three forms. The first is that since the general tendency of nature is toward mutual aid, it would be odd “if men were an exception to so general a rule: if a creature so defenseless as man was at his beginning should have found his protection and his way of progress, not in mutual support, like other animals, but in a reckless competition for personal advantages.” 21 The point I think is clear. We have no natural weapons like large fangs and claws to protect us, and human children need many years before they can survive without the care of parents or other adults. Therefore, it was especially important for the survival of our species in prehistoric times that we developed not only general social instincts but specific tendencies to mutually aid each other. The second part of his argument draws on the observations of anthropology which, on the basis of studying groupings of human beings that might resemble

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our prehistoric ancestors, directly challenges Huxley’s assumption that human existence, “beyond the limited and temporary relations of the family,” was a continuous Hobbesian war of each against all. “As far as we can go back in the paleo-ethnology of mankind, we find men living in societies—in tribes similar to those of the highest mammals. . . . Societies, bands, or tribes—not families—were thus the primitive form of organization of mankind and its earliest ancestors.” 22 Thus, instead of families or individuals constantly at war with each other, the beginnings of human organization required highly communal and cooperative forms; in effect, mutual aid. Finally, as Darwin himself had suggested, human beings are most closely related to “some comparatively weak but social species, like the chimpanzee.” 23 Kropotkin was an anarcho-communist, and his hope for a society based on mutual aid which had no need for a repressive state apparatus clearly motivated his thinking. However, he was also a serious scientist— a geographer and geologist as well as a naturalist. In the opening paragraph of his Mutual Aid, he makes clear that during his time in Siberia, he was anticipating finding a competitive struggle for existence among members of the same species and that he was simply unable to find it. The paleontologist and evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould has argued that in the light of contemporary evidence, Kropotkin got it essentially right. “I would hold that Kropotkin’s basic argument is correct. Struggle does occur in many modes, and some lead to cooperation among members of a species as the best pathway to advantage for individuals. If Kropotkin overemphasized mutual aid, most Darwinians in Western Europe had exaggerated competition just as strongly.” 24 Still, are Hsün Tzu and Hobbes completely wrong? Although Kropotkin suggests that competition is more exceptional than the norm, he does recognize that there is some degree of competition in the struggle to survive; and perhaps, as Steven Jay Gould suggests, there is more than he thought. Furthermore, as I mentioned in my discussion of Hobbes, the very idea of mutual aid suggests that self-interest may be at work, since it is to my long-term self-interest to cooperate with others. Finally, that tribal groups cooperated among themselves for their mutual advantage does not preclude fierce, perhaps even lethal, competition between tribal groups. In fact, one of the survival advantages of cooperation and mutual aid might be precisely that it enabled one tribe to defeat another in warfare. Perhaps, just as I suggested in the previous section that human nature might contain both a selfish and empathetic component, so it may also be the case that human nature contains a competitive as well as a cooperative component. Furthermore, we need at least to consider the possibility that there may be something even more dangerous lurking in the background—what Freud called the aggressive drive.

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AGGRESSION AND HUMAN NATURE In 1954, William Golding’s first novel, Lord of the Flies, appeared and became an overnight literary success. The novel tells the story of a group of British school boys who are abandoned on an uninhabited island during what seems to be a third world war. The boys attempt to establish among themselves certain rules of social organization, but, as the novel progresses, the social order is undermined by what the novel would have us believe are more primitive aggressive instincts. When the boys are finally rescued, they have, with one exception degenerated into savagery, and the adults who rescue them appear in war ships. The message is clear enough. The same instinct that drove the boys on the island to become savage is the underlying drive that leads humans to war. Golding himself has stated that his purpose in writing the novel was “to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature.” 25 It is important to note that Golding’s novel does not just depict the Hobbesian state of nature, wherein human beings are in conflict because they are competing for the same things. The boys in fact have degenerated to the level where they enjoy tormenting and killing for its own sake, even if it undermines the initial attempts at social order from which they all could benefit. Something else is at work here. In Golding’s novel, the state of nature is not simply a state in which our competitive instincts reign. It is a state in which we each have an instinct to aggress against others and to harm them. This assumption about human nature was theorized by Sigmund Freud in one of his later works, Civilization and its Discontents. Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. 26

Freud refers to this drive as a “primary mutual hostility,” 27 although he later suggests that it is itself derivative of something more basic—the death instinct. 28 The important point about his claim is that the aggressive drive is something which no rearrangement of social institutions can eliminate, since it resides in the human organism independently of those conditions (although how it manifests itself will depend in part on those conditions). Freud, in fact, uses this analysis to criticize communism explicitly, or at least what he takes to be one of its underlying assumptions.

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Chapter 6 The communists believe that they have found the path to the deliverance from all our evils. According to them, man is wholly good and is well-disposed to his neighbor; but the institution of private property has corrupted his nature. . . . If private property were abolished, all wealth held in common, and everyone allowed to share in the enjoyment of it, ill will and hostility would disappear among men. Since everyone’s needs would be satisfied, no one would have any reason to regard another as his enemy. . . . I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property, we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments. . . . but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness was not created by property. 29

Freud then goes on to insist that no matter what we do to change society, human aggression would continue to manifest itself in some form, as it would remain a fundamental feature of human nature. What is also interesting about Freud’s analysis is that he does not preclude the possibility of people cooperating with one another, so long as they find others to aggress against. “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.” 30 Thus, if this last part of Freud’s hypothesis were true, it would have specific implications for Kropotkin’s analysis. While Kropotkin’s analysis demonstrates the survival advantage of forming communal tribal units whose members mutually aid and cooperate with one another, Freud’s hypothesis would add the idea that the instinct for mutual aid may have developed in conjunction with an instinct for each tribal unit to aggress against other tribal units. Freud’s theory of innate aggression implies a biological basis for aggression, for where else can a basic instinct or drive be rooted if not in human biology. In more recent times, there has been an attempt to explicitly ground the aggressive drive in biology through the field of what has come to be called “ethology,” the scientific study of animal behavior in its natural habitat. 31 One of the founders of this field, Konrad Lorenz, attempted to popularize his work in a book entitled On Aggression. Like Freud, Lorenz claims that human beings have an innate aggressive drive, “a fighting instinct . . . which is directed against members of the same species,” 32 but, in contrast to Freud, Lorenz claims that this drive evolved in various species because it serves useful survival functions. One of the basic functions, he claims, is to disperse animals over a given territory, thus preventing too much concentration and overcrowding within a certain area relative to food sources. Other survival functions include natural selection of the strongest for reproduction, defense of the young, and

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the establishment of an organized hierarchy necessary to coordinate the interactions of the group. This leads Lorenz to challenge Freud’s analysis of the derivation of the aggressive drive directly. “We find that aggression, far from being the diabolical destructive principle that classical psychoanalysis makes it out to be, is really an essential part of the lifepreserving organization of instincts.” 33 I have presented the contrast between Freud and Lorenz’s analyses of the aggressive drive in part because it reveals a confusion concerning how that drive is to be understood. We need, at least, to distinguish between two kinds of claims about the function of aggression. The first understands the object of aggression to be the destruction of the other— e.g., Freud. We might label this “primary” aggression. The second derives its energy from other drives or instincts—e.g., for Lorenz, from the instinct for territory or the need to dominate. We might label this “derived” or “secondary” aggression. The basic question is whether there is any good reason to think that either of these forms of aggression are rooted in human nature. Let’s first consider the idea of primary aggression, whose primary purpose is to injure or kill the other for its own sake. What evidence is there for an instinct of this kind? One of Freud’s basic reasons for claiming that there is an aggressive drive at work was that people often act aggressively toward each other. But this does not prove that we are witnessing an instinct at work. The other main reason for Freud’s claim is that it fits his psychoanalytic architecture. Freud admits that he arrived at the concept from speculation which at first he put forth very tentatively but then insists that “in the course of time they have gained such a hold on me that I can no longer think in any other way. To my mind they are far more serviceable from a theoretical standpoint than any other possible ones. . . . I can no longer understand how we could have overlooked the ubiquity of non-erotic aggressivity.” 34 In other words, since certain forms of aggression cannot be easily explained as a result of the sexual drive, it must be explained as the manifestation of an opposing instinct. But why could aggression not be explained as a response to the frustration of other desires and drives? As Clara Thompson, who was a neo-Freudian psychoanalyst and historian of the evolution of psychoanalytic theory, wrote: I do not, of course, deny the existence of basic biological drives. My question is rather whether they constitute problems by the very intensity of their energy. . . . When these drives are obstructed by neurotic parents or as a result of a destructive cultural pattern, then the individual develops resentment and hostility either consciously or unconsciously or both. In short, far from being a product of the death instinct it [aggression] is an expression of the organism’s will to live. 35

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However, even if there is no primary aggressive instinct, could there not be a secondary aggressive instinct? Might there not be a territorial instinct or an instinct to dominate which manifests itself aggressively? Lorenz tells various stories about aggression and its life preserving functions in fish, birds, and mammals, and then proceeds to argue that Homo sapiens must retain this animal inheritance. We have here an argument from analogy. If animals and humans both exhibit aggressive territorial behavior and if this is instinctive in other animals, then by analogy it follows that human beings also have an innate territorial instinct. The first thing we should recognize about arguments from analogy is that they can offer only indirect proof. Two things may be similar and yet have very different causes. In fact, evolution is full of examples in which similar features in different species do not have a common evolutionary ancestry, e.g., the wings of birds and the wings of insects. Second, the fact that human behavior is the result of cultural as well as biological evolution makes a crucial difference. Animals are not defending private property or making war. They have no such concepts. Lorenz and those who follow him often confuse territory with the idea of “home range.” The latter is an area within which the animal moves and in which various groups of animals often coexist. A territory, in contrast, is a specifically defended area. Furthermore, studies of primates have shown that while some groups do live in relatively well-defined range areas, “there is no evidence that they are defending territory per se; they are simply defending the spot they occupy at the moment. . . . The trend which appears in the primate series is that the importance of territorial instinct declines as we move toward man.” 36 It is worth noting that Lorenz draws most of his examples from fish and birds, where we can expect a territorial instinct to be strongest, rather than primates and other mammals. Much of the same point can be made about the claim that aggression is the result of an instinct for dominance. A more sophisticated version of this claim suggests that various animals exhibit both dominance and submissive behavior, and that both have developed in order to establish a “pecking order,” which is to say a stable social hierarchy. 37 Here, again, we have an argument from analogy. If animals have instincts to compete for dominant positions within the hierarchy and also to exhibit submissive behavior to those who are dominant, then if human beings manifest the same behavior, this must also be as the result of an evolutionary program. The first question, of course, is how similar the social hierarchy of human beings is to the pecking order of, say, chickens or baboons. Chickens will establish the pecking order by directly pecking each other until the loser gives up. In baboons, and other non-human primates, the conflict is essentially ritualized and actual combat rarely takes place. In contrast, what is most important about social stratification in modern human society is the lack of face-to-face confrontation. The CEOs of large corporations receive deference because of the power of their office, not

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because they are capable of defeating their subordinates in hand-to-hand combat. Furthermore, just as territorial behavior that may be considered instinctual declines as we move from birds and fish to mammals and then to primates, so too do dominance systems become much less clearly defined. 38 Before concluding this section, it is important to mention that the anthropological evidence is not decisive on the question of aggression and violence. While anthropologist like Ashley Montagu claim that among hunter-gatherer societies, fighting to defend or invade territory is quite rare, 39 a number of other studies have challenged this image of the peaceful hunter-gather. Steven Pinker summarizes their findings in the following manner. “Modern foragers, who offer a glimpse of life in prehistoric societies, were once thought to engage only in ceremonial battles that were called to a halt as soon as the first man fell. Now they are known to kill one another at rates that dwarf the casualties from our world wars.” 40 It is not clear what we should make of these conflicting claims, especially since any attempt to study these societies already changes their situation and often introduces them to the vices of modern civilization. On the other hand, we already know that violence and warfare do occur under a variety of historical conditions. My conclusion, then, is that the case for an innate aggressive drive is weak but that this does not rule out the possibility that there are components of human nature which may predispose us to certain forms of aggression, including overt violence.

BIOLOGICAL DETERMINISM AND SOCIETY The underlying assumption behind the idea of an aggressive drive, either in its primary form or as derived from territorial instinct or an instinct for dominance is that human behavior is biologically determined. The assumption works in the following way. The first step is the claim that certain psychological dispositions largely determine individual and social behavior. The question then is what determines these psychological dispositions and abilities, and it is here that biological determinism supplies what is often taken to be a scientifically respectable answer, which brings us to the second step: that these psychological dispositions and abilities are determined by a genetic program which was selected through the course of our hominid evolution. Thus, the theory moves in a linear causal fashion from biology to psychology to social behavior. The paradigm is immediately attractive for three reasons. First, it provides a simple theory of social behavior. Secondly, it offers to fulfill the reductivist impulse toward the unity of the sciences, grounding the social sciences in the laws of biology. Finally, however, its main appeal probably lies in its ideological function—in the way in which it mystifies social reality, de-

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fends the capitalist status quo, and thereby serves to promote the interests of the capitalist ruling class. 41 In the 1970s and 1980s, a new version of biological determinism emerged which was based on parallels between the social behavior of various animal species and human social behavior and which became known as sociobiology, a term popularized by the entomologist E. O. Wilson, first in his elaborate study of social behavior in various animal species entitled Sociobiology: The New Synthesis and shortly afterwards in his On Human Nature. 42 Wilson defines “sociobiology” as “the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior, in all kinds of organisms, including man.” 43 Wilson claims that a number of features of contemporary Western society are genetically programmed as a result of natural selection, among them the nuclear family, the sexual division of labor, territoriality, communal aggression, nationalism, homosexuality, and altruism (which he sees as often mixed with selfishness). Wilson does not deny that many aspects of society are a result of cultural development and that culture can change but insists that “genetic determination narrows the avenue along which further cultural evolution will occur” 44 and that “genes hold culture on a leash.” 45 He even concedes that these genetically based forms of psychological and social behavior could be counteracted through extreme social measures but argues that we would pay a high price for doing so. I am not concerned to challenge Wilson’s specific claims here but rather wish to consider the way that this form of biological determinism misrepresents the nature of human psychological and social reality. Psychological dispositions and abilities develop in a social context and are unintelligible outside of that context. We never simply express emotions and desires; we express them within a system of cultural meanings, within a system of social roles and symbols. Similarly, our abilities are developed as we learn to confront and solve problems within specific social contexts. Between the genotype and the phenotype is the whole of human culture. It is not surprising that instinctive behavior declines as we ascend the evolutionary ladder toward human beings. Specific instincts “would be adaptively useless to a creature that responds to the challenge of the environment by the use of intelligence and learning. . . . Instincts would simply have got in the way of responses that were called for—not reactions but responses. A reaction is automatic, a response is a weighed, thought out solution to a problem.” 46 This is not to say that human learning is independent of our genetic endowment, for surely it is dependent on our brain. But what is important about our brain is precisely its capacity for non-programmed learning. As Steven Jay Gould puts it, “increased brain size in human evolution may have . . . added enough neural connections to convert an inflexible and rigidly programmed device into a labile organ, endowed with sufficient logic and memory, to substitute non-programmed learning for direct specification as the

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ground of social behavior. Flexibility may be the most important determinant of human consciousness.” 47 Finally, biological determinism systematically misrepresents social reality, because it misrepresents the relation of individual psychological traits to human social institutions. Even if our genes did uniquely determine our psychological dispositions, these dispositions could not determine our social institutions. “Any given psychological disposition is able to take on an indefinite set of institutional realizations. We war on the playing fields of Ann Arbor, express sexuality by painting a picture, even indulge our aggressions and commit mayhem by writing books. Conversely, it is impossible to say in advance what needs may be realized by any given activity.” 48 In other words, sociology cannot be reduced to psychology. Social institution cannot be reduced to the specific motives of the individuals within them. Rather these motives take their meaning in large part from the imperatives of these institutions. What all biological determinist theories have in common is the assumption that biology is social destiny. On that assumption, the capitalist organization of society with its competitiveness, its selfishness, its greed, its vast inequality of wealth, its corporate hierarchy, its racism, its imperial wars, and its sexual division of labor is a natural order that is both necessary and desirable. Certain reforms might still be possible within the capitalism system but the attempt to create an egalitarian socialist society is a utopian illusion. Any attempt to create such a society would reproduce our fundamental competiveness, selfishness, greed, etc. in a more perverse form. However, if there is one thing that is clear from the study of human history, it is that social institutions do change historically and that human social behavior has changed though various historical epochs. Capitalism is a very recent form of social organization in the history of the human species. Furthermore, “what has usually been referred to as ‘human nature’ has changed a great deal during the long history of humankind. As social systems changed, many habits and behavior traits also changed as people adapted to new social structures.” 49 Given this observation, it may seem that the concept of human nature is, in fact, meaningless. “It is, of course, doubtful whether the concept of ‘human nature’ means anything at all. . . . Not only has so-called human nature changed, but the ideology surrounding components of human nature has also changed dramatically.” 50 Since “human nature” is generally understood to designate certain innate characteristics of human beings, what does it mean to say that human nature has changed and what would this idea imply for human biology? We need now to interrogate the historical concept of human nature.

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BIOLOGY AND THE HISTORICAL CONCEPT OF HUMAN NATURE As biological determinism views human nature as fixed and immutable, the historical concept begins with the assumption that human nature changes throughout the course of history. Thus, the force of the historical concept of human nature is to identify human nature not with biology but with history. This does not mean that there is no role for the biological in thinking about human nature, but, in contrast to biological determinism, the historical concept of human nature would emphasize biological potentiality and the primacy of cultural evolution over biological evolution. Consider the following statement by Theodosius Dobzhansky, who was one of the world’s foremost geneticists and evolutionary theorists: The great environmental plasticity of psychic traits in man is no biological accident. It is an important, even crucial evolutionary adaptation, which distinguishes man from other creatures. . . . Mankind’s singular, and singularly powerful instrument is culture. Culture is not inherited through our genes; it is acquired by learning from other human beings. . . . In a sense human genes have surrendered their primacy in human evolution to an entirely new, non-biological or superorganic agent, culture. However, it should not be forgotten that . . . human culture is not possible without human genes. 51

Biological determinism is not so much completely false as one-sided. There are certain kinds of structures in the brain, such as sensory cells, which are determined by specific genes. However, “most brain structures develop as the result of brain cell proliferation followed by a process of ‘pruning.’ While the initial process of proliferation is under genetic control, the process of brain-cell pruning depends on interaction between cells and the environment. Thus the cortical structures we end up with are not genetically specified but mainly shaped by our environment.” 52 The result of this process is that genes for the most part do not uniquely determine certain brain structures and the resulting cognitive abilities, psychological dispositions and forms of behaviors that may be based on them. On this analysis, what genes determine are certain potentialities for various forms of cognitive processing, psychological dispositions, and behaviors. The various positive and negative features of human nature are encoded not as biologically determined necessities but as biological potentialities. To quote Stephen Jay Gould again, “Violence, sexism, and general nastiness are biological since they represent one subset of a possible range of behaviors. But peacefulness, equality, and kindness are just as biological—and we may see their influence increase if we can create social structures that permit them to flourish.” 53 Thus, the historical concept of human nature assumes that human biology has within it a range of potentials which are actualized differently in different historical epochs. The claim is that what biology determines is certain potential-

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ities, but it is only through our concrete social and historical activities that we develop certain specific cultural and psychological characteristics. Since what psychological and social characteristics we do in fact develop will depend upon our social institutions and since those institutions change over historical time, we can expect also that those character traits will change over historical time. Nevertheless, do the concepts biological determinism and biological potentiality exhaust the ways of thinking about the relation of genes to our psychological dispositions and forms of social behavior? It seems to me that there is another possibility, one which is suggested by the debate between Mencius and Hsün Tzu and also by Kropotkin. Perhaps while genes cannot uniquely determine our psychological dispositions and forms of social behavior, they do more than simply provide bare possibilities which are then inscribed by historical and social relations. It may be possible that genes provide the “seeds” for certain impulses and tendencies which exist in all human societies? What it would mean is that in any set of social relations, there is a certain probability of these impulses and tendencies being realized in some socially organized form. Within a network of certain social relations, the probability of the realization may be low relative to another set of social conditions. But the probability will nonetheless be significantly more than zero. Is there any evidence that such impulses and tendencies exist? I think there is, although the evidence is certainly, at this historical moment, far from definitive. The evidence comes from such fields as cognitive science, which sees the mind as an informational, computational form of organization grounded in our neural-physical being and which sees finite combinatorial programs generating an infinite range of human behavior; from neuroscience which understands emotions and thoughts rooted in physical signals within the neural activity of the brain; from behavioral genetics, which is concerned with the probabilistic effects of genes within certain environments resulting in certain kinds of thinking, learning, feeling, and behavior; and from evolutionary psychology, whose paradigm, in the words of David Buller, one of the major proponents of the field, is the assumption “that, just as evolution by natural selection has created morphological adaptations that are universal among humans, so it has created universal psychological adaptations,” 54 which would entail that there are certain psychological universals beneath the psychological variations that are manifested in specific societies and cultures. 55 The development and evidence from these fields suggest that there are indeed innate psychological predispositions which are not in opposition to culture but which, in fact, provide the foundation that makes human culture possible. Steven Pinker emphasizes this point: “Culture relies on a neural circuitry that accomplishes the feat we call learning. These circuits . . . work in surprisingly subtle ways to make the transmission of culture possible. That is why a focus on innate faculties of mind is not an alterna-

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tive to focus on learning, culture, and socialization, but rather an attempt to explain how they work.” 56 The resistance to these fields from socialists is often motivated by a tendency to conflate these fields as a whole with the kinds of claims that Wilson and other sociobiologists make. However, there is nothing in these fields as such which require a commitment to biological determinism. 57 In contrast to biological determinism, the results of the studies generated by these fields would point to a genetic basis for certain cognitive and affective dispositions which in certain cultural environments have a certain probability of appearing. For example, as Noam Chomsky has shown, the young infant will develop some language in a linguistic environment, and the development of language in the infant cannot be explained as a result of behavioral reinforcement; and while the language that develops will be in accord with the language or languages to which the child is exposed, it will conform to an underlying generative “universal grammar” that both constrain the forms of linguistic expression and make linguistic creativity possible. 58 To take another example, there is some interesting evidence which suggests that human beings have an innate sense of empathy. The developmental psychologist Martin L. Hoffman has demonstrated that even very young children manifest empathetic distress when confronted with the suffering of others and that children at a later stage empathize with others even when they have no direct experience of them, even with entire groups of people who are suffering. 59 He also argues that there are innate altruistic dispositions, mediated through empathy, which cannot be reduced to egoistic motivation and which are the result of what was necessary for our species to survive through our evolutionary history. “It follows that if survival requires altruism as well as egoism . . . then the physical structures and genetic formations for altruism must have been selected and eventually become part of the evolving human organism.” 60 These studies provide some empirical backing for Mencius’s claim that we have an innate tendency to respond with empathetic distress to the suffering of others. We have also previously discussed Kropotkin’s argument for the claim that our evolutionary history has built into our nature a tendency to cooperate and practice mutual aid. There is now some contemporary support for his argument. Martin Nowak, who is director of the program for evolutionary dynamics at Harvard, has applied mathematical analysis to studies which observe the strategies and reactions of subjects who play various versions of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. On the basis of this analysis, he argues not only that natural selection favors cooperation but that cooperation is one of the three basic forces of evolution, the other two being mutation and natural selection. “Mathematical analysis shows that winning strategies tend to be generous hopeful and forgiving. Generous here means not seeking to get more than one’s opponent; hopeful means cooperating in the first move or in the absence of information;

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forgiving means attempting to reestablish cooperation after a temporary defection.” 61 There are also a number of studies which suggest that human beings may have an innate moral sense—a sense of fairness, a gut level feeling that certain actions are wrong, etc. Steven Pinker argues that what these studies suggest is that just as for Chomsky there is an innate universal grammar, it may also be that “by analogy, we are born with a universal moral grammar.” 62 It is important here to recognize that this is not at odds with the idea that different cultures and individuals within a given culture can have very different ways of understanding of what is moral, just as the idea of a universal grammar is not incompatible with the existence of many different languages and an incredible variety of possible linguistic expressions within these languages. 63 From the considerations above, should we then conclude that if there are these innate genetic tendencies which can generate certain psychological dispositions, a society based on them is more properly in accord with human nature than one which is not, that a society which affirms empathy, altruism, cooperation, and fairness is more in accord with human nature than one based on individual self-interest, competitions, and the idea of winner take all? I do not think we can draw this conclusion on this basis alone, because it is possible that these innate tendencies and psychological dispositions may coexist with opposite tendencies and dispositions. What Steven Jay Gould takes to be opposing biological possibilities may be a range of genetic tendencies for opposing psychological dispositions. We may have any number of innate tendencies and countertendencies which can, under certain circumstances, generate any number of dispositions and counter-dispositions—tendencies to violence, hate, and envy and tendencies toward peace, love, and compassion; dispositions for dominance and dispositions for fair play and equality, dispositions to be nasty and dispositions to be kind; and so on. Now, there may be good reasons to suggest that the promotion of certain tendencies are better than the promotion of other tendencies, but this will require a normative ideal of human flourishing, which we shall consider in the next section. The result of all this does not undermine the idea of a historical human nature. However, it does change our understanding of how our historical nature develops. What this perspective entails is that our historically developed nature cannot be understood simply as the result of historical forces. To put this another way, the historical concept of human nature must leave room for the interpenetration of the historical and the trans-historical; and any attempt to promote a socialist society must develop an ideal of human flourishing.

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MARX AND HUMAN NATURE: THE HISTORICAL, THE TRANSHISTORICAL, AND HUMAN FLOURISHING Neither Marx nor Engels ever wrote a treatise on human nature, although Engels comes closest to it in a short essay which considers how the human species might have evolved from their primate ancestry. 64 Nonetheless, Marx and Engels have an elaborate view of human nature embedded in their discussion of historical materialism and in their vision of communism. 65 While their understanding of human nature can be classified as an important contribution to the historical concept of human nature, I would argue this historical concept is grounded in a robust trans-historical concept of human nature and that historical materialism, broadly conceived, offers perhaps the best way of conceptualizing the way in which the historical manifests the trans-historical. I would also argue that Marx in particular has a conception of human flourishing. There is a paradox at the core of the historical concept of human nature. Since human nature is generally understood to be something innate within us and, therefore, immutable, how can human nature be said to change? Put another way, if human nature is whatever characteristics are trans-historical, how can human nature also be historical. In other words, what is it, in fact, that changes which simultaneously can be called “human nature”? It seems to me that the Marxist concept of human nature resolves the paradox nicely. I will explain this shortly. What historical materialism adds to the general historical concept of human nature is that while human nature changes as human culture changes, human culture changes as a result of changes in social and political conditions and that these changes are, in turn, at least conditioned by changes in the mode of production. Thus, human beings collectively within a given society continuously change their nature but they do so, not consciously, but over historical time as they develop the material forces of production, engage in class struggle, and replace the old mode of production with a new one. 66 It is with this understanding that Marx writes, “All history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature.” 67 Marx’s concept of human nature is sometimes taken to be a purely historical one, and there are several passages that suggest this, among them the one quoted at the end of the previous paragraph. Probably the passage that is most cited in defense of this position is Marx’s sixth thesis on Feurbach: “Feurbach resolves the religions essence into the human essence. But the essence of man is not an abstraction inhering in each single individual. In its actuality, it is the ensemble of social relations.” 68 István Mészáros draws from this the conclusion that “Marx categorically rejected the idea of a ‘human essence.’” 69 He also insists that, for Marx, “nothing . . . is ‘implanted in human nature.’ Human nature is not some-

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thing fixed by nature.” 70 Another commonly cited passage which would also suggest that Marx had a purely historical concept is from The German Ideology: The “mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of physical existence. Rather it is a definite form of activity of those individuals . . . a definite mode of life. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with what they produce and with how they produce.” 71 The implication for understanding human nature seems to be that human characteristics, beyond the physical, are determined ultimately by the way in which work is organized; and, we might add, by the class relations and various other social, political, and ideological institutions that develop through that organization of work. Human nature changes, then, as the organization of work and its attendant social and political institutions change. Norman Geras, in his Marx and Human Nature, has offered a different reading of these and other such passages. For example, he suggests that a reasonable alternative reading of the second sentence of Marx’s sixth thesis on Feurbach—that “the essence of man is no abstraction inhering in each single individual”—is that the human essence is not merely an abstraction inhering in the individual. He offers as an analogy with language to make the point. “I could say, ‘Language is no individual possession; it is a social and collective phenomenon’; without supposing, absurdly, that it is not individuals who know and speak, to that extent ‘possess,’ a language.” 72 Of the third sentence of the sixth thesis, Geras makes a similar point—that there is no reason to interpret it as saying any more than the human essence is not merely the ensemble of social relations or that it is conditioned by social relations or that it manifests itself through social relations. Here again, he uses language as an example, noting that while “it is a capacity whose very mode of expression is a social one,” it would be wrong to conclude that “with regard to language, nothing is inherent in the individual, in the type of brain, for example, that is his biological endowment.” 73 Geras offers similar observations about the passage cited above from The German Ideology. Once again, the passage can be easily interpreted as meaning that human nature is manifested through a given mode of production and as implying that it would manifest itself differently in another in another mode of production. While Geras does not explicitly discuss the passage quoted above from the Poverty of Philosophy—that “all history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature”—I would suggest that rather than point to a purely historical concept of human nature, it alludes to something trans-historical. If history is continuously transforming human nature, then there must be something that is being transformed. There are a number of other passages in Marx’s writing which suggests this interpretation. For example, in Capital, volume 1, Marx, criticizes Jeremy Bentham in a footnote: “To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dognature. This nature itself is not deduced from the principle of utility.

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Applying this to man, he that would criticize all human acts, movements, relations, etc. by the principle of utility must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch.” 74 The question, then, is: how are we to understand what, for Marx, is “human nature in general”? For Marx, the distinguishing feature of the human species is our unique form of production. In fact, Marx and Engels declare that human beings “distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence.” 75 In effect, the first primates who were able to produce what they needed for their subsistence began human history. It was “the first historical act.” 76 The process by which humans beings did this, what distinguished them from other animals, required the development of tools by which they transformed nature and created specific objects which satisfied their needs. But through this process something remarkable happens. They not only satisfy their initial biological needs but create new needs. “The second point is that the satisfaction of the first need . . . leads to new needs; and this production of new needs is the first historical act.” 77 But how can the creation of new needs also be “the first historical act”? This makes sense only on the assumption that they are both aspects of the same process. Productive activity produces not only a product which can satisfy the original need but simultaneously new needs within the producers. One of the original subsistence needs is warmth and shelter. To satisfy this need, we create housing, fire, and weave blankets and clothes. To do this, however, we need various tools and raw materials, which means that even before the production begins we need more than what we originally needed. In addition, the production of these objects creates still other needs—perhaps aesthetic needs, e.g., clothes that not only keep us warm but which are appealing to our senses or even beautiful. And these needs require the creation of still new products which produce within us still new needs, and so on. Thus, the process by which we transform the material world is simultaneously a process by which we continually create within ourselves new needs and, thus, can be said to change our nature. Furthermore, as we change the material world, we also develop, in addition to these new needs, new capacities, and new ways of relating to nature and to each other. In all, “by thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature.” 78 There are several other things that make human production unique. While certain species of animals also produce (beavers, bees, etc.), they, for the most part, do so instinctively in a set pattern, whereas human production is flexible and can make specific judgments about how to treat the materials that are to be transformed. “The animal builds only according to the standard and need of the species to which it belongs, while man knows how to produce according to the standard of any species.” 79 Furthermore, human production involves imagination, planning

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and conscious goal directed activity, which are capacities which Marx takes as unique to the human species. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. . . . He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but also realizes a purpose of his own . . . 80

There is another important thing to say about human production, which is that it is fundamentally social. The producer is not first an individual producer who only secondarily associates with others. Production itself is an inherently social process. “A certain mode of production . . . is always combined with a mode of cooperation.” 81 This can be understood in several ways. First, the organization of production is a historical process involving the learning and tools that have been transmitted from one generation to another. Second, every previous historical form of production has involved some division of labor—division between mental and material labor, a gender division of labor, class divisions, and a division which assigns different individuals to different tasks in the specific production process and in society as a whole. Third, human consciousness which is intrinsic to production is itself social, as human consciousness is only possible through language, and language is inherently social. “Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all.” 82 Finally, human production is fundamentally social, because human beings are fundamentally social animals. As Sean Sayers puts it, “We are inherently and essentially social beings. We develop our natures . . . only by participating in society. . . . Sociality is inscribed in our very biology.” 83 What this means is not simply that we like to hang out with one another but that our very sense of individuality and the kind of individuality that we have depends on the form of society in which we live. “The human being,” Marx writes in the Grundrisse, “is in the most literal sense a zoon politikon [political animal], not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can only individuate itself in the midst of society.” 84 Thus, the forms of sociality and the forms of individuality are intimately connected. 85 It follows from this that we not only produce our material reality but also our forms of sociality of and individuality, which are conditioned by the mode of production and by our social location within it. As the mode of production and our forms of sociality and individuality change, it follows that human nature will also change. Finally, these forms of sociality and individuality involve much more than material production and a division of labor. We produce our social, political, and ideological institutions. We produce art, philosophy, morality, and religion. These are all social products, and they are all part of the process by which the form of sociality and of individu-

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ality specific to a given society develops. They require a set of social roles within which are generated certain role specific social needs. These social roles and needs also generate a certain kind of identity as well as certain social-psychological dispositions and attitudes. In effect, each form of sociality produces a specific form of individuality, and the forms of sociality and individuality together function to reproduce the mode of production and its attendant social and political institutions. The struggle to transform these institutions is a struggle to create institutions within which there are new social roles, new social needs, with new psychological dispositions and attitudes, in all, new forms of sociality and individuality. As these change, so does human nature. We are now in a position to resolve the paradox mentioned above. If human nature is something trans-historical, how can it also change? The answer is that the fundamental characteristic of human nature as socially productive activity is also the activity by which we change our nature. Still, what is this nature that is changed if our fundamental nature is trans-historical? The answer here is that the two concepts—the transhistorical and the historical—operate at different levels. The trans-historical concept refers to the general form which human social activity takes— social production in the widest sense of the term. The historical concept refers to the specific forms of human sociality and individuality organized around the mode of production within a given historical epoch. Thus, the fundamental general and trans-historical feature of human nature, social production, makes it possible to transform our human nature understood as historically specific forms of human sociality and individuality. Furthermore, although we can speak about certain general forms of sociality and individuality manifested in a particular historical time period, each class and indeed social group has, to a large extent, its own forms of sociality and individuality, which is bound up with the more general forms of sociality and individuality which most individuals in a given society share. 86 At this point in our discussion, we need to be clear about what explanatory work we want the general trans-historical concept of human nature to do. Sean Sayers, whom we have quoted above and who emphasizes our inherently social nature, nonetheless argues that the general concept of human nature can “constitute only the abstract philosophical starting point for Marx’s social theory” since “in concrete conditions there is no human nature in general. The bare abstract concept of human nature in general is not a sufficient basis on which to understand concrete social conditions in their specificity.” 87 His support for this claim rests on his observation that “our biology and our sociality interpenetrate, and it is impossible to separate them out and oppose them to each other. . . . For example, hunger always takes a social form. It is not possible to isolate a universal and general need for food.” 88 Sayers accuses Geras of a form of essentialism which tries to separate human nature in general from its

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specific historical manifestations. I do not think his characterization of Geras is correct, as Geras is well aware that our trans-historical human nature can only manifest itself in specific historical forms. What Geras does claim is that it is possible by abstraction to separate theoretically our general trans-historical nature from its specific historical manifestations. If this is a form of essentialism, I see no reason to reject it. Certainly, in one sense, Sayers is correct. It would be a mistake to use the general, trans-historical concept of human nature to explain concrete social conditions or why a specific need took a specific form, and certainly our social nature always manifests itself in a particular historical form. It is also certainly correct that the general trans-historical concept of human nature is an abstraction from concrete social reality. However, that does not make it only an “abstract philosophical starting point” any more than the abstraction of “value” as socially necessary labor time is, for Marx, merely a philosophical starting point of his critique of political economy. What Marx’s general concept of human nature does is precisely to explain how we can have human nature in its historical form; that is, how we can assume that our forms of sociality and individuality continually change and also why we can assume those changes are brought about by changes in the mode of production. It explains how and why we as active socially productive creatures continually transform ourselves, how and why we are continuously developing new needs and capacities and new forms of sociality and individuality; and why we can expect that socialism will bring about a further transformation of our needs, capacities, and forms of sociality and individuality. Furthermore, given that we are biological as well as social beings, we can assume that our active socially productive nature and our ability to continuously transform ourselves must be rooted in our biology in some way. As Terry Eagleton, in his criticism of Sayers book, writes: If human beings really are such social, dynamic, transformative animals, then this already tells us a great deal about the kinds of abiding capacities they must possess. Any creature which can continually create new needs for itself is unlikely, for example, to have the kind of body which does not allow it to engage in intricate semiotic processes, deploy tools in particular ways, enter into complex social relations with others of its kind, and the like. We now have a whole set of procedures for distinguishing between such animals and, say, slugs or squirrels, which is just what is traditionally meant by the talk of ‘nature.’ 89

I mentioned earlier that Marx also has a normative ideal of human flourishing, which is based on his understanding of human nature. This normative ideal may also be called an ideal of self-realization, and it provides the normative basis for Marx’s critique of capitalism. As Sean Sayers puts it, “Marxism involves a humanist critique of capitalism, based on the moral ideal of self-realization.” 90

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The ideal of self-realization is based on the idea that human flourishing requires the fullest development of our faculties and capacities which are largely denied by capitalism, at least for most people, and which would be realized to a high degree for everyone within socialism or what Marx called “communism.” 91 Thus, in contrast to the way in which capitalist society pits individuals against one another so that one person’s gain often requires another’s loss, socialism/communism is “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” 92 It is also a society in which ultimately there is no longer a division of labor, which means not only the abolition of class division, but also the end of the division between mental and manual labor, of the allocation of work by gender, and even of the way work is distributed into specific tasks in “which each person has a particular, exclusive area of activity.” 93 The point, then, of socialism/communism in contrast to capitalism and previous class societies is that each individual is able to develop their many sided talents and potentials, both physical and mental. Human flourishing, then, requires creative work activity, the selfrealization of all human powers and capacities—“the full development of human mastery over the forces of nature . . . the absolute working out of his creative potentialities . . . the development of all human powers as an end in itself.” 94 There is also, in Marx’s commitment to the ideal of human flourishing a dialectical relation between the historical development of human needs and of human capacities, since as human beings develop their capacities they also develop a need to exercise these capacities which in turn leads to new capacities and again the need to exercise these new capacities. Thus, Marx says that in the more developed second stage of communism, human beings will be able to work according to their ability freely insofar as “labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want.” 95 Thus, socialism/communism is morally superior to capitalism since it makes possible a higher degree of human flourishing? The question now is whether or not this normative ideal of human flourishing is grounded in Marx’s trans-historical concept of human nature. From what I have said above about Sayers’s analysis, it should not be surprising that he would ground this normative ideal in the historical concept of human nature. Sayers argues that the needs and capacities which capitalism denies and which would be realized within socialism are themselves historical developments. In other words, given Sayers’s interpretation of Marx, we cannot derive the ideal of human flourishing, of self-realization from the general trans-historical concept of human nature. “Human nature cannot provide an absolute and trans-historical moral yardstick. When conditions are criticized for being ‘inhuman’ or ‘degrading,’ it is an inescapably historical and relative judgment that is made. . . . There is no question, therefore, of holding capitalism up against an absolute and ideal conception of what is ‘human’ and finding it wanting.” 96 For example, a large part of Sayers’s Marxism and Human

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Nature focuses on the need to work and also to have leisure, which would include both rest and creative activity. Both of these needs, Sayers argues, emerge only within the capitalist mode of production. “Attitudes to work, all attitudes toward work . . . are social historical products. They are created by and reflect the mode of production in which they occur.” 97 The modern need to work and to have fulfillment in work grows out of these attitudes as they are developed within the capitalist mode of production. Citing Rousseau and the contemporary anthropologist Marshall Sahlins to support his position, Sayers argues that hunter-gatherers probably did not have a need to work beyond what was necessary for subsistence. He also points out that the first factory workers initially resented their work and that it took considerable time before they internalized the habits and attitudes necessary for the development of the industrial system. “Thus the modern need to work is a historically developed need” which is, nonetheless, “a real and ineliminable feature of contemporary psychology.” 98 Of course, work in capitalist society is alienated, but the idea of alienation holds out the possibility of work without alienation. Alienated labor, then, is, in Sayers’s account of Marx, “a stage in the process of human development and self-realization.” 99 Alienated labor produces the need for unalienated work, not for the abolition of work itself. It is the need for work as fulfilling activity for its own sake, work which is fulfilling because it is creative and develops our capacities, and also which is fulfilling because it is socially useful. There is also, for Sayers, a parallel need for leisure. The need for leisure is a need for rest but also for creative activities outside of work. Here again, Sayers argues that the need for leisure in the modern sense is a historically developed need which derives from the capitalist mode of production. “Leisure in its modern sense—a sphere of positive non-work activity enjoyed by the mass of working people—is a modern phenomenon and a product of modern industry.” 100 It seems to me that Sayers’s specific analysis of the need for work and leisure as historically developed is correct but that this does not entail that the trans-historical concept of human nature play no role in understanding the ideal of human flourishing. The need for some kind of creative and socially useful activity which can develop our powers and capacities is built into Marx’s general idea of human beings as socially productive. It is precisely because humans are trans-historically social producers that these more specific needs for work and leisure in their modern form can emerge in modern society. Furthermore, it is not clear how Marx (or Sayers) could derive an ethical ideal for human flourishing purely from the needs and capacities that develop historically in capitalist society. The problem is that capitalism produces a number of needs and capacities, some of which are not needs or capacities which we would wish to develop in a socialist society. The problem is that the purely historical analysis of self-realization cannot tell us which of the

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needs and capacities we want to more fully realize. Terry Eagleton poses the problem this way: By what criteria do we determine which historical capacities are beneficent and which are not. Which of the potentials which capitalism is currently obstructing should be fostered and which should not. . . . To reply that we should actualize only those capacities that make for socialism is simply to beg the question, since, if socialism is valuable because it is a positive form of self-realization, what is to count as such positive self-realization still needs to be determined. 101

Marx’s vision of communism adds still other characteristics to the transhistorical concept of human nature, since it assumes that people can develop the qualities necessary to sustain communism. If human beings are to work freely according to their ability, it is assumed that human beings can develop motivation to work which no longer requires material incentives. These would include not only the motivation to work so as to exercise and develop our creative capacities but also that we can derive significant pleasure from the way in which our work makes a social contribution. If human beings are to be able to take from the common stock whatever they need, we can assume that they will develop qualities which lead them to take no more than they really need with attention to what other people need as well. If human beings are to sustain a society in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” they must be able to so identify with and care about others that they are motivated to want others to equally develop their capacities and are motivated to aid them in doing so. Furthermore, if production no longer requires material incentives, we can also assume that human beings are capable of deriving genuine pleasure from making a social contribution. If the state is at least to begin to wither away, we can assume that people are able to internalize certain fundamental social and moral norms to such an extent that they require very little external compulsion to obey these norms. Bertell Ollman has suggested a number of other qualities which an individual of a future communist society would require, among them that the individual no longer thinks in terms of what is “mine” or “yours”; that human beings have not only overcome class antagonisms but that they have also overcome religious, national, and racial divisions, which means that they no longer have such identifications; and that when someone has harmed another, they will feel such anguish that the society will need to console them, not to punish them. 102 After enumerating these and many other qualities of the communist individual Ollman makes the following observation: The extraordinary qualities Marx ascribes to the people of communism could never exist outside the unique conditions which give rise to them. . . . One can only state the unproven assumptions on which this flowering of human nature rests. These are that the individual’s poten-

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tial is so varied and great; that people possess an inner drive to realize all this potential; that the whole range of powers in each person can be realized together; and that the overall fulfillment of each individual is compatible with that of all others. Given how often and drastically the development and discovery of new social forms has extended accepted views of what is human, I think it would be unwise at this time to foreclose on the possibility that Marx’s assumptions are correct. 103

In one sense, I think that Ollman is correct, I think it would be unwise to foreclose the possibility that our trans-historical nature has these capacities, and, I would add, that they can serve as part of the basis for a normative ideal of human flourishing even if they can never be completely realized. However, it might be equally unwise to foreclose the possibility that Marx here is being overly optimistic about the potentialities of human nature. Does the possibility of a socialist society require that we make such optimistic assumptions about human nature?

HUMAN NATURE AND SOCIALISM: OPTIMISM AND A CAUTIONARY NOTE I now want to put forward my own position on the relation of socialism to our understanding of human nature. While Marx and Engels talked about socialism as a scientific project, I would insist that it is also an ethical project. At the very least, it is animated by a concern for human flourishing. I would also claim that, as an ethical project, socialism is based on a substantive idea of freedom, equality, and community. It is based on the freedom to participate in the collective control of the social, economic, and political conditions which impact our lives. It assumes a substantive equality between the participants, on the political, social, and economic level. None of this is possible without a sense of community, a sense of mutual concern for each other and a desire to mutually aid each other, what is often termed “solidarity.” And this sense of mutual concern and aid conjoined with the ideals of freedom and equality entails that we create institutions which allow each of us to develop our full creative powers in cooperation with others and to participate democratically in decision making at every level of society. 104 At the economic level, this specifically entails some form of public and democratic control of the means of production, democratic control of the work place and participation in the decisions by which work is organized (self-management), and the organization of work as a fulfilling creative activity for each member of the work force. What assumptions does all this require about human nature both as a historical phenomenon and as something trans-historical. At the level of the historical concept, human nature must change. The forms of sociality and individuality which reinforce and reproduce capi-

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talism—e.g., competition, selfish individualism, lack of concern for the well-being of others beyond a small circle of family and friends, desire for power and dominance, an instrumental attitude toward work—must be replaced by socialist forms of sociality and individuality—e.g., cooperation, altruism, a sense of community and mutual concern, need for and appreciation of work as an end in itself, desire for the full development of each our creative powers in harmony with the development of the creative powers of others, deriving pleasure in contributing to the welfare of others. Since these latter traits already exist to some extent in a capitalist society and since, in the historical sense, human nature has changed throughout history, it might seem that there is no reason, at least at this level, to assume that there is any problem. Yet, even here there is some reason for concern. As Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves . . . they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service.” 105 We can then anticipate that some of the socially antagonistic needs and character traits developed by capitalism will attempt to reassert themselves within socialism. I have been arguing throughout this paper that human nature must also be understood as trans-historical as well as historical and that this would play a role in how we think about a socialist society. What assumptions, then, can we reasonably make about human nature as transhistorical, which are relevant to the construction of socialism? I think there are some reasons for optimism. First, following Marx’s analysis, there is good reason to assume that human beings are indeed social producers who continually develop new needs and capacities, and there is also good reason to assume that the need for creative activity as an end in itself is at least latent within human nature. Second, following the analyses of Mencius, Kropotkin, and some recent work in evolutionary psychology, there is good reason to assume that human beings have innate tendencies to develop such dispositions as empathy, cooperation, mutual aid, and altruism. Third, as I have argued earlier, there is no reason to assume that we have an aggressive drive as such. Fourth, while there is innate within us a range of biological potentialities, there is no reason to assume that our social behavior or individual behavior is biologically determined in a way that would undermine the socialist project. Nonetheless, it is important that we not be overly optimistic. If we have innate tendencies for dispositions that would fit nicely with socialism, we may also, as I have previously argued, have innate tendencies which if allowed to develop could threaten the socialist project. To return to the ancient Chinese debate—is human nature good or evil? The answer may be that we have the seeds of “good” and “evil” within us and that how these seeds develop and the extent to which they develop will depend on a variety of social factors. While I think there is good reason to

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think that Kropotkin is correct about an innate tendency for cooperation and mutual aid, I do not think we can totally discount Hobbes. While it is much more reasonable to think in terms of biological potentiality instead of biological determinism, we should not ignore the possibility that there may also be a variety of conflicting tendencies built into our genetic makeup. Put in the terms of contemporary neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, there is some evidence—although certainly not definitive—for thinking that we may have a range of tendencies and impulses, both negative and positive, built into the human genome whose probability of being realized will vary with social conditions but will always be more than zero. The task of socialism as regards our trans-historical human nature is to provide social institutions and conditions which can develop, nurture, and organize our positive tendencies into socialist forms of sociality and individuality and which would channel or sublimate our negative tendencies into acceptable forms. But it would be a mistake to think that these negative tendencies will simply disappear. To put this another way, we might think of the socialist project as developing social conditions which would nurture the “good” seeds and not the “bad” seeds. Norman Geras, in a more recent work, offers the following cautionary note: If socialism, at any rate, will be still a society of human beings, much about them will be recognizably the same. We have nothing at present but the emptiest of speculation to tell us that the common faults and vices might or all but disappear; that everything that is productive of grave mischief belongs to the discontinuities of history, with the societally generated, and nothing of it with our underlying human nature. 106

There is nothing in human nature which precludes socialism, and socialism, if we are able to construct it properly, would indeed be the highest form of human flourishing in that it is most likely to foster the positive tendencies within human nature and at least significantly reduce the negative tendencies. It is certainly more likely to do so than capitalism which, to a large extent, tends to develop and nurture the more negative tendencies of human nature. However, if we are to take socialism seriously, we need to confront the possibility that these negative tendencies are innate within us and not merely to wish them away. If we do not develop socialist institutions that take account of these negative tendencies, whether they are derived simply from our capitalist inheritance or are rooted in our trans-historical human nature, we may find ourselves constructing a society that we do not want.

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NOTES 1. Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, trans. Christian E. Detmond, in Social and Political Philosophy, ed. John Somerville and Ronald E. Santoni (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 137. 2. Mark J. Perry, “Why Socialism Failed,” The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, 4, no. 6 (June 1995). Accessed 10/6/1911, http://www.thefreemanonline.org. 3. Noam Chomsky, “Noam Chomsky on Anarchism, Marxism, and the Hope for the Future: Interview with Kevin Doyle,” in Red and Black Revolution, 2 (1995). Accessed 10/6/1911, http://struggle.ws/rbr/noamrbr2.html. 4. The Book of Mencius, in A Sourcebook of Chinese Philosophy, ed. and trans. WingTsit Chan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 52. 5. One of his other analogies is a comparison between wheat seeds and human nature. How wheat seeds, which are initially the same, will grow will depend on the soil, the rain and the dew, and human cultivation. In the same way, he suggests that all human beings begin with good seeds but depending on the kind of social nurture they receive, they will turn out differently. In still another analogy, he compares our original good nature with a mountain that has been systematically denuded of its trees, thus suggesting that it is even possible for the good that is within our nature to be completely destroyed. 6. The other three seeds are a sense of shame, feelings of respect, and an initial sense of right and wrong. Each of these can, with proper guidance, develop into good character traits. The feeling of shame is a signal that we have done something wrong and so can put us on the path to wanting in general to do the right thing. The feeling of respect can develop into a more general sense of propriety, and the gut level feeling that certain things are right or wrong can, again with proper guidance and reflection, lead to a more general moral understanding. 7. Mencius at one point criticizes a king to his face, telling him that his exploitative economic policies are disastrous. While, he does not challenge the idea of monarchy as such, he suggests that if a king does not properly attend to the welfare of his citizens, the citizens may legitimately rebel. 8. The Book of Mencius, 65. 9. Hsün Tzu, “Man’s Nature Is Evil,” in Basic Writings of Mo Tzu, Hsün Tzu, and Han Fei Tzu, ed. and trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 157. 10. Joel J. Kupperman, Theories of Human Nature (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2010), p. 74. 11. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (New York: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1962), 98-99. 12. Hobbes, Leviathan, 100. 13. Spencer first used the phrase “survival of the fittest” to describe Darwin’s ideas. Darwin himself subsequently borrowed the term from Spencer in the fifth edition of his Origin of the Species. 14. In the United States, William Graham Sumner was one of the major popularizes of Social Darwinism. See his What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1920). There is, however, good reason to think that Spencer himself was not a Social Darwinist. See David Weinstein, “Herbert Spencer,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2009 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. Accessed 10/6/2011, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/spencer/. 15. Quoted in Oliver James, “The Genes Don’t Fit,” New Statesman, August 16, 2010. Accessed 10/6/1911, http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2010/08/genes-essaygenetic-mental. 16. Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (Boston: Extending Horizon Books, Porter Sargent Publishers, 1976). 17. The articles were first published in book form in 1902.

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18. Thomas H. Huxley, “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society,” reprinted in Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, 332. 19. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, 74. 20. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, 75. 21. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, 77. 22. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, 79. 23. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, 79. Now that we have an analysis of the human genome and the genome of some other species, we know that chimpanzees have 99% the genetic structure of human beings. Of course, the 1% clearly makes a difference. 24. Stephen Jay Gould, “Kropotkin Was No Crackpot,” Natural History 106, June 1997. Accessed 10/6/1911, http://www.marxists.org/subject/science/essays/kropotkin. htm. 25. Quoted in Ashley Montagu, The Nature of Human Aggression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 27. 26. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1961), 68–69. 27. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 69. 28. In its pure form, the death instinct, for Freud, intends the destruction of one’s own being. What Freud hypothesizes is that a portion of the Death Instinct is diverted outward so that instead of destroying itself, the human organism can destroy some other person. In so doing, the death instinct is transformed into the aggressive drive. 29. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 70–71. In a footnote, Freud makes it clear that he sympathizes with the attempt to fight against the inequality of wealth that exists within capitalism. In other words, his criticism is not a challenge to the economic assumptions of socialism but what he takes to be one of its central psychological assumptions. 30. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 72. Freud suggests that antiSemitism may be, in part, the outcome of the Christian idea of universal love. 31. Although Kropotkin did not have the name, his field work in Siberia would be counted today as a form of ethology. 32. Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (New York: Harvest Book, 1974), ix. 33. Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, 48. 34. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 78–79. 35. Clara Thompson, Psychoanalysis: Evolution and Development (New York: Hermitage House, 1950), 54. 36. Allen Mazur and Leon S. Robertson, Biology and Social Behavior (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1972), 21. 37. For a more explicit defense of this thesis see George Maclay and Humprey Knipe, The Dominant Man: The Pecking Order of Human Society (New York: Delta Publishing Company, 1972). Maclay and Knipe claim that not only is there an innate drive for dominance but also that we are programmed to shift from dominant to subordinate roles. Each of us, then, in their view, is programmed by evolution to find a secure social position within a hierarchical structure. Aggression on the basis of the drive for dominance occurs when individuals compete for their place within the hierarchy. 38. Based on his studies of chimpanzees, W. A. Mason concludes that apart from the fact that chimpanzees will sometimes try to intimidate one another “there is no indication that chimpanzee groups as a whole are organized hierarchically; nor is there any evidence of an autonomous drive for social supremacy.” Quoted in Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, 1975), 141. 39. Montagu, The Nature of Human Aggression, 249–50. Montagu cites such groups as the Eskimo, the Hadja of Tanzania, the Comanche and Shoshoni Indians who seem not at all to be territorial. He cites other groups which are territorial but not very aggressive or defensive about their territory: e.g., the Kwakiutl, the Ituri Pygmies, and the Kung Bushman.

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40. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking Penguin, 2002), 306. Pinker refers the reader to studies that challenge Montagu’s claim. He mentions, among others, the anthropologist Carol Ember, who in her 1978 article “Myths about Hunter-Gatherers” (Ethnology 27, 239–48), calculates that 90% of hunter-gatherer societies engage in warfare, and 64% of them do so at least once every two years. 41. For the purposes of this paper, I shall define ideology as a set of theoretical assumptions, beliefs, and/or values which serves the interests of a dominant class or other kind of group through representing reality in a mystified form, that is to say, by representing social reality through a prism of assumptions which distorts its nature or, as Henri Lefebvre writes, which “refract (rather than reflect) reality via pre-existing representations, selected by the dominant groups and acceptable to them.” Henri Lefebvre, The Sociology of Marx (New York: Vintage, 1969), 69. 42. Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: A New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975) and Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (New York: Bantam Books, 1979). 43. Wilson, On Human Nature, 16. 44. Wilson, On Human Nature, 80. 45. Wilson, On Human Nature, 175. 46. Montagu, The Nature of Human Aggression, 77–78. 47. Steven Jay Gould, “Biological Potential vs. Biological Determinism,” in Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1977), 257. This article was first published in Natural History, 85, no. 5 (May 1976). 48. Marshall Sahlins, The Use and Abuse of Biology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976), 10. 49. Harry Magdoff and Fred Magdoff, “Approaching Socialism,” Monthly Review, 57, no. 3 (July–August 2005), 19. 50. Magdoff and Magdoff, “Approaching Socialism,” 21. 51. Theodosius Dobzhansky, Heredity and the Nature of Man (New York: New American Library, 1966), 113. 52. Phil Gasper, “Genes, Evolution, and Human Nature,” International Socialist Review, 41 (May–June 2005). Accessed 10/6/1911, http://www.isreview.org/issues/40/ genes2.shtml. 53. Stephen Jay Gould, “Biological Potential vs. Biological Determinism,” 257. 54. David Buller, “Evolutionary Psychology.” Accessed 10/6/1911, http://host. uniroma3.it/progetti/kant/field/ep.htm. 55. For a good overview of these four fields, see Pinker, The Blank Slate, 30–58. 56. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, 60. 57. However, individuals within these fields do sometimes frame their findings in biological determinist terms. 58. See Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind, 3rd edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 59. See Martin L. Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chapter 3. 60. Martin L. Hoffman, “Is Altruism Part of Human Nature,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40, no. 1 (1981), 124. 61. Martin A. Nowick, “Generosity: A Winner’s Advice,” Nature, 456, no. 4 (December 2008), 579. See also his “Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation,” Science, 314, no. 8 (December 2006), 1560–63. 62. Steven Pinker, “The Moral Instinct,” New York Times Magazine, Jan. 13, 2008. Chomsky, in a 1993 interview with Michael Albert, makes a similar comparison between language and morality and concludes that “we can't reasonably doubt that moral values are rooted in our nature.” The interview is entitled “Conversations between Michael Albert and Noam Chomsky, Part 3” and was posted in Noam Chomsky’s Z space, December 22, 2008. Accessed 10/6/1911, http://www.zcommunications.

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org/conversations-between-michael-albert-and-noam-chomsky-pt-3-by-noamchomsky. 63. Pinker in “The Moral Instinct” goes on to suggest that there are five spheres of morality, which can be mixed, emphasized, or downplayed in any number of ways and which, therefore, can account for the differences between the moral judgments of different cultures and different individuals. 64. Frederick Engels, The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man (New York: International Publishers, 1950). In that essay, Engels suggests that it was the ability of certain apes to use tools which provided the selection pressure for the development of the larynx and the human brain, so that, in effect, it was labor which made it possible for certain primates to evolve into human beings. 65. I am assuming that the reader of this book is sufficiently familiar with the method of historical materialism, and so for the sake of space, I shall not explain it in this paper except as necessary to elucidate the Marxist theory of human nature. 66. It is not my intention here to engage in the debate over the whether substructure/ superstructure model is best understood in causal terms or whether the substructure determines or simply conditions the superstructure. 67. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 147. 68. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feurbach,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. Lawrence H. Simon (Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Company, 1994), 100. 69. István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin Press, 1970), 13–14. 70. Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation, 170. 71. Karl Marx Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 42. 72. Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend (London: Verso, 1983), 33. 73. Geras, Marx and Human Nature, 48. I cannot do justice in the space of this paper to Geras’s carefully reasoned analysis of plausible alternative interpretations of the sixth thesis on Feurbach, whose discussion occupies the entirety of Part II of his book. 74. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 609. 75. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 42. 76. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 48. 77. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 49. 78. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 177. 79. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 64. 80. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 178. 81. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 50. 82. Marx and Engels, The German ideology, 51. 83. Sean Sayers, Marxism and Human Nature (New York: Routledge, 1998), 7. 84. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 84. In the context in which Marx is writing, “political animal” means more broadly “social animal.” 85. By the “forms of sociality” I mean those forms of social behavior which are inscribed within the social institutions, social norms, and social roles of a society. By “forms of individuality” I mean the way in which human beings develop a sense of individual identity as well as their psychological dispositions and attitudes. The point is that the forms of individuality grow out of and develop within the forms of sociality and, in turn, help to reinforce and reproduce the forms of sociality. 86. Erich Fromm has called these general forms of sociality and individuality the “social character” of a given society. He defines “social character” as “the nucleus of character structure which is shared by members of the same culture” and whose function it is “to mold and channel human energy within a given society for the purpose of the continued functioning of the society.” Erich Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), 78 and 79. 87. Sayers, Marxism and Human Nature, 155.

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88. Sayers, Marxism and Human Nature,154. 89. Terry Eagleton, "Self-Realization, Ethics, and Socialsm," New Left, Review 237 (September/october 1999), 154. 90. Sayers, Marxism and Human Nature, 9. 91. Marx never used the term “socialism” for the society that he envisioned, since he wanted to distinguish his understanding of that society from the utopian socialists. However, he did distinguish between two phases of this society and Lenin called the first phase “socialism.” In this terminology, which many Marxists now use, socialism is the transition to communism. For the purposes of this chapter, I will refer to Marx’s understanding of a post-capitalist society as “socialism/communism” unless I want to refer specifically to Marx’s understanding of the later phase, in which case I will use the term “communism.” 92. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 176. 93. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 53. 94. Marx, Grundrisse, 488. 95. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 321. 96. Sayers, Marxism and Human Nature, 126. 97. Sayers, Marxism and Human Nature, 35. 98. Sayers, Marxism and Human Nature, 53 99. Sayers, Marxism and Human Nature, 89. 100. Sayers, Marxism and Human Nature, 73. 101. Eagleton, “Self Realization and Ethics,” 156. 102. Bertell Ollman, “Marx’s Vision of Communism,” in his Social and Sexual Revolution: Essays on Marx and Reich (Boston: South End Press, 1979). 103. Ollman, “Marx’s Vision of Communism,” 91. 104. Michael Lebowitz suggests that there is an essential connection between mutual cooperative activity and the development of our human capacities. The socialist insight, he writes, is that “the development of human capacities can occur only through practice and . . . thus points to our need to be able to develop through democratic, participatory, and protagonist activity in every aspect of our lives.” Michael A. Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 22. 105. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 188. 106. Norman Geras, The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy after the Holocaust (New York: Verso, 1998), 105.

REFERENCES Buller, David. “Evolutionary Psychology.” Accessed 10/3/1911, http://host.uniroma3. it/progetti/kant/field/ep.htm. Chomsky, Noam. “Conversations between Michael Albert and Noam Chomsky, Part 3.” Posted in Noam Chomsky’s Z space, December 22, 2008. Accessed 10/3/1911, http://www.zcommunications.org/conversations-between-michael-albert-andnoam-chomsky-pt-3-by-noam-chomsky. ———. Language and Mind, 3rd edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. ———. “Noam Chomsky on Anarchism, Marxism, and the Hope for the Future: Interview with Kevin Doyle.” Red and Black Revolution, 2 (1995). Accessed 10/3/1911, http://struggle.ws/rbr/noamrbr2.html. Dobzhansky, Theodosius. Heredity and the Nature of Man. New York: New American Library, 1966. Eagleton, Terry. “Self-Realization, Ethics, and Socialism.” New Left Review 237 (September/October, 1999), 150–61. Ember, Carol. “Myths about Hunter-Gatherers.” Ethnology 17 (October 1978): 239–48.

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Engels, Frederick. The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man. New York: International Publishers, 1950. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1961. Fromm, Erich. Beyond the Chains of Illusion. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962. ———. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, 1975. Gasper, Phil. “Genes, Evolution, and Human Nature.” International Socialist Review, issue 41 (May–June, 2005). Accessed 10/3/1911, http://www.isreview.org/issues/40/ genes2.shtml. Geras, Norman. Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend. London: Verso, 1983. ———. The Contract of Mutual Indifference: Political Philosophy after the Holocaust. New York: Verso, 1998. Gould, Stephen Jay. “Kropotkin Was No Crackpot.” Natural History 106 (June 1997). http://www.marxists.org/subject/science/essays/kropotkin.htm. ———. “Biological Potential vs. Biological Determinism.” In Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History, 251–59. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Michael Oakeshott. New York: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1962. Hoffman, Martin L. “Is Altruism Part of Human Nature?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 40, no. 1 (1981): 121–37. ———. Empathy and Moral Development. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Hsün Tzu. “Man’s Nature Is Evil.” In Basic Writings of Mo Tzu, Hsün Tzu, and Han Fei Tzu, edited and translated by Burton Watson, 157–71. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967. Huxley, Thomas H. “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society.” In Kropotkin, Peter. Mutual Aid, Appendix B, 329–41. Boston: Porter Sargent Publishers, 1976. James, Oliver. “The Genes Don’t Fit.” New Statesman, August 16, 2010. Accessed 10/3/ 1911, http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2010/08/genes-essay-genetic-mental. Kropotkin, Peter. Mutual Aid. Boston: Porter Sargent Publishers, 1976. Kupperman, Joel J. Theories of Human Nature. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2010. Lebowitz, Michael A. The Socialist Alternative. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010. Lefebvre, Henri. The Sociology of Marx. New York: Vintage, 1969. Lorenz, Konrad. On Aggression. New York: Harvest Book, 1974. Machiavelli, Niccolo. Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius, trans. Christian E. Detmond. In Social and Political Philosophy, edited by John Somerville and Ronald E. Santoni, 127-38. New York: Doubleday, 1963. Maclay, George, and Humprey Knipe. The Dominant Man: the Pecking Order of Human Society. New York: Delta Publishing Company, 1972. Magdoff, Harry, and Fred Magdoff. “Approaching Socialism.” Monthly Review 57, no. 3 (July-August 2005). Marx, Karl. “Theses on Feuerbach.” In Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited by Lawrence H. Simon, 98–101. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994. ———. Capital, vol. 1. New York: International Publishers, 1967. ———. Critique of the Gotha Program. In Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited by Lawrence H. Simon, 315–32. Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Company, 1994. ———. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. In Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited by Lawrence H. Simon, 54–97. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994. ———. Grundrisse. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. ———. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited by Lawrence H. Simon, 187–208. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994. ———. The Poverty of Philosophy. New York: International Publishers, 1963. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology. New York: International Publishers, 1970.

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Mazur, Allen, and Leon S. Robertson. Biology and Social Behavior. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1972. Mencius. The Book of Mencius. In A Sourcebook of Chinese Philosophy, edited and translated by Wing-Tsit Chan, 51–83. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969. Mészáros, István. Marx’s Theory of Alienation. London: Merlin Press, 1970. Montagu, Ashley. The Nature of Human Aggression. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Nowick, Martin A. “Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation.” Science 314, no. 8 (December 2006): 1560–63. ———. “Generosity: A Winner’s Advice.” Nature 456, no. 4 (December 2008): 579. Ollman, Bertell. “Marx’s Vision of Communism.” In his Social and Sexual Revolution: Essays on Marx and Reich, 48–98. Boston: South End Press, 1979. Perry, Mark J. “Why Socialism Failed.” The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty 4, Issue 6 (June 1995). Accessed 12/3/1911, http://www.thefreemanonline.org. Pinker, Steven. “The Moral Instinct.” New York Times Magazine, Jan. 13, 2008. ———. The Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking Penguin, 2002. Sahlins, Marshall. The Use and Abuse of Biology. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1976. Sayers, Sean. Marxism and Human Nature. New York: Routledge, 1998. Sumner, William Graham. What Social Classes Owe to Each Other. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1920. Thompson, Clara. Psychoanalysis: Evolution and Development. New York: Hermitage House, 1950. Weinstein, David. “Herbert Spencer.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2009 Edition). Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Accessed 10/3/1911, http://plato. stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/spencer/. Wilson, Edward O. On Human Nature. New York: Bantam Books, 1979. ———. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.

SEVEN Solidarity: The Elusive Road to Socialism Richard Schmitt

Although Marx and Engels did not provide us with a detailed plan for a socialist society, they left us a clear outline. 1 A socialist society would be a classless society and, as a consequence, exploitation would be a thing of the past. In addition, this new society would be democratic. In capitalist societies, democracy is always class-based. It allows, as Marx observed in his pamphlet about the Paris commune of 1870, the majority of the people periodically to choose their oppressors. 2 In a classless society, democracy takes a very different form; now people can govern themselves; everyone has a say in running the society, including the economy. The society to succeed capitalism will be “a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labor power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labor-power of the community.” 3 Socialists still share that vision of socialism, of a society democratically run in all respects, where no one has the power, or the inclination to exploit anyone else. Marx did not have a name for what unifies this social order in which no one takes advantage of anyone else; today we use the word “solidarity.” Socialists like Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, or David Schweickart talk about solidarity 4 and so do many other political thinkers. Neither Marx nor his contemporary followers seem to think that fostering socialist solidarity is a major challenge. Everyone seems to assume that once capitalism collapsed the new society, run by the emancipated proletariat, will be held together by socialist solidarity.

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As a consequence there is no careful discussion of what socialist solidarity consists of. Political theorists use “solidarity” in many different senses. No one asks which of those apply to the solidarity that unifies socialist societies. I will try to remedy this oversight in the discussion that follows. In addition, I will argue that socialist solidarity—what it is and how to foster it—is a much more central problem than many socialists realize. The nature of socialist solidarity and the means for reaching it are therefore also very pressing questions for socialists. What is worse, we shall see, that it is by no means obvious how one would go about fostering the sort of socialist solidarity we dream of.

SOME VARIETIES OF SOLIDARITY I begin by considering some of the the bewildering variety of conceptions of solidarity that can be found in contemporary theoretical writings. Solidarity as Given Here solidarity consists of feelings, attitudes, and connections supported by many commonalities. We share this solidarity with others, often without even knowing it. Solidarity is given as are its foundations. This essentialist concept of solidarity may be found in the writings of Emile Durkheim and of the communitarians. Durkheim recognizes two forms of solidarity—mechanical and organic. A group is united by mechanical solidarity when the members are tied together by shared experiences and beliefs, perhaps a common history. They are one group because they are so similar in many respects, in what they think and what they experience. This solidarity is given even if the members of the group do not clearly articulate it for themselves. Organic solidarity is constructed in societies with progressively more complex divisions of labor in order to coordinate the different roles played by members of the society. 5 Communitarians argue, analogously, that individual identity is, in part, constituted by membership in a community, characterized by solidarity arising from common traits of the community members. They do not choose these traits but rather find themselves sharing them with other members of the same community. 6 The commonalities undergirding solidarity are found, not made. A third variant of that sort of solidarity was prominent in the early days of the second wave feminist movement and, at the same time, in racial or ethnic liberation groups. Solidarity was thought to rest on the common experience of being a woman, or of being black in the United States. The wide range of different experiences and histories between

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groups of women was here overlooked in favor of very fundamental commonalities in experiences. This sort of solidarity rests on shared essences. In an age deeply suspicious of “essentialism,” this conception of solidarity has come to be the target of widespread criticisms. 7 Solidarity as Human Nature In a post-modern age this view of solidarity as rooted in the nature of human groups is unpopular. 8 But there exists a quasi-biological version of this essentialist conception of solidarity which has not been targeted by critics but has, on the contrary, garnered a certain admiration, especially among Leftists—even among the sworn enemies of essentialism among them. The earliest and best known version of this biological essentialism is found in Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid. Love, sympathy and self-sacrifice certainly play an immense part in the progressive development of our moral feelings. But it is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience—be it only at the stage of an instinct—of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of everyone’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own. 9

Various students of human conduct in times of major disasters have come to similar conclusions. Thus Charles E. Fritz argued in 1961 that “most disasters [both natural ones and those inflicted by enemy aircraft attacks during World War II] produce a great increase in social solidarity among the stricken populace.” 10 The carpet bombing of German cities intended to weaken the will to continue fighting proved, according to Fritz, counterproductive. The wholesale assault on civilians did not arouse the desire to surrender but instead spurred on their will to cooperate, to provide mutual support and to be solidary with other Germans. Recently, Rebecca Solnit has made very similar observations in a detailed account of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and many other disasters. 11 Caught in an overpowering natural disaster, ordinary citizens perform extraordinary feats of mutual assistance and care for the destitute stranger. Sam Bowles comes to comparable conclusions as a result of complex computer modeling studies. 12 Solidarity, in these studies, does not emerge from an unspecified common characteristic of a given group but from a very specific inclination toward mutual aid in times of extreme deprivation and suffering. The inclination to solidarity is an innate human trait.

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Solidarity as Movement Organization The preceding two types of solidarity depended on given, shared characteristics of groups: common essences, common experiences, perhaps common interests, shared dispositions to provide mutual support in times of suffering. The next type of solidarity, instead, arises from choices made by groups of individuals. Sally Scholz discusses what she calls “political solidarity” which connects individuals who have decided to resist oppression or injustices done to themselves or, perhaps, to others. 13 Here separate and distinct individuals come together not because they share characteristics or interests but because they are “acting in concert”— Arendt’s formula for political action. Political solidarity arises where different persons are committed, one to the other and to a cause of resistance. It is their commitment that unifies them rather than shared properties. 14 Solidarity arises from individual choices when resistance to oppression or injustice is the action chosen. Resisters work together and in so doing develop solidarity which is one element in political cooperation. We might call this kind of solidarity “solidarity of resistance”—the ties of mutual assistance, obligation, and cooperation are invigorated and focused by the resistance to perceived injustice and oppression. 15 It is very much solidarity “against” an oppressor. Once the battle comes to an end, whether the resisters are victorious or not, solidarity ebbs away and the former comrades are often at each others’ throats. 16 There are other forms of political solidarity. 17 Groups of citizens trying to work out a reform program are in solidarity with each other, not against any opponents, but around the effort to formulate a program that embodies their ideals. Nationalist groups work in solidarity when they rediscover their ancient language, and the culture and customs of their ancestors. All these different forms of solidarity are chosen; not all of them are solidarity against an enemy. Solidarity as Moral Stance Solidarity of Resistance is chosen, not found. So are moral stances deliberately adopted because they give rise to solidarity. Virginia Held argues that we should adopt an ethics of care instead of the prevailing liberal approaches to ethics. Liberal ethics focuses on rights that are the same for all. The others are considered impersonally, as holding rights that are theirs by virtue of their abstract humanity. Ethics of care, on the contrary, attends to the particularities of the other, to the specific needs, desires and circumstances of each person herself. When citizens respect each other only as abstract rights holders, their concrete and particular relations are likely to be disturbed by self-interest; they do not respect each other as concrete persons. Under those conditions solidarity will not

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flourish. It is strong only where citizens have regard and care for each other in their full particularity. Liberal ethics undercuts solidarity; ethics of care promotes it. 18 Analogously, Enrique Dussel argues that solidarity with the victims of imperialism is an ethical choice which he recommends we make. Solidarity, Dussel understands as “taking charge of the other . . . assuming the other to be the victim of an injustice. . . . Solidarity is to take on the pain of the Iraqi people before the Empire. . . .” 19 Clearly the emphasis shifts here from Arendtian solidarity consisting of the commitment to resistance shared by the members of a group to a more decided focus on relations between persons caring to persons cared for, including all the requisite mutualities and reciprocities. But these different emphases do not need to eventuate in a disagreement about the broad outlines of solidarity. Solidarity also appears in the liberal tradition but in a different sense again from the solidarity that Held uses to criticize liberalism. Rawls and others use it to denominate the attitude toward the least advantaged in the society that is summarized in his “difference principle.” Those who are better off, have an obligation not to improve their own condition unless, in so doing, the situation of the worst off is also bettered. 20 The reference to Rawls reminds us that in thinking about solidarity it is all important in what respects we “take charge of the other” or “citizens have regard and care for each other. . . .” For Rawls solidarity is mainly economic it commits us not to improve our own situation without first making sure to improve the lot of the least fortunate. One suspects that both Dussel and Held have a more generous understanding of solidarity. The details of the ethical notion of solidarity is all-important and needs to be worked out by specific groups. These different ideas of solidarity, however, fall short of socialist solidarity. We encountered two kinds of solidarity as given—either as a human essence or a propensity to stick together in times of great upheavals. The first of these forms of solidarity is, as many feminists have pointed out, exclusionary. The group joined by a common feature is distinct from groups with different features. That sort of found solidarity is inseparable from xenophobia, distrust of the folk who are different as well as the strong temptation to exploit them. This found solidarity cannot be socialist solidarity because it must be able to unite all human beings. The second form of solidarity is limited in time. After many years of brave struggle, a people finally wins it independence. Its oppressors are defeated. But with it often sets in huge fatigue exhibited in a moral collapse. The freedom fighters practiced genuine democracy and equality. Once the war is won, the former leaders who were equals among equals become lazy, turn to dictatorship and crude oppression and exploitation. Solidarity spawned by suffering will not stand us in good stead in building a socialist society.

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Solidarity can also be a choice for a political stance or project, or a choice on the terrain of ethics. But these forms of solidarity also are different from socialist solidarity because socialist solidarity cannot be chosen. Marx was very clear about that, because what we can choose, we can also get tired of. If we choose not to exploit, the temptation to take advantage of others still remains. The inclination to develop our own competences and powers at the expense of others is still there and we must continue to struggle with the temptation to revert back to capitalist attitudes. If socialist solidarity is to be the central feature of socialist society it must be ingrained such that we would not dream of exploiting anyone— that is simply not who we are. It must be a deeply embedded character trait. A report about Mondragon exemplifies this characteristic of socialist solidarity: During Andrew McLeod’s 10-day visit to the Basque Country of northern Spain, he met a 34-year-old man named Aitor Garro, who makes aluminum car components. For the last 13 years, this man has worked at Fagor Ederlan, a division of the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, which is the world’s largest system of worker-owned businesses. Mondragon’s 100 global businesses employ 120,000 people and produce sales exceeding $20 billion annually. Garro grew up knowing only this system, as both his parents also worked in co-ops. “It was interesting to watch his perception of co-ops,” McLeod said. “He took them for granted. It was like water to a fish.” 21

Solidarity under socialism—the refusal to exploit as well as the dedication to pay serious attention to the interests of others—must be a given. It must be one of the common features that makes us into socialists. It must be what children learn very early, that adults practice as unquestioningly as we, under capitalism, compete. For us competing is not a choice; it comes naturally. Not exploiting must come naturally to socialists it must be for them “like water to a fish.” Solidarity that is chosen for political or ethical reasons is too fragile and often too limited in scope to serve as socialist solidarity. A range of the familiar versions of “solidarity” cannot serve as definitions or descriptions of socialist solidarity.

SOCIALIST SOLIDARITY—WHAT IS IT? In order to clarify this idea of socialist solidarity, we may begin with the formulation by Andrew Mason: members of a solidary group “must give each others’ interests some non-instrumental weight in their practical reasoning” and “there must be no systematic exploitation . . . no systematic injustice.” 22 When people in solidarity consider what to do in any given situation they think not only about their own interests but also

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about the interests of other concerned parties. They will not accept benefits for themselves that are gained at the expense of others; they will refrain from taking advantage of the weaknesses or difficulties of others. The two formulations are obviously closely connected. In refusing to exploit anyone I am not only considering the other’s interests but I am regarding them as equally important as my own. Gaining an advantage by damaging another person is impermissible if I take their interests as seriously as my own. The converse is not always true. Many authors explicate solidarity as having regards for the others’ interests without including a prohibition of exploitation. 23 All of this is very abstract. In his final publication, G. A. Cohen gives us this lovely example of a group in solidarity: You and I, and a whole bunch of other people go on a camping trip. There is no hierarchy among us; our common aim is that each of us should have a good time doing, so far as possible, the things that he or she likes best . . . somebody fishes, somebody else prepares the food, and another person cooks it. People who hate cooking but enjoy washing up may do all the washing up, and so on. There are plenty of differences, but our mutual understandings and the spirit of the enterprise, ensure that there are no inequalities to which anyone could mount a principled objection. 24

On this camping trip, there is no bargaining between the campers. People bargain when they do not believe that others will meet their needs voluntarily. The central presupposition of markets is that we will get something from the other only if we give them something in return—no one will give us what we need freely and out of the goodness of their heart. Not so on our socialist camping trip. The cook does not have to make demands for free time to go fishing after dinner because someone is certain to offer to play with his son so that the father can catch fish undisturbed. The woman who wants two helpings of desert does not have to extort those by threatening not to share the lovely apples she found. All she needs to do is to ask and, if there is desert left over, she will get her a second helping because everyone knows that desert is her favorite part of any meal. Being in solidarity means trusting each other not only to take everyone’s interests into account, but to be willing to provide for what anyone needs to the extent that that is possible. People cannot be in solidarity with each other unless they trust each other not to try to take advantage of others. It involves confidence on everybody’s part that they are safe in the regard of others, that they do not need to take up protective positions, that they do not need to figure out what secret designs others have on them. If I suspect you of being inclined to take advantage of me, I will not give you what you want just for the asking because I am, perhaps, afraid that you will come around again and again, trying to benefit from my kindness; I fear that you will

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take advantage of my generosity without doing your part and providing for me when you can. Alternatively I will not volunteer to give you what I know you want because I am trying to extract something from you that I do not think you will give me without getting something in return. Trust on my part involves my trusting others to trust me. Trust must be mutual. Like solidarity, trust has many different meanings. Even a competitive, capitalist society works a lot better if there is a certain amount of trust between competing enterprises. To the extent that I do not trust enterprises I contract with to keep their end of the bargain, I need to make careful (and expensive) checks before signing a contract and I need to marshal elaborate legal resources to make sure that the other parties cannot evade the contractual obligations they have entered into. All of this costs a lot of money and thus, by raising transaction costs, reduces profits. If contracting parties have confidence that the others will keep their side of a bargain, everyone is better off. Capitalism works more smoothly and cheaply if there is a certain amount of trust among enterprises. But this is not the mutual trust required for socialist solidarity. Among capitalist enterprises trust exists between competitors. I may trust them to stick to a bargain but I must have no illusion that we are no longer competitors, that they will not use my mischances as an opportunity to improve their position. Trust between capitalist competitors does not moderate competition. Each enterprise remains on the look-out to raise their profits at another’s expense, if they can possibly do it. Their interests are theirs. My interests do not concern them except insofar as our interests coincide, temporarily, or inasmuch as knowledge of what my interests are, may enable them to thwart me more effectively. Socialist solidarity involves a much more extensive trust—namely trust that others will refrain from injuring me even if that would be advantageous for them (in a short-sighted sense). It involves the certainty that my own interests are taken seriously by the others. I am for the other, not an opponent to be vanquished in competition, but someone whose wants and needs are to be taken seriously and furthered wherever possible. Persons who trust each other, in that way, must have a robust selfconfidence. Trusting incurs risks—it is possible that I could mistake your action for generosity when you are secretly trying to take advantage. To the extent that I am confident in my ability to overcome deceptions, I trust myself not to be easily injured by your possible deception. Since I am confident that I could recover from the losses inflicted should you take advantage of me, I am calmly prepared to trust you. To the extent that I doubt my own powers, I will succumb to destructive suspicions. Solidarity in a group of persons does not only consist of their arrangements, their work assignments, and their distribution of goods—the so-

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cial structures they create—but it refers to the character of the people in solidarity. They have to trust each other mutually and feel secure in the trust of others and in their own value and importance. Solidarity requires a certain character structure that enables people to live with social arrangements that stress mutuality and sharing. Socialist societies require specific socialist women and men.

PIE IN THE SKY? Many readers will applaud these efforts to build a society dedicated to the common good but will, at the same time, deplore that they are, of course, doomed to failure. Human nature being as it is, we cannot expect a society where individuals’ self regard plays only a minor role. Human beings are incapable of founding a society where everyone is safe from the overreaching of others, where everyone works for everyone’s benefit while receiving what they themselves need. There are two responses to this defense of capitalist institutions. I will examine both in turn. Disaster Solidarity Rebecca Solnit has documented human reactions to disaster. In her book A Paradise Built in Hell, she ranges from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to Hurricane Katrina and finally the attack on the twin towers in Manhattan in 2001. 25 Every disaster is different and she draws different lessons from each. But she has no doubt that when confronted with extreme danger and devastation, human beings rediscover their mutual sympathy, their commitment to each others’ well-being and their determination to work for the survival of the group. The stories begin on April 18, 1906, when Amelia Holshouser wakes up at 5:12 a.m. because a fierce earthquake has ejected her from her bed. While the house is still shaking she gets up off the floor, dresses carefully and goes out into the street. Soon she begins to prepare food and before the week is out her kitchen has grown to feed several hundred people. “Just as her kitchen was one of the many spontaneously launched community centers and relief projects, so her resilient resourcefulness represents the ordinary response in many disasters. In them strangers become friends and collaborators, goods are shared freely, people improvise new roles for themselves. Imagine a society where money plays little or no role, where people rescue each other and then care for each other. . . .” (17) The attacks of 9/11 yield similar experiences. “I felt that sense of collectivity I’ve experienced only rarely in my life. . . . I felt that ‘beloved community’ that we talked about in the civil rights movement.” (197) The crisis spurs many on to exceptional activity. Rescue efforts are not the

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work of specific leaders but arise from the activity of large numbers of people. “Each volunteer becomes a self motivated never-say-die powerhouse who does whatever it takes to get the job done.” (205) Persons who in ordinary life tend to be passive and adrift, suddenly become focused, energetic, and inventive. These stories once again remind us of Cohen’s picnic. Everyone does his or her part to make the shared enterprises succeed. Personal anxieties about getting enough, or getting what one wants fall away. One feels secure in the group, in sharing existing resources and contributing whatever one is able to do. In this cooperative environment, everyone feels more active and energetic, more self-motivated and productive than they do in their ordinary work life. Life is suddenly good. Why so ephemeral? Socialists are inclined to use these stories in support of their hope for a future society characterized mainly by solidarity rather than the competition and rampant selfishness of ours. The partisans of capitalism, however, reply that these states of solidarity and cooperation, often among strangers, occur only under exceptional conditions and very rarely last more than a few days or perhaps a few weeks. The very evanescence of these glowing experiences of solidarity suggests that human nature is, indeed, incapable of maintaining this spirit of unity where the well-being of the group, of the “we,” is more important for everyone than their own fears and desires. For most of human history the selfish have gained power in order to lord it over the weaker. The powerful have prospered; the weak have suffered. Contemporary capitalism simply repeats that pattern. Solnit has an answer to that objection. In life as we experience it ordinarily, we find ourselves consumed by small anxieties, suspicious of our fellow men and women, paralyzed by a sense of aimlessness. But this state of affairs is an imposition by people with power, particularly by governments. “The very structure of our economy and society prevents” the emergence of altruistic solidarity. Our society is organized so as to make it appear rational to seek one’s own interests at the expense of others. The weight of prevailing ideology and institutions prevents us from feeling the intense desire for cooperation and mutual aid, the keen sense of individual responsibility for the well-being of others that we manifest again and again when these prevailing ideologies and institutions fall away destroyed by war or natural disaster. 26 Particularly in her chapter on Hurricane Katrina, Solnit draws a sharp contrast between the overwhelming generosity with which ordinary people rescue and sustain the victims of the hurricane and the murder and mayhem caused by the police, the military, armed private security guards, and their allies. The misery of ordinary daily life is clearly due to the actions of the government and its armed supporters. This is an eloquent restatement of the views of the Anarchists. Peter Kropotkin wrote: “Far from imagining men better than they are, we see

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them as they are and that is why we affirm that the best of men is made essentially bad by the exercise of authority. . . .” 27 It is governments and the authority exercised in the capitalist economy, where money is power, that account for the failure of this solidarity in life as we know it. Abolish governments, abolish the private ownership of means of production and what you will have is a society of free men and women, cooperating for the well-being of all. 28 This is not the place to enter into the long and complex argument about anarchism, but I would like to suggest a somewhat more complex explanation for the sudden and unexpected emergence of solidarity, on one hand, and it’s brief life, on the other. Life during disasters is drastically simplified. The future is suddenly completely opaque and thus no longer plays an important role. In wartime, if we talk about the future at all, only the most immediate future matters: where will we find food, or fuel, or shelter today? For the rest all references to the future begin with the phrase “after the war is over . . .” and we don’t know when or how it will be. Most importantly, we don’t know whether we will live to see it. The same is true of the past. Ordinarily we have a social position, often inherited from our parents. There may be property and there are traditions that come down to us and play an important part in determining who we are and what we do. If disaster strikes, all that is much less important. Property becomes worthless because no one has any money. Social position does not mean anything when we are all standing in the food line or scavenging for a bit of fuel. My advanced degreees will not give me an advantage in the search for nourishment. In the middle of disaster we discover the unimportance of social distinctions. We unearth a new, deeper equality. In the present only survival counts. While in ordinary life many different concerns and activities may lay claim our attention, leaving us confused and troubled about what is important and what is not, survivors of disasters have no problem knowing what matters—staying alive, finding food, staying warm, finding a doctor if someone is hurt or sick. This radical simplification of daily life and its concerns opens us up to the possibility of solidarity, of mutual aid and responsibility. Moreover, the dimensions of disasters are not on a human scale. They do not consist of this or that person getting hurt but of masses of people being cast adrift staring death in the face. Faced by this monster, individual efforts to save oneself are ridiculous. They are out of proportion to the enormity of the threat that only collective action can hope to meet. Faced by whole cities underwater or skyscrapers collapsing onto themselves, we turn to each other to rally our united strength. Solidarity is a function of the radical simplification of daily life and the disproportionate dimensions of the threats we face in a disaster, whether natural or the result of human folly.

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In that moment when we submerge our own survival in the continued existence of the group in which we find ourselves, we often experience new emotions: fear and sadness mixed with joy. Life, as Susan Wolf observes, takes on a new and more powerful meaning when our activities connect to the well-being of a larger group. 29 When our needs and desires are not purely personal and our thoughts and emotions revolve not only around our individual life but are involved in that of other individuals and the group we form, life acquires a new kind of meaning and importance. Hence the joy. But this joy and the solidarity it springs from cannot last because the drastically streamlined world the disaster presents us with is inevitably short-lived. As soon as possible, everyone struggles to re-establish more ordinary conditions where they are not daily faced with the threat of death, of starvation, of freezing to death, of succumbing to sickness. Ordinary life may be disorienting and even depressing by its complexity and the cussedness of our fellow beings. But life on the edge of a submerged city or buried in the debris of burning skyscrapers is not sustainable. Normality must return. Normality is desired by all. The intensification of one’s sense of being alive, the joy of freely shared resources comes at too high a price. When the blitz ends everyone heaves a sigh of relief. When peace returns we weep and celebrate and count our dead. It does not seem to me that the anarchist account of how miserable life is under ordinary capitalist conditions is acceptable. We cannot simply blame “government” and its armed minions, or the bureaucracy, or multinational corporations for making us as quarrelsome and selfish as we are most of the time. Our better natures emerge under very complex conditions of which the absence of government is only one small aspect. Faced by annihilation, humans stick together and in many cases refuse to strong-arm each other. But the price for those experiences of shining human solidarity is much too high. Other Roads to Solidarity? There are many examples of solidarity that do not occur during war time, hurricanes, or floods. Instead we have a rich storehouse of stories about intentional communities established with the express purpose of creating a life of cooperation and solidarity. In the United States and Britain many communities were established during the 19th century. Some lasted only briefly, others for an extended period. Some like New Lanark established by Robert Owen or the Rochdale cooperative store were world famous. Others lived and died in obscurity. I will take as my example the communal settlements in Israel. These examples are well documented. They manage to tell us a good deal about the possibility and pitfalls of establishing solidarity communities.

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Disaster solidarity is short lived because normalcy is urgently needed. After the earthquake, people need to find permanent lodging, a steady food supply, jobs and restoration of a regular family and social life, to the extent that that is possible. With the return to normalcy solidarity fades and disappears. Not so in the case of intentional communities that establish a regular, daily life that is normal in that it meets all ordinary needs insofar as that is possible. Here solidarity is not a function of exceptional circumstances but, instead, emerges from everyone doing his or her daily job, procuring food and shelter, establishing families, and raising a new generation. Disaster solidarity happens to people in dire straits. It happens to them regardless of their political persuasions. But intentional communities are very much inspired by their political principles. The early settlers in various kibbutzim were socialists. (They were, of course, also Zionists.) They wanted nothing to do with private property or capitalism. Their guiding principle was borrowed from Marx: “From each according to their ability; to each according to their need.” Later transformations of kibbutzim are evidence for a political shift away from that version of socialism to an outlook that is more hospitable to private initiative, to differential earnings for different kind of work, and to some market incentives in the economy. Similarly, the cooperatives in Italy’s EmiliaRomagna region were influenced and often organized by the Communist party. The word “socialism” was first used for anti-capitalist economic institutions by a contemporary of Robert Owen, William Thompson, who, as a fierce critic of capitalism, found Owen too comfortable with capitalist institutions and practices. He described his own, anti-capitalist cooperatives as “socialist.” 30 Here is a summary of early kibbutz life by one participant: “Everyone works here. One could not live here and not work, it would be spiritual impossibility. All work is done without remuneration. All pay goes to the common fund. Life here is very free and there is a great deal of personal consideration. Each is treated according to his needs. The ideal which guides us is, as far as possible, to give to each according to his needs and to get from each whatever he can give.” 31 But did the kibbutzim not also fail? Many people think so. There are two versions of this story. The first asserts that the kibbutz was noteconomically viable. The second points to the failure of the children of the kibbutz to join the community that raised them as evidence that the socialist solidarity of the kibbutzim also cannot last. It cannot perpetuate itself. Both of these stories give rise to debates in which the stories become more and more complex. For present purposes, I will present the criticisms of the kibbutz projects in excessively simple form. One line of argument reaches the conclusion that kibbutzim are failures as alternative socialist systems that were supposed to replace capitalism. This argu-

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ment follows a series of changes in the majority of kibbutzim—the sequence of these changes is not always the same. First there were payments to individuals for clothing and some extras. Then the food in the dining halls was paid for by swiping a plastic card; then the food was contracted out to capitalist firms and/or the communal dining hall was closed completely. Then the children’s house was closed and families raised their children at home. Then the kibbutz began to pay differential wages, higher pay for more skilled and important jobs. Then they began to hire wage labor. Factories were established, as well as tourist enterprises. No longer were the communities exclusively devoted to agriculture. Then members began to work outside the kibbutz and in some cases it became their individual responsibility to find work. The final step was taken by Kibbutz Kfar Ruppin that converted its productive projects into capitalist enterprises and then distributed shares to its members. Instead of members of a socialist community, the members are now capitalist owners of a thriving enterprise. The socialist kibbutz, for a variety of complex reasons, turned itself into a successful capitalist business. 32 One of the reasons for this surrender was that the young who were born and raised in the kibbutz did not want to continue living there. The hope was that a capitalist community would be more attractive to the new generation. Most kibbutzim have similar problems to persuade their children to stay in the community or, at least, return after their military service and a few years of travel and living elsewhere. Kibbutz schools are widely blamed for failing to transmit the socialist values that had animated the founders a hundred years ago. This, very briefly, is the frequent story about the kibbutzim: Given their small numbers, the kibbutzniks played a disproportionately important role in building the new state of Israel. The experiment of building socialism one community at a time, however, failed.

THE DETAILS OF SOCIALIST SOLIDARITY It is not at all clear what lesson we should draw from this history of the kibbutzim. Does it show that socialism does not work? Many people draw that conclusion. But the very specific experiences of the kibbutzim do not support this broad conclusion. They only show that this particular experiment failed. Is human solidarity no more than a dream that can never be realized? That is often suggested by writings about the kibbutz which use the word “utopia” liberally. Human solidarity cannot exist at all or only for short periods. But these generalities are not supported by the actual experiences. Nor are they terribly useful. It is much more helpful to see the history of the kibbutzim as an extended experiment trying to work out ways in which human beings can foster solidarity. The original ideas that the first set-

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tlers tried to put into practice had serious problems which we can now identify. But when the settlers cast about for alternatives ways of arranging their affairs, what they found was the pervasive capitalism of Israeli society, and so they borrowed this or that capitalist method. The original institutions meant to foster solidarity could, of course, not be rectified or improved upon by using capitalist practices and institutions. However no other methods or techniques were available. No one can fault the kibbutzniks for explicating socialist solidarity as they did. They believed in the “moral value of labor”; and they were especially insistent that manual labor was as good as, or even better, than intellectual work. They also sought to abolish mind numbing repetitive labor and to make working enjoyable and satisfying. They believed that hiring laborers was not legitimate on the grounds that the relation to hired laborer is inevitably exploitative. Private property was not acceptable; all property was to belong to the community and to be distributed among the members according to the communities’ decisions. The kibbutz had some officers, elected for limited terms. But they could not make major decisions. Those had to be made by the entire community. Democracy was an important value. While, on the one hand, the Kibbutz stood for individual freedom, the members agreed that the interest of the individual must be subordinated to the interests of the group. If your wishes or opinions are in the minority, you must subordinate them to those of the majority. Excessive desire for privacy was regarded as “queer.” 33 This interpretation of solidarity was not limited to the Jewish communities in Palestine, and later in Israel. Very similar ideas were dominant on “The Farm”—a large and thriving community in Tennessee founded in the 1970s by Stephen and InaMay Gaskin. 34 These communities had a number of important goals: they tried to build a world in which all human beings were equal. Equality in turn implied democracy: everyone was to have equal power to run the community in which they lived. Equality for women was a specific and pressing instance of equality in general. So was the absence of exploitation: in a society where all are equal, no one can profit from the work of others without their consent. That also meant that the community could not hire wage labor. Equality was a key component of solidarity. The fact that no one has managed to even approach that ideal does not show that it is utopian. But the experiences of the kibbutzim show us something else, namely that we do not know what institutions, practices, human characters are needed for far going equality in any given society. That is the important lesson to be drawn from the history of kibbutzim. Our general ideals may do us credit, but unless we can develop very specific ways in which the ideals can be put into practice in a given social situation, the ideals remain just that—ideals. At some point, we need to stop talking movingly about

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equality and devote serious and extended study to different ways in which equality might be made a reality. The kibbutzim can teach us something about the difficulties of establishing genuine equality in a group. The distribution of clothing is the first example. The early kibbutzim distributed clothing once a week. Following the principle of equality, as it was then understood, people received the clothes that were on top of the pile when it was their turn. People ended up with clothes much too large or much too small—but everyone received the same treatment. It was soon obvious that this practice was not a desirable form of equality. Solidarity was not enhanced by people looking ridiculous and being made to feel uncomfortable. After a while clothing was sorted by size and people were giving their size; equality was modified to acknowledge that human bodies differ in size. But even that imposed more uniformity than seemed desirable in a community that held individual autonomy in high esteem. Finally every member received a sum of money with which to procure clothing to their taste. The demands for individual autonomy were met by introducing cash payments to members. Was that the nose of the capitalist camel in the tent? 35 Equality demanded by solidarity may conflict with the demands of individual autonomy. Solidary communities need to learn how to bridge that conflict. It is not clear that the kibbutzim managed that. The lesson to be learned from this story is surely that we need to ask very specific questions: what is the best way of providing clothing for members of a community who are dedicated to the principle of equality? It is obvious from this story that the question has no self-evident answer. But a community that seeks to embody the principle of equality but cannot answer a question like this is clearly going to fail. Corresponding questions arise with respect to food, lodging, and work. Especially important are, obviously, questions with respect to gender equality. The institution of the children’s house was a more serious example of the failure of the early principles of solidarity. The early kibbutzim raised their children in separate spaces because they regarded the nuclear family as a “bourgeois” institution. They supported, at least in principle, complete equality for women and hence wanted to make it possible for them to work even if they had small children. The children’s house also was expected to raise young persons accustomed from the first day of their life to live with other persons in close community. It intended to transmit the communitarian values of the parents to their children. As we have seen already the transmission of communitarian values— certainly not as understood in the early years—turned out to be a failure. The children’s houses also came under serious criticism because many mothers found them to be a terrible burden. They missed being able to cuddle their children and to put them to bed. One mother reported that she would, from time to time, go off the kibbutz with her children in

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order to be able to have them sleep with her in the bed. Some women, still members of a kibbutz today, report missing their mothers’ physical affection when they were children. But the children had no choice and the mothers thought that they needed to suppress their feelings for the good of the community. 36 The sharpest criticism of socialist solidarity as practiced in the early communities comes from another kibbutz established about 30 years ago. All its members grew up in more traditional kibbutzim; they are committed to this communal, anti-capitalist way of life. But their understanding of socialist solidarity makes a great deal more room for individual autonomy and decision making. In the kibbutz Samar, there is still, after 30 years, a box with cash on the table in the communal dining room, from which everyone takes what they need for small expenses. No community discussions are needed. Individual members do not need permission from the community to make a purchase. Major decisions are made by the entire community. But if some member has an idea for a new project, she will discuss it with other members and if they are interested, they will undertake the project. If it fails so much the worse. The central principle is to make as much room for individual decision-making and inventiveness as is compatible with having thriving agricultural and other projects. 37 Kibbutz Samar is interesting in its own right. It is also interesting because it shows that not all objections to the original interpretation of socialist solidarity come from people who have embraced capitalism to various degrees. One misses the most important lessons to be learned from the kibbutzim if one interprets their history only as an argument for or against capitalism. The real underlying debate concerns the meaning of socialist solidarity and the concrete measures needed to foster it. Here are two more examples of our ignorance of the indispensable details of socialist solidarity and how one might produce it. The early communities were quite certain that equality demanded that they abstain from hiring labor. Once some workers are members of the community and therefore owners, and others work for wages without being participants in making fundamental decisions, equality has been breached and with it socialist solidarity. This is obvious and there has been a great deal of criticism of the kibbutzim for hiring temporary labor, for instance, for harvesting. But obviously the demand for workers fluctuates not only in agriculture. In the early days, the members of the community were pitching in to work weekends or longer hours when there was more work to be done. But in the long run that was not sufficient; the problem of fluctuating demand for labor had to be met in some other way. The socialist islands in a sea of capitalism borrowed a capitalist technique and hired workers. It is still not clear what alternative they could have employed. One could imagine a socialist country making provisions to shift labor from one

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workplace to another. But nothing comparable existed for the kibbutzim and so, having no alternatives, they used a capitalist technique. The second example concerns what we call the “free rider” problem. In the kibbutz people talk about “parasites”—members who do not work hard, who never volunteer when extra efforts are needed, who do as little as they can while deriving maximal benefits. The kibbutzim have found no solution to this problem short of paying wages and then paying some people more for exceptional service. We might conclude from that experience that, as many Americans believe, people do not put out a good faith effort unless they receive monetary reward. The history of the early kibbutzim shows that to be false. But elsewhere, in Japan, with a long history of small and tight neighborhood associations and cooperative farming, the free rider problem seems to have been solved through communal pressure. Free riders were ostracized. No one spoke to them or otherwise noticed them. That sort of pressure, apparently, was effective. It is, once again, not self-evident that free riding can be controlled only through paying differential wages. But this topic too requires much more study. We see this striving for socialist solidarity seriously impeded by our ignorance of the day-to-day details, of feasible methods and techniques to meet the challenges of agriculture and industrial production. At issue are not the large principles. The issues concern the details which we do not know enough about.

CONCLUSION The capitalists keep repeating that “there is no alternative.” Socialists have been trapped into responding to that claim and therefore keep repeating that “another world is possible.” But that is not really helpful. As long as we do not know how to solve the detailed problems of socialist solidarity, another world is in fact not possible. If we are going to make it possible, we need to study carefully and methodically the failures as well as the accomplishments of all the different efforts at building socialist solidarity. We need to meet the failures by devising new techniques and trying them out. We need to build a careful record of all the experiments and their results. Armed with that information future builders of socialist solidarity may well succeed where so far we have failed.

NOTES 1. A shorter version of this paper will be published in the Radical Philosophy Review. 2. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978): 633.

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3. Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader, 326. 4. Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, Looking Forward: Participatory Economics for the Twenty-first Century [for reasons of his own, Albert does not use the word “socialism.” He prefers to talk about “parecon.”]; David Schweickart, After Capitalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002): 68, 73; Milton Fisk, “Social Feelings and the Morality of Socialism,” in Anatole Anton and Richard Schmitt, eds. Towards a New Socialism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007): 117–143; Richard Schmitt, “Can We Get There from Here? Reflections about Fundamental Social and Human Change,” in Anatole Anton and Richard Schmitt, eds. Towards a New Socialism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007). 5. See Sally Scholz, Political Solidarity (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008): 22. 6. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982): 151–152. 7. Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990); Sally Scholz, Political Solidarity (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008): 3; Amy Allen, “Solidarity after Identity Politics: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Feminist Theory,” in Philosophy and Social Criticism 25 (1999): 99. 8. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989): 191. 9. Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (Forgotten Books, 2008): 5. It is interesting to see that view being revived today. See, for instance, Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis (New York: Penguin, 2010). 10. Charles E. Fritz, Disasters and Mental Health: Therapeutic Principles drawn from Disaster Studies (Newark, DE: Disaster Research Center, 1996): 10. 11. Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Viking, 2009). 12. Sam Bowles, “Conflict: Altruism’s Midwife,” Nature 456 (2008): 326–327. 13. Scholz, Political Solidarity. I am indebted to Jesse Kyle for drawing my attention to that book. 14. Allen, “Solidarity after Identity Politics”; see also Tommy Shelby, We Who Are Black (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Larry Blum, “Three Kinds of Race Related Solidarity” Journal of Social Philosophy 38 (2007): 62; Joseph M. Schwartz, “From Domestic to Global Solidarity: The Dialectic between Particular and Universal in Constructing Global Solidarity,” Journal of Social Philosophy 38 (2007): 131–147. 15. Roger Gottlieb, A Spirituality of Resistance (New York: Crossroads Publishing, 1999). 16. Dr. Peter Wolff documents this in an unpublished manuscripts that describes the generous solidarity that binds the Eritreans to each other in their 30-year resistance to Ethiopia. When Eritrea wins and finally liberates itself, the former leaders of a thoroughly democratic resistance movement turn into violent and corrupt dictators. Personal Communication. 17. See, for instance, Avery Koler, “Justice and the Politics of Deference,” Journal of Political Philosophy 13 (2005): 154–155. 18. Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care, Personal, Political, Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006): 131. 19. Enrique Dussel, “Deconstructing the Concept of ‘Tolerance’: From Tolerance to Solidarity” Constellations 11 (2004): 326–333. 20. Veronique Munoz-Dardė, “Fraternity and Justice,” in Solidarity, ed. Kurt Bayertz (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999): 81–97. 21. The Growth of Citizen Co-ops (accessed on 02/07/10 at http://www.alternet.org/ environment/144969/the_growth_of_citizen_co-ops_is_a_positive_development_as_ corporations_fail_us_in_every_way_/). But of course different observers of Mondragon have reached rather different conclusions about it. For a dissenting view see

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Sharyn Kasmir, The Myth of Mondragon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). 22. Andrew Mason, Community, Solidarity and Belonging: Levels of Community and their Normative Significance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 27. 23. Hans W. Bierhoff and Beate Kuepper, “Social Psychology of Solidarity,” in Solidarity, ed. Bayertz (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999): 133–156. 24. G. A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009): 4. 25. Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell. 26. Solnit, Paradise, 7. 27. Peter Kropotkin, The Black Flag: Peter Kropotkin on Anarchism (St. Petersburg, FL: Red and Black Publishers, 2009): 94. 28. See also Michael Bakunin, God and the State, accessed September 21, 2011 at http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bakunin/godandstate/godandstate_ ch1.html; Rudolf Rocker, Ideology of Anarchism, accessed September 21, 2011, at http:// www.marxists.org/reference/archive/rocker-rudolf/misc/anarchism-anarcho-syndicalism.htm. Rousseau made similar claims, as did Robert Owen. See John Restakis, Humanizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2010). 29. Susan Woolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 30. John Restakis, Humanizing the Economy. 31. Daniel Gavron, The Kibbutz: Awakening from Utopia (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). 32. Gavron, The Kibbutz, 195 ff. 33. Melford Spiro, Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia (New York: Schocken Books, 1972): 11ff. 34. Rupert Fike, ed., Voices from the Farm: Adventures in Community Living (Summertown, TN: Book Publishing Co., 1998). 35. Gavron, The Kibbutz, 18. 36. Gavron, The Kibbutz, 191ff. 37. Gavron, The Kibbutz, 245ff.

REFERENCES Andrew Mason, Community, Solidarity and Belonging: Levels of Community and Their Normative Significance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Bakunin, Michael. God and the State, accessed September 21, 2011 at http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bakunin/godandstate/godandstate_ch1.html. Bierhoff, Hans W., and Beate Kuepper, “Social Psychology of Solidarity,” in Bayertz, ed. Solidarity. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999, 133–156. Cohen, G. A. Why Not Socialism? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Fike, Rupert, ed., Voices from the Farm: Adventures in Community Living. Summertown, TN: Book Publishing Co., 1998. Gavron, Daniel. The Kibbutz: Awakening from Utopia. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Kropotkin, Peter. The Black Flag: Peter Kropotkin on Anarchism. St. Petersburg, FL: Red and Black Publishers, 2009. Restakis, John. Humanizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2010. Rocker, Rudolf. Ideology of Anarchism, accessed on 2/2/11 at http://www.marxists.org/ reference/archive/rocker-rudolf/misc/anarchism-anarcho-syndicalism.htm. Solnit, Rebecca. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disasters. New York: Viking, 2009.

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Spiro, Melford. Kibbutz: Venture in Uotpia. New York: Schocken Books, 1972. Woolf, Susan. Meaning in Life and Why It Matters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.

EIGHT Is Socialism Relevant in the “Networked Information Age”? A Critical Assessment of The Wealth of Networks Tony Smith

The first question raised by Richard Schmitt in his Introduction to the present volume could not be more basic: What is socialism? The most familiar answer to this question is that socialism would be a new mode of production replacing commodification, profit seeking, and the capital/ wage labor relation with freely associated labor and the proliferation of public goods. For most socialists the institutionalization of such a mode of production would obviously require a radical break from the present social order. More specifically, socialists accuse liberal egalitarians who believe that capitalist market societies could operate in a normatively acceptable manner if only the proper legislative and regulatory framework were in place. In the socialist view, liberal egalitarians affirm core values and social relationships—substantive freedom, a flourishing public sphere, a fair global order, and so on (values and relationships socialists affirm as well)—that are in principle incompatible with the capitalism they also affirm. 1 Yochai Benkler has been called “the leading intellectual of the information age.” 2 His recent work, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, is, I believe, one of the most important attempts to vindicate a liberal egalitarian perspective in recent decades. 3 Unlike most other advocates of this position, however, Benkler does not remain on the level of abstract philosophical ideas. In Marxian terminology, he presents what is in effect a historical materialist account 157

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of the dialectical interactions of the forces of production and production relations in the contemporary era. Benkler himself does not refer to “socialism” once in his work. Nevertheless, his account implicitly calls into question every element of the familiar picture of socialism sketched above. A critical analysis of The Wealth of Networks therefore provides an exceptional opportunity to consider what, if anything, the socialist project might mean in the present moment of world history.

COMMONS-BASED PEER PRODUCTION: A NEW MODE OF PRODUCTION? Benkler’s central claim is that today “a new mode of production [is] emerging in the middle of the most advanced economies in the world— those that are the most fully computer networked and for which information goods and services have come to occupy the highest-valued roles.” 4 “Information goods and services,” of course, have been an essential component of human life from its inception. The main characteristic distinguishing them from other sorts of goods and services has been well known for quite some time as well: information is “non-rivalrous.” 5 There are, however, three dimensions of the production and distribution of information goods and services today that together constitute a new mode of production in Benkler’s view. Means of Production The paradigmatic technologies throughout the industrial age were large-scale single-purpose machines, requiring massive investments in fixed capital. The scale of these investments led to extensive centralized ownership and control of the means of production through joint-stock companies. If satisfactory returns on the investments were to be won, economies of scale had to be obtained from extended runs of standardized products. In this period, then, the economy was dominated by private firms devoted to the sale of commodities in mass markets. As in many other reconstructions of economic history, in Benkler’s account the “industrial age” gives way to an era in which “information, knowledge, and culture have become the central high-value-added economic activities of the most advanced economies.” 6 He gives this familiar story a twist, however, asserting that two “information ages” must be distinguished. The first, the industrial information age, continued to employ means of production requiring large-scale fixed capital investments: The core distinguishing feature of communications, information, and cultural production since the mid-nineteenth century was that effective communication . . . required ever-larger investment of physical capital. Large-circulation mechanical presses, the telegraph system, powerful

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radio and later television transmitters, cable and satellite, and the mainframe computer became necessary to make information and communicate it on scales that went beyond the very local. 7

A break from the industrial epoch is now taking place with the emergence of the networked information age. Thanks to developments that have brought down the cost of computing power, a high proportion of adults in relatively wealthy regions of the global economy (and to an everincreasing extent elsewhere as well) now own personal computers, workstations, laptops, notebooks and pads with considerable processing power and memory. Network connections uniting these various devices with each other are also affordable and close to ubiquitous. The radical newness of this state of affairs should not be underestimated. Unlike the means of production of the industrial epoch (including the industrial information age) ownership of the characteristic means of production of the networked information age is widely dispersed. Labor Relations There have always been large numbers of people with the psychological disposition to willingly cooperate with others in the pursuit of shared ends outside the authority structures of firms and without market rewards. 8 What is different today is that the technologies and associated economics of the “networked economy” now make it possible to mobilize the creative energies of such people on an unprecedented scale. In specific, those engaged in the production and use of knowledge products can communicate with each other almost instantaneously and costlessly whenever and wherever they choose. If individuals have the time and the disposition, they can freely choose to cooperate together in the production of information goods or services on a scale that was previously impossible. Output Distribution The immense fixed capital costs associated with the industrial age and the industrial information age had to be covered by the sale of mass produced commodities. The fact that computing power is now relatively inexpensive removes this pressure. Further, computers and electronic networks allow additional units of knowledge products to be produced and distributed at close to zero marginal cost. This enables knowledge products, which function as both inputs and outputs in the information economy, to be distributed as free public goods on an unprecedented scale. Benkler terms the new mode of production defined by these three elements commons-based peer production, a system of “cooperative and coordinate action carried out through radically distributed, nonmarket

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mechanisms that do not depend on proprietary strategies.” 9 He does not believe that private property, market transactions, or for-profit firms are about to disappear. Nonetheless, he writes, New patterns of production—nonmarket and radically decentralized— will emerge, if permitted, at the core, rather than the periphery of the most advanced economies. [This] promises to enable social production and exchange to play a much larger role, alongside property- and market-based production, than they ever have in modern democracies. 10

There is in fact already overwhelming evidence that “nonmarket behavior is becoming central to producing our information and cultural environment.” 11 The successes of the open software movement are an immensely important example: Ideas like free Web-based e-mail, hosting services for personal Web pages, instant messenger software, social networking sites, and welldesigned search engines emerged more from individuals or small groups of people wanting to solve their own problems or try something neat than from firms realizing there were profits to be gleaned. 12

Encryption software, peer-to-peer file-sharing software, sound and image editors, and many other examples can be added to this list. “Indeed, it is difficult to find software not initiated by amateurs.” 13 Individuals cooperating outside firms and the system of market rewards have also collectively produced and freely distributed encyclopedias that have proven useful to millions, entirely new genres of music, political commentary and information about events across the globe, and so on. 14 Commons-based peer production bears a close family resemblance to the familiar vision of socialism sketched in the first paragraph of this chapter. Socialists reject commodification, the capital/wage labor relation, and the sacrifice of all other social ends to private profits. In commonsbased peer production a critical mass of inputs, and all outputs, are distributed within information networks as free goods, rather than as commodities to be sold for profit by capitalist firms. The power to labor does not take the form of a commodity purchased by capital; the living labor that transforms inputs into final products is organized on the basis of free association, outside the capital/wage labor relation. But this “new mode of production” is not an anticipation of something in the indefinite future, after a rupture from the present social order has occurred. It is already emerging within this order, and it does not replace capitalist production. As we shall see below, in Benkler’s account commons-based peer production can flourish alongside continuing capitalist market relations, as long as the right legal framework is in place. In all these respects commons-based peer production would appear to undermine the familiar socialist view that the core normative values of liberal egalitarianism cannot in principle be adequately institutionalized

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within the present social order. Liberal egalitarians evaluate social practices, institutions, and entire social systems by the degree to which they further the autonomy and flourishing of individuals, who each warrant equal respect. Liberal theorists have long argued that market societies in principle institutionalize the mutual recognition of the equality and autonomy of individuals far better than command economies. Individuals have the freedom to engage in trade of goods and services whenever doing so can be foreseen to further their life plans, and efficiencies resulting from the market competition help provide individuals with access to the material conditions for human flourishing. Benkler insists, however, that a vibrant sphere of commons-based peer production results in a much more thorough institutionalization of core liberal egalitarian values than has previously been possible. He discusses this transformation under three major headings. 15 Autonomy When production and distribution are organized within firms, individuals participate in wage labor only if they are granted permission to do so by the owners/controllers of those firms. Permission will only be granted if they are willing to follow directives issued by the owners and controllers. In common-based peer production, in contrast, means of production are owned by the producers themselves (their computers and network connections), many other inputs into the production process are available as free public goods, and the results of production can be easily and inexpensively distributed over information networks. Under these circumstances no one has to ask for permission to participate in production and distribution processes, and the form this participation takes does not depend upon the decisions of others. One can simply decide to contribute, and the form the contribution will take, on one’s own. 16 By definition, such an arrangement significantly increases substantive autonomy. Public Discourse In the liberal egalitarian framework governments are required to protect individual rights, avoid unreasonable concentrations of market power, ensure that all citizens have the proper social minimum, provide public goods and avoid public bads, and so on, all of which furthers substantive autonomy. Unfortunately, the coercive powers of the state are also a potential threat to the autonomy and flourishing of individuals, a danger that is especially acute when political elites and economic elites collude. Contemporary liberal egalitarian theorists accordingly place great weight on a flourishing public sphere, capable of monitoring exercises of power, checking abuses of that power, and influencing legislation through public discourse and social movements.

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The concentrated and centralized media of the industrial age and of the industrial information age greatly limited the ability of individuals to participate effectively in processes of political will formation: Those who are on the inside of the media [are] able to exert substantially greater influence over the agenda, the shape of the conversation, and through these the outcomes of public discourse, than other individuals or groups in society. Moreover, for commercial organizations, this power could be sold—and as a business model, one should expect it to be. . . . Second, issues of genuine public concern and potential political contention are toned down and structured as a performance between iconic representatives of large bodies of opinion, in order to avoid alienating too much of the audience. 17

In the networked information age, in contrast, a far wider range of individuals have the ability to contribute effectively to the collective interpretation of events and policy proposals through electronic forums organized as a form of commons-based peer production. Individuals therefore have a far greater ability to gain access to a diversity of viewpoints regarding the interpretation of events and policy proposals. The collective process of sharing information and evaluations of issues of public interest in many-to-many relationships outside the structures of corporate owned (or state controlled) media furthers the dynamism of the public sphere far more than the one-to-many communication flows of industrial media ever could. Global Justice Billions of individuals in poor regions of the global economy do not have access to basic nutrition or medicines. The injustice of this state of affairs is undeniable for anyone like Benkler committed to the values of liberal egalitarianism. Lack of access to scientific-knowledge relevant to growing food and producing medicines is one important causal factor underlying this state of affairs. A global market system in which the needs and wants of consumers with extensive disposable income have first priority is another. The emergence of commons-based peer production promises to improve matters greatly by making relevant scientifictechnological knowledge freely available in poorer regions of the world market, aiding in the production of low-cost (or free) medical drugs to meet the most pressing health needs. Turning to issues of nutrition, public plant breeding programs have a very impressive track record of developing seeds appropriate to the climate and soil of specific regions. With the rise of information networks such programs should be even more effective in helping individuals in poor regions of the global economy meet their nutritional needs. 18 Global justice requires that individuals throughout the planet have access to the material preconditions for human flourishing to the greatest

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feasible extent. Medical care and adequate nutrition are two of the most important of these preconditions. The potential for commons-based peer production to generate and freely distribute the scientific-technological knowledge regarding neglected and health and nutrition problems of poor countries justifies Benkler’s conclusion that “this is where freedom and justice coincide”: The practical freedom of individuals to act and associate freely—free from the constraints of proprietary endowment, free from the constraints of formal relations of contract or stable organizations—allows individual action in ad hoc, informal association to emerge as a new global mover. . . . It offers a new path, alongside those of the market and formal government investment in public welfare, for achieving definable and significant improvements in human development throughout the world. 19

The Political Project It was not difficult for socialists to argue that industrial capitalism could not in principle institutionalize the sort of substantive autonomy, democratic will-formation, and global justice that the liberal egalitarians advocated. Benkler, however, has given strong reasons to doubt that the criticisms of industrial capitalism (including what Benkler terms the “industrial information age”) can be assumed to hold for the networked information economy. If substantive autonomy, a democratic public sphere, and global justice can in principle now be institutionalized within the contemporary social order, the familiar socialist case for undertaking a world historical break from that order would be undermined to a considerable extent, if not entirely. The world historical project of constructing a socialist alternative would have to be abandoned as well, replaced by the quite different project of ensuring that commons-based peer production could flourish alongside capitalist sectors. The latter is Benkler’s political project. He emphatically rejects the technological determinist thesis that the development of information technologies in itself automatically brings about a society in which commons-based peer production plays a central role. In many sectors of the contemporary economy there are incumbents whose profits are directly threatened by commons-based peer production. These incumbents have great resources to influence the political and legal system in the hope of maintaining (or even extending) their privileged positions. Powerful cultural beliefs regarding the moral justification and economic efficiency of private property and markets can be mobilized to this end as well. Incumbents have won great victories, as intellectual property rights have been extended in both scope and enforcement. 20 The principle of “net neutrality,” which Benkler considers an essential condition of the pos-

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sibility of a flourishing commons-based peer production sector, has come under increasing pressure. 21 Fortunately, Benkler asserts, the stifling of commons-based peer production is not inevitable either. Incumbents face strong opposition from members of the open source movement, corporations that provide tools and materials for commons-based peer production, and the growing number of corporations that have incorporated commons-based peer production in their long-term business strategies (IBM is perhaps the leading example). 22 For Benkler, then, the future prospects of commonsbased peer production are open-ended. We do not have to choose between a for-profit capitalist market sector, on the one hand, and commons-based peer production, on the other. In principle, he asserts, it is possible for capitalist market production and commons-based peer production to complement each other, with each making its own contribution to human autonomy and flourishing. Simplifying somewhat, the former remains suitable in cases where the relevant means of production are too expensive to be owned by those engaged in living labor, while the latter is appropriate when the means of production are inexpensive enough to be owned by them. All that is required is the political will to resist the imposition of a legal and regulatory framework privileging the short-sighted interests of incumbents: From the beginning of legal responses to the Internet and up to this writing . . . the primary role of law has been reactive and reactionary. It has functioned as a point of resistance to the emergence of the networked information economy. It has been used to contain the risks posed by the emerging capabilities of the networked information environment. What the emerging networked information economy therefore needs, in almost all cases, is not regulatory protection, but regulatory abstinence. 23

If these claims were correct, socialism would be a relic of a by-gone age. The only relevant practical imperative would be a 21st-century variant of the traditional liberal egalitarian project of ensuring the proper background conditions necessary for the economy to function in a normatively acceptable manner. I shall argue in the remainder of this chapter that the rise of the “networked information economy” does not eliminate the need to struggle for socialism. Nor does it remove the internal contradiction within liberal egalitarianism of affirming the value of an autonomous citizenry, a dynamic public sphere, and a just global system, while simultaneously affirming a social order that rules out their adequate institutionalization. The rise of commons-based peer production does, however, provide grounds for a new answer to the “What is socialism?” question: socialism is a set of democratic social forms that allows the emancipatory potential

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of commons-based peer production to be adequately institutionalized, beyond the restrictions imposed by capitalism.

A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT I would like to begin by noting a tension at the heart of Benkler’s analysis. Sometimes Benkler talks of the sphere of commons-based peer production as being at the “core” of the contemporary economy. Other times he pictures it as operating “alongside” for-profit market production. At first glance his off-hand remark that “someone needs to work for money, at least some of the time, to pay the rent and put food on the table,” appears compatible with both descriptions. 24 Matters appear differently when we note his implicit admission that the time devoted to commonsbased peer production does not come from a reduction in the time devoted to wage labor: instead “the time can be drawn from the excess time we normally dedicate to having fun and participating in social interactions.” 25 In other words, even after the rise of commons-based peer production, the capital/wage labor relation provides the central mechanism for social reproduction. And this implies that capitalist production remains the “core” of the economy. Benkler insists that a social world including commons-based peer production alongside for-profit capitalist production counts as a significant advance over the industrial age and the industrial information age from the standpoint of essential liberal egalitarian values. He justifies this assertion by arguing that commons-based peer production furthers individual autonomy, deliberation, and decision making in the public sphere, and global justice. This line of thought is broadly correct. But it is only half the story. The relatively subordinate place of commons-based peer production within capitalism imposes systematic limits to the extent to which commons-based peer production can contribute to autonomy, a flourishing public sphere, and global justice in the present social order. It also forces us to reconsider the future prospects of this new form of production as long as the present social order remains in place. Autonomy Benkler’s discussion of autonomy is limited to a consideration of the activities of those engaged in commons-based peer production. Insofar as participants in this practice choose what projects they contribute to, the parts of the project they work on, how much of their free time they devote to the project, and so on, it does indeed make sense to speak of autonomy here. But the limits to these gains are significant, and should be explicitly acknowledged as well.

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First, Benkler treats money as one sort of psychological motivation among others. 26 But the acquisition of money remains an objective necessity in our world, whatever our subjective dispositions might be. The use of money is not a matter of mere convenience. That may be true of societies with markets. But in capitalist market societies individuals are compelled to obtain access to money. 27 To be without money is to be literally outside this sort of society. The economic agents Benkler discusses may own some means of production required for commons-based peer production (their personal computers) and have inexpensive access to others (the Internet). But they do not have access to their means of subsistence as a matter of right. Nor do they have access to the means of production required to produce means of subsistence. Since means of subsistence generally remain in the commodity form, these agents must acquire monetary resources to obtain them. However autonomous they may be while engaged in commons-based peer production, they, like other agents who do not own or control capital, must sell their labor power as a commodity in order to gain access to the money required to purchase means of subsistence, a form of structural coercion that remains even if overt violence or its threat is absent. And since they, like other wage laborers, will not be hired unless those who own and control capital foresee that their (surplus) labor will create an amount of economic value exceeding the value of their wages, we may also speak of them being coerced into a situation of exploitation. Participants in commons-based peer production may enjoy a significant degree of autonomy outside the capital/wage labor relation. But, once again, Benkler himself concedes that this is “time . . . drawn from the excess time we normally dedicate to having fun and participating in social interactions.” 28 Insofar as much of their remaining waking time is subject to structural coercion and exploitation inside the capital/wage labor relation, the restrictions on their autonomy remain profound. Whatever other changes the networked economy has brought, it has not made this Marxian point irrelevant. 29 The most basic terms in which our society should be conceptualized are at stake here. According to liberal doctrine, liberal societies do not privilege a particular conception of the good on the level of society as a whole. Each individual is free to determine his or her own “conception of the good,” subject only to the proviso that he or she respects the equal right of other individuals to do the same. And “capital,” whether taken as a physical thing used in production and distribution or as a sum of money, is essentially a means to further the human ends that embody the various conceptions of the good. But in capitalism units of production undertake production privately, and must then validate the social necessity of their endeavors through sale of their products for money. Units of production that do not relentlessly and successfully direct their endeavors to valorization, that is, to appropriating monetary returns exceeding

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the initial money invested, will over time necessarily tend to be pushed to the margins of social life or eradicated altogether. For these units, Use-values must . . . never be treated as [their] immediate aim . . . nor must the profit on any single transaction. [The] aim is rather the unceasing movement of profit-making . . . the ceaseless augmentation of value. 30

“Capital” is first and foremost a totalizing drive to valorization operating on the level of society as a whole. This implies that, pace liberal doctrine, there is an end, a conception of the good, holding on the level of society as a whole. But it is not a human end, not a human good. It is capital’s good, “the ceaseless augmentation of value” as an end-in-itself. This does not mean that human agents are mere automatons, puppets whose strings move in response to the needs of capital. Human agents have causal powers emerging from processes of natural and social evolution, and capital presupposes, rather than creates, these powers. While these powers are shaped, and new ones developed, under the capital form, the causal powers of human agents remain their causal powers. Nonetheless, due to the historically specific way in which social life is organized—the separation of units of production from each other, the separation of working men and women from (most) means of production and subsistence, and the consequent subordination of living labor under the valorization imperative—“capital . . . valorizes itself through the appropriation of alien labour.” 31 When this occurs, the powers of living labor appear in the alien form of powers of capital. 32 In liberal egalitarian theory a Kantian “kingdom of ends,” in which individuals mutually recognize each other as autonomous ends in themselves, forms the normative standard for assessing institutional frameworks. But when the “self-valorization of value” is the dominant end on the level of society as a whole, it is impossible for humans to be adequately treated as autonomous ends in themselves in a substantive, as opposed to merely formal sense, given the coercive pressures reducing them to means for capital accumulation. This continues to hold for variants of capitalism that include commons-based peer production. Second, the systematic limits on autonomy imposed by capital on those engaged in commons-based peer production go beyond the time they are forced to spend in wage labor. In this context it is extremely important to recall that for Marx the powers of capital are not limited to the expropriated powers of commodity-producing living labor in the wage form. The powers of nature are also appropriated by capital as its powers, 33 as are the heritage of pre-capitalist societies, 34 the powers of scientific and technological knowledge, 35 and so on. Unpaid care labor in households also provides a free service for capital insofar as it contributes to the production and reproduction of capital’s most important commodity, labor power. The “free gifts” to capital provided by nature, history,

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scientific-technical knowledge, and care labor are part of Marx’s value theory. Marx fully recognized that the valorization process would come to an immediate halt were it not for these gifts. 36 Units of capital today are happy to appropriate the creative achievements of social labor outside the capital/wage labor relation as “free gifts.” Consider, for example, the millions of lines of open software code used by corporations in their processes of production and distribution, the manner in which firms’ marketing and design have taken advantage of millions of hours spent by consumers providing evaluations of and design suggestions for commodities, or the new forms of commodities that open software has helped produce. 37 Insofar as commons-based peer production is incorporated within capital circuits as a “free gift,” those engaged in this form of production are in effect working for capital for free. They are therefore “exploited” by capital in a broad sense of the term. The fact that they freely chose to engage in commons-based peer production complicates this state of affairs without changing the essential matter. 38 As long as capital reigns they are not free to free to prevent their living labor from being transformed into a power of capital in this way. Third, the systematic limits on autonomy imposed by capital relevant to commons-based peer production go beyond those imposed on individuals who participate in it. We can begin by reviewing Marx’s general description of technology’s role in the capital/wage labor relation, and then asking how the rise of commons-based peer production might affect this account. Regarding innovation in the labor process Marx wrote: John Stuart Mill says “It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.” That is, however, by no means the aim of the application of machinery under capitalism. Like every other instrument for increasing the productivity of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities and, by shortening the part of the working day in which the worker works for himself, to lengthen the other part, the part he gives to the capitalist for nothing. The machine is a means for producing surplus-value. 39

The ever-present danger that an investment in machinery will become technologically outdated before satisfactory returns have been appropriated (moral obsolescence) reinforces the tendency for technological changes in the workplace to be associated with an intensification of the labor process. 40 In these circumstances it should be no surprise that machinery and the scientific-technical knowledge upon which it is based are experienced by individual workers as alien. 41 Collective organization can overcome this sense of powerlessness, but collective organization is undermined by divisions within the workforce, and technological change may foster such divisions in a variety of ways. Technologically induced unemployment can set those desperate for work against those desperate to retain their jobs. 42 Technologies may also make the threat of shifting

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investment from one group of workers to another more effective. Technologies that deskill those enjoying relatively high levels of remuneration and control over their labor process also shift the balance in power between capital and labor in favor of the former. 43 Technologies that undercut the effectiveness of strikes must be mentioned in this context as well. 44 It is important to stress that the social consequences of technological innovation are not always foreseeable. The very technologies introduced to divide the workforce, deskill certain categories of workers, or break strikes, may in certain contexts contribute to worker unity, enhance the skills of other workers, and help labor struggles succeed. Nonetheless, ownership and control of capital grants its holders the power to initiate and direct the innovation process in the workplace. As long as this power is in place, Marx thought, technological change will tend to reinforce the structural coercion and exploitation at the heart of the capital/wage labor relation, subordinating human flourishing to the flourishing of capital. What, if anything, in the above account needs to be revised in light of the networked information economy? Benkler himself implicitly acknowledges that wage labor remains and will remain the dominant social form in which individuals gain access to the means of subsistence (the number of wage laborers in the global economy has in fact greatly increased in the past decades). And so the key question is whether the use of information technologies in offices and factories today corroborates the continuing relevance of Marx’s account. It does, although there is not space to document the point here. 45 The introduction of advanced information technologies in capitalist workplaces has been correlated with an intensification and extension of the workday. Workers’ role in determining the design and use of machinery in the labor process continues to be radically restricted, despite all the rhetoric of worker “empowerment.” It continues to be taken as “natural” that the introduction of advanced machinery “causes” unemployment. Information technologies have enabled cross-border production chains to proliferate, making it much easier for workers in one region of the globe to be played off against those of another. The process of objectifying workers’ skills in machinery has if anything accelerated, as has the use of technologies that enable operations to continue during strikes. There have also been new developments in capital/wage labor relations since Marx’s day made possible by information technologies, such as electronic monitoring of the workforce on a massive scale, 46 and the combination of extreme work process fragmentation with extreme geographical dispersal of work fragments that mathematical modeling of employees and consultants allows. 47 These developments can be easily accommodated within Marx’s framework. Insofar as these results of commons-based peer production have been appropriated by capital as a free gift, we may assume that they have contributed to all these phenomena. Insofar as the phenomena restrict the autonomy of those

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trapped within the capital/wage labor relation, participants in commonsbased peer production have substantively contributed to the erosion of their autonomy, even if they would not have chosen to have the fruits of their labor used in this fashion. Public Discourse Commons-based peer production has enabled new forms of active participation in public discourse, as Benkler rightly emphasizes. If the question is whether participation in the public sphere can be more extensive in the networked information age than it was previously, the answer would clearly and emphatically be yes. But the only question Benkler asks is not the only question worth asking. Anyone who accepts active participation in the public sphere as a core normative value should also inquire whether there are systematic limits to the extent to which commons-based peer production can foster this value while capital continues to reign. Unfortunately, the answer to this question is also “yes.” There are, I believe, two main sets of limits, one imposed by the continuing commodification imperative, the other by an artificial restriction on what counts as a “political” matter. There is in capitalism a necessary tendency for products taking the commodity form to proliferate, since “the ceaseless accumulation of value” requires the sale of commodities. As Guy Debord so vividly described, the circulation of physical commodities has been enveloped by an endless circulation of images (the spectacle) designed to elicit desires to possess and consume these commodities. 48 The networked economy has intensified the proliferation of commodities in many ways. It has brought with it new sorts of commodities such as computer games (whose sales now exceed those of movies and music combined). It has contributed to a significant compression of the product cycles of commodities. 49 Internet shopping has also greatly expanded the set of commodities effectively available to consumers; the net (among other things) is a sophisticated mechanism for transmitting a heightened spectacle of commodities on display. 50 Clicking from one site of advertising to another in itself no more breaks the spectacle’s dominance than using a remote control to switch from one TV channel to another. The internet does allow for consumers to act in new ways beyond staring at overt and (increasingly) covert advertisements. A significant amount of living labor outside (and sometimes inside) the capitalist workplace is devoted to the active sharing of information regarding the pros and cons of various commodities. Another chunk of time is devoted to customizing purchases, directly shaping the production process as “prosumers,” in the inimitable poetry of business jargon. These sorts of “leisure” activities should also be conceptualized as “free gifts” to capital. They represent new ways in which capital accomplishes its very old ob-

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jective of mobilizing the collective energies of human subjects in order to further “the ceaseless augmentation of value.” Other forms of activity in the networked economy illustrate the commodity imperative in a more indirect fashion. Debord has taught us that moments of the spectacle that are not themselves commodities or advertisements can still contribute to the commodification of leisure. Much of the time spent on electronic networks pursuing information about areas of personal interest (sports, celebrities, etc.) fits under this heading. So too do the various forms of role playing in virtual worlds, even if that form of behavior is qualitatively distinct from the passive reception of entertainment that typifies industrial media. After all, immersion in the spectacle is more complete the more one actively participates in its construction. 51 I argued above that a normative assessment of the extent to which commons-based peer production furthers substantive autonomy must take into account the way the results of commons-based peer production have contributed to the exploitation of living labor in the capitalist workplace. The point here is analogous. When the results of commons-based peer production have been appropriated as “free gifts” to capital, they will inevitably contribute to the subordination of leisure time to capital through the commodification of everyday life and its accompanying spectacle. The greater the power of this spectacle, the greater the systematic restriction on the flourishing of the public sphere, as “flourishing” is defined by liberal egalitarian values. To examine only how the networked economy might foster a flourishing public sphere is to examine only part of the story. What of the use of electronic networks to engage in political discussion, the case Benkler himself clearly has in mind? Much of what counts as “politics” in contemporary society is itself part of the spectacle, as Debord observed. (Consider gossip about the personalities of political elites and their personal transgressions, or the extent to which campaign rhetoric has little to do with policies actually pursued after an election.) Benkler, however, describes several examples that cannot be reduced to the circulation of gossip or ritualistic slogans, examples of effective mass political mobilization on substantive issues that mainstream media had ignored. 52 No one committed to social change should dismiss the emancipatory promise of this dimension of commons-based peer production. Even in these sorts of cases, however, another sort of systematic restriction on the flourishing of the public sphere needs to be explicitly confronted. It stems from the artificial separation of political and the economic spheres that is both a defining feature of capitalism and uncritically reflected in all variants of liberal social theory, including liberal egalitarianism. 53 In pre-capitalist class societies the appropriation of the surplus product was inextricably intertwined with the political relationship of rulers/ ruled. In contrast, class relations in capitalism are reproduced through

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transactions among (formally) free and equal individuals for their mutual benefit, rather than through the direct subjugation of slaves, serfs, or tribute-paying independent producers. As a result there is a fundamental split, with supposedly non-political economic relations assigned to the realm of civil society, distinct from the explicitly political sphere of states and international institutions. Liberal egalitarians then assign public discourse the task of mediating between the particular and private interests of civil society, on the one hand, and, the universal public interest that officials in political institutions have an obligation to institute, on the other. The class system, however, is no less inherently a political matter in capitalism than in any previous class society, even if it is reproduced through individual contracts. 54 It is also the case that the supposedly universal political institutions of a class society are tied to the class system “all the way down.” While the interests of capitalists and of state elites are too heterogeneous for there to always be a direct one-to-one correspondence between the two, any extended breakdown in the capital accumulation process brings with it the danger of political unrest. Also, the more the process of capital accumulation slows, the more difficult it is to raise the tax revenues required for domestic administration and foreign affairs. And the more state policies diverge from the perceived self-interest of investors in capital markets, the more onerous are their terms for purchasing government bonds. As a result of these (and many other) considerations, state officials will necessarily tend to implement policies designed to encourage capital investment and accumulation within the territory over which they rule. It follows that the class interests of the owners and controllers of capital will necessarily tend to have priority over the interests of other individuals and group. Not always, not everywhere, perhaps, but “proximately and for the most part,” as Aristotle would say. Information networks today provide new forums for participating in discussions regarding public issues, and establishes a potential for a public sphere of vastly expanded scope and effectiveness. But the artificial restriction on what counts as “political” systematically restricts discourse within the public sphere by masking the inherently political nature of class rule, and by making the specifically capitalist nature of the capitalist state opaque. The rise of commons-based peer production does not in itself reverse this artificial split. Unless it is explicitly challenged more efficient forms of communication will simply reproduce and reinforce the restrictions on public discourse that arise “naturally” in capitalist society. No full assessment of the normative significance of commons-based peer production in contemporary society can abstract from the way in which the restriction of what counts as “political” systematically distorts the public sphere.

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Global Justice Benkler is unquestionably correct to assert that global justice requires that all individuals have access to basic nutrition and medical care across the globe. A social world in which scientific-technological knowledge underlying the production of foods and medicines circulates freely in global information networks would indeed be a tremendous advance. Benkler’s call for a coalition against attempts to use intellectual property rights to restrict such information flows deserves strong support. But here too assessments of the normative significance of commons-based peer production should not examine it in isolation. As long as commons-based peer production operates alongside (and subordinate to) the capitalist sphere, its results will tend to be appropriated by capital as “free gifts” whenever possible. Certain tendencies necessarily follow. Scientific-technological knowledge is one of the most important weapons in competition in the capitalist world market. Units of capital operating at or close to the scientific-technological frontier are generally able to appropriate above average profits from innovations, enabling them to operate at or close to that frontier in the future. 55 In contrast, units of production without access to advanced scientific-technological knowledge necessarily tend to be trapped in a vicious circle. Their inability to introduce significant innovations prevents them from enjoying above average returns, limiting their ability to participate in advanced R&D in the succeeding period, and thus their future innovations and profit opportunities. At present more than 95% of all research and development is undertaken in the wealthy regions of the global economy, granting units of capital based in these regions with tremendous advantages in the world market. 56 From this perspective, the growth of scientific-technological knowledge is not the solution to severe inequality in the capitalist world market. It is a major contributing cause. 57 When the fruits of commons-based peer production are appropriated as “free gifts” by the leading units of capital of the Global North, and then combined with their proprietary scientific-technical knowledge, the result can be a much greater competitive advantage vis-à-vis producers in the Global South than what they would otherwise enjoy. Commonsbased peer production undoubtedly has a tremendous potential to contribute to the nutritional and medical needs of the world’s poor. But it is no less true that in the existing global order this form of production is likely to reproduce the systematic tendency to uneven development underlying severe global inequality. The Limits of Benkler’s Political Project In Benkler’s view we are at a major crossroads today. As a society we could choose to establish a legal framework enabling commons-based

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peer production to flourish alongside for-profit market production. Or we could chose to protect incumbents in the for-profit sector threatened by commons-based peer production, establishing a legal framework discouraging (or even criminalizing) the open flow of knowledge products over information networks. Which path we choose, he asserts, will depend primarily on the balance of power between a coalition of incumbents and a counter-coalition including activists in the open source movement, manufacturers of the computers whose capacity for aiding commons-based peer production is a marketing advantage, and corporations that have made appropriation of the products of commons-based peer production part of their business plan. The future is open. Recognition of the role of contingency and agency in history should not come at the cost of ignoring the importance of social forms. Unless and until the social forms of capital are directly challenged the development of commons-based peer production will necessarily tend to be severely restricted in three important respects: the allocation of financial resources, the allocation of labor, and the distribution of knowledge goods. The first concerns the allocation of financial resources: investment in commons-based peer production will necessarily tend to be severely restricted in a social order that continues to be dominated by the valorization imperative. The output of the former is non-proprietary, while the latter demands profits from the sale of proprietary products. It is true that as the costs of computers and of communicating over information networks radically declines, increasing numbers of people can afford to purchase means of production required for commons-based peer production. But in a capitalist society these investments will invariably be dwarfed by the financial resources devoted to investments in the production and distribution of commodities for profit. This pattern cannot be adequately explained by choices individuals make based on their conception of the good. Nor can it be explained by saying that this allocation of resources better furthers the core normative values of liberal egalitarianism. The allocation is due to the simple fact that in a capitalist order the production and circulation of commodities will necessarily tend to be privileged. As long as the development of commons-based peer production is more or less complementary to the circulation of commodities, providing a steady stream of “free gifts” to capital, no tensions arise. There will be a more or less “peaceful coexistence” of the two spheres, albeit one in which the capitalist sphere remains hegemonic. But if the resources devoted to commons-based peer production were ever to grow to the point where they significantly threatened what Marx termed “total social capital,” the economic system, based as it continues to be on “the ceaseless augmentation of value,” would soon fall into crisis. In the absence of a successful political movement to radically transform the capitalist sector,

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investment in commons-based peer production would inevitably be eroded, and investment in commodity production and circulation extended. The production and circulation of scientific-technical knowledge is itself an illustration of this dynamic. While Marx noted how scientifictechnological knowledge developed outside capital provides valuable “free gifts” to capital, he also foresaw the increasing commercialization of scientific-technical knowledge. Due to the competitive advantages it promises “invention becomes a business, and the application of science to immediate production itself becomes a factor determining and soliciting science.” 58 Insofar as “invention becomes a business” it is directed toward profit from the sale of proprietary products. As long as the capital form reigns, this mode of scientific-technological knowledge will continue to be privileged at the expense of scientific-technological knowledge within commons-based peer production. In the present context we should also remember that investments in intra-firm networks, inter-firm networks connecting for-profit enterprises with their suppliers and distributors, and networks connecting manufacturers and marketers, on the one hand, with consumers, on the other, have been far more central to the “networked information economy” than investments associated with commons-based peer production. Further, the greatest non-governmental investment in information technologies, the greatest concentration of advanced knowledge workers, and the highest rate of product innovation in the networked information economy have been in the financial sector, not in commons-based peer production. Why were relatively few resources devoted to commons-based peer production relative to these expenditures? The answer is surely not that these investments furthered autonomy and human flourishing to a vastly greater extent than the financial bubbles and global crisis that the pathologies of the financial sector caused! The explanation is instead that there is a systematic bias in the flow of investment funds in capitalist societies that necessarily tends to severely restrict investment in the development of commons-based peer production, whatever the promise of the latter might be from the standpoint of liberal egalitarian values. The second point concerns the allocation of labor. To say that “a billion people in advanced economies may have between two billion and six billion spare hours among them, every day” to contribute to commonsbased peer production is both true and rhetorically powerful. 59 But it is also undeniable that the time and energy people have to participate in commons-based production will be severely limited as long as most social agents face unrelenting financial pressure to sell their labor power and perform extensive surplus labor for capitalist firms. One example should suffice to illustrate the point. Profit-oriented pharmaceutical firms have not made the medical problems afflicting individuals in poorer sections of the globe a high priority, to put it mildly.

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In contrast, the potential for commons-based peer production to effectively address these problems is incalculably high, as Benkler correctly proclaims. Whose living labor can be mobilized toward that end in laboratories today? Benkler’s answer is sobering: Most important by far are postdoctoral fellows. These are the same characters who populate so many free software projects, only geeks of a different feather. They are at a similar life stage. They have the same hectic, overworked lives, and yet the same capacity to work one more hour on something else. 60

When measured against the immensity of the social need, on the one hand, and the immense potential of commons-based peer production to meet that need, on the other, the utter inadequacy of this answer should be immediately apparent. The more convincingly Benkler establishes commons-based peer production’s tremendous potential to contribute to human welfare, the more implausible is his assumption that this potential can be adequately developed while the capital/wage labor relation remains the dominant social relationship. The relatively limited time available for the “free development” of commons-based peer production due to the continuous pressure to engage in surplus labor for capital is a striking illustration of Marx’s thesis that “Since all free time is time for free development, the capitalist usurps the free time created by workers for society.” 61 The final issue to consider here is the distribution of knowledge products. Commons-based peer production makes use of knowledge goods as inputs, and produces knowledge goods as outputs. The flourishing of this form of production therefore requires the free flow of these knowledge goods. This is feasible in principle, since additional units of knowledge goods can be produced and distributed within information networks at close to zero marginal cost. Many categories of products of the networked economy (software, information, literary, scientific, and cultural texts, music, videos, etc.) could in principle be treated as public goods and distributed freely to whoever wanted them. The potential for such free provision to bring the satisfaction of human wants to new peaks is incalculable. As long as capital reigns, however, the actualization of this potential will be severely restricted. The main problem is not providing incentives for people to devote free time to the production of knowledge products distributed as free public goods. As Benkler stresses, it has already been empirically established that there are great numbers of individuals willing to use their free time to cooperate in collective projects that interest them, using their own computers and taking advantage of inexpensive access to communication networks. 62 The real problem is that the commodification imperative and the valorization imperative continue to be the main organizing principles of our social world. As we have already seen, this implies that investment

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funds necessarily tend to flow predominantly to commodity production, whatever the potential of commons-based peer production to address human needs and further human flourishing might be. And, as also noted, this implies that labor engaged in production necessarily tends to be trapped within the wage form most of the waking day, whatever the potential for living labor outside the capital/wage labor relation to further human ends might be. The same consideration implies that there is a dominant tendency in any and all variants of capitalism for knowledge products to take the commodity form. Even worse, there is a systematic tendency for massive amounts of monetary and human resources to be devoted to technologies whose sole purpose is to create an artificial scarcity by restricting flows of knowledge products that do not take the form of privately appropriable commodities. 63 Intellectual property rights do not come without cost to capital. The greater the extension and enforcement of intellectual property rights, the more resources must be devoted to litigation, a paradigmatic form of non-productive expenditure from capital’s standpoint. Extensive intellectual property rights also discourage potentially innovative firms from investigating promising paths due to the threat of expensive litigation and the costs of gaining the permission of rights-holders. And small patent holders, and speculators who purchase patents with the sole intention of extracting payments from wealthy firms, are an annoyance to large technology companies. Nonetheless, the intellectual property rights regime is likely to become ever-more central to the networked economy in the twenty-first century in the absence of massive social movements against capital. One of the most distinctive features of the global capitalism today is the greater number of reasonably effective national innovation systems in place. 64 Suppose a new cluster of innovations with significant commercial potential emerges. Research expenditures, tax breaks, credit allocations, and a multitude of other direct and indirect subsidies would then be mobilized in a number of regions more or less simultaneously. The results are likely to further technological dynamism in use-value terms. In value terms, however, things are more complicated. Past “golden ages” of capitalist development have occurred when high profits in particular regions have been appropriated for extended periods as a result of competitive advantages in the world market. 65 With the proliferation of national innovation systems, however, the period in which high profits can be appropriated from competitive technological advantages necessarily tends to be drastically compressed. (In Marxian jargon, the time prior to the outbreak of “overaccumulation” crises, manifested in overcapacity and falling rates of profit, necessarily tends to shorten.) This development leads to desperate attempts to maintain profits through the heightened exploitation of wage labor, increasingly reckless leveraging in financial

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assets, more extensive predatory activities in vulnerable regions of the world market, etc. The crucial point here, however, is that it leads to the aggressive assertion of formal intellectual property rights and pursuit of informal trade secrets, since intellectual property rights and trade secrets enable above-average profits to continue to be appropriated after effective national innovation systems have eroded other competitive advantages from innovation. 66 Benkler combines a deep appreciation of how the expansion of intellectual property rights will stifle the development of commons-based peer production with a complete neglect of the increasing importance of the artificial scarcity imposed by intellectual property rights for capital accumulation in the networked economy.

CONCLUSION Benkler’s political project is based on the assumption that commonsbased peer production could in principle flourish alongside the present for-profit market sector. All that is required is that we recognize how commons-based peer production furthers the core normative values of liberal egalitarianism, and then institute the appropriate legislation and regulation (or, rather, simply refrain from instituting the wrong sort of legislation and regulation). In my view, this account of the future prospects of commons-based peer production exemplifies the shortcomings of Benkler’s liberalism. Lacking an adequate concept of capital, he lacks an adequate appreciation of the totalizing force of the commodification and valorization imperatives. The full development of commons-based peer production is incompatible with the property and production relations of capital, and its future prospects will be severely restricted unless there is a world historical break from those relations. Without such a break those who do not own and control capital, including the vast majority of those engaged in commons-based peer production, will continue to be subject to the structural coercion and exploitation of the capital/ wage labor relation. Further, many of the fruits of commons-based peer production will still be appropriated by capital as “free gifts,” and then used to further the structural exploitation and exploitation of wage labor, the commodification of leisure, the depolitization of inherently political matters, and uneven development in the world market. Finally, the future development of commons-based peer production will continue to be severely restricted due to the vast material resources and living labor that must be devoted to commodity production in a capitalist economic order, and the increasing centrality of intellectual property rights in that order. We may conclude that an adequate institutionalization of the liberal egalitarian values professed by Benkler cannot result from a sphere devoted to commons-based peer production existing alongside a dominant sphere devoted to for-profit capitalist production. It would require a fun-

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damental break from the latter. It would require a democratic form of socialism extending throughout production and distribution processes. Imagine a world in which investment priorities are decided by democratically elected bodies on local, regional, national, and perhaps global levels after a period of extensive public discussion, with investment resources allocated by community banks according to these priorities. A democratic consensus could then emerge regarding the extent to which commons-based peer production is likely to contribute to human flourishing, and for resources to be allocated to support those engaged in this form of production in accord with that consensus. There would be no tendency to systematically privilege the commodification of knowledge products in such a society. Any knowledge product that would contribute to the satisfaction of wants and needs and could be produced and distributed at (close to) zero marginal cost, could be distributed freely. Imagine further that in this world workplaces were organized according to the democratic principle that the exercise of authority should be subject to the consent of those over whom the authority is exercised. In such a world there would not be a dominant structural tendency for increases in productivity to lead to greater output with no reduction in labor time. The dominant tendency instead would be for productivity advances to be tied systematically to less time spent in formal workplaces, increasing the amount of time those motivated to contribute to commons-based peer production could devote to that endeavor. The systematic tendency for the results of commons-based peer production to be used in a manner that furthers the structural coercion and exploitation of the workforce would also be eradicated. Suppose also that in this world all forms of scientific-technological knowledge were categorized as public goods. Scientific-technological knowledge could then never be used as a weapon to gain monopoly power in the world market. It would not be possible to combine the fruits of commons-based peer production with proprietary knowledge in a manner that reproduced severe global inequality. And if funds for investment were distributed according to the principle that every region has a prima facie right to its per capita share, the tendency to uneven development that besets global capitalism would be overcome. This brief sketch of a feasible and normatively attractive form of socialism no doubt needs to be developed and revised in numerous ways. 67 It has been introduced simply to suggest the sort of goal those who wish to nurture the “electronic commons” must strive for. If some version of democratic socialism is not instituted the emancipatory promise of the internet is doomed to be broken, just as the emancipatory promises of earlier revolutions in communications technologies were broken again and again. 68 The immense emancipatory promise of commons-based peer production will only be fulfilled after a fundamental transformation of production relations throughout the economy. While this goal seems

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very distant today, its objective and subjective preconditions are being developed within contemporary society. Among the most important objective preconditions for the sort of democratic planning and social cooperation sketched above are the technologies of the networked economy described by Benkler. And commons-based peer production provides concrete and collective experiences of democratic planning and social cooperation, helping to form the subjective capacities that make socialism an objective possibility rather than a utopian dream.

NOTES 1. Alex Callinicos, Equality (London: Polity Press, 2000). 2. The praise was bestowed by Lawrence Lessig on the back cover of Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 3. Benkler himself refers to the position he defends as “liberalism” throughout his book. But theorists in the “classical liberal” tradition with whom Benkler profoundly disagrees (such as Nozick and Hayek) have as legitimate a claim to the mantle of “liberalism” as he does. In contemporary political philosophy Benkler’s viewpoint is standardly termed “liberal egalitarianism.” See Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (New York: Oxford, 2001), Chapter 3. 4. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 6. 5. If there are two of us and one apple, every bite of the apple I take is a bite you cannot have. If there are two of us and one item of information, in contrast, I can possess the information fully and you can possess it no less fully at the same time. 6. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 56. 7. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 3–4. 8. Titmuss’s famous study of blood donors showed that offering to pay the market price for blood can result in there being fewer donors than appealing to the nonmonetary values of potential contributors. Benkler generalizes the point: “Some resources can be mobilized by money. Social relations can mobilize others. For a wide range of reasons—institutional, cultural, and possibly technological—some resources are more readily capable of being mobilized by social relations than by money.” Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 95. 9. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 3. 10. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 3. 11. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 56. 12. Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 85. 13. Zittrain, The Future of the Internet, 89. 14. Besides Wikipedia, “there are 145 other wiki engines today, each one powering myriad sites that allow users to collaboratively write and edit material. Then there are status updates, map locations, half thoughts posted online. Add to this the six billion videos delivered by YouTube each month in the United States alone and the millions of fan-created stories deposited on fan-fiction sites. . . . When individuals work together toward a large-scale goal, this effort produces results that emerge at the group level. . . . The whole group benefits at the same time that the individual benefits. . . . Just look at any of hundreds of open-source software projects, such as Wikipedia. In these endeavors, finely tuned communal tools generate high-quality products from the coordinated work of thousands or tens of thousands of members. One study estimates that 60,000 man-years of work were poured into the release of the Fedora Linux 9 software. Altogether, roughly 460,000 people around the world are currently work-

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ing on an amazing 430,000 different open-source projects. That’s almost twice the size of General Motors’ workforce, but without any bosses.” Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010), 314–16. 15. A fourth topic, the impact of the networked economy on culture, will not be discussed here. 16. This does not, however, mean that activities devoted to these collective projects lack all structure: “these projects are based on a hierarchy of meritocratic respect, on social norms, and, to a great extent, on the mutual recognition by most players in this game that it is to everyone’s advantage to have someone overlay a peer review system with some leadership.” Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 105. 17. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 204–5. 18. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, Chapter 9. 19. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 355. 20. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 57. 21. “The emergence of the networked information economy as described in this book depends on the continued existence of an open transport network.” Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 397. 22. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 46; see notes 37 and 66 below. 23. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 393. 24. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 100. 25. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 101. 26. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 92 ff. 27. Money is here the center of the social universe, “the god among commodities.” Karl Marx, “Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy” [“the Grundrisse,”beginning], in Collected Works: Volume 28, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1986), 154. “Each individual . . . carries his social power, as well as his connection with society, in his pocket” (Ibid.), 94. 28. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 101. 29. “It is [not] a mere accident that capitalist and worker confront each other in the market as buyer and seller. It is the alternating rhythm of the process itself which throws the worker back onto the market again and again as a seller of his labourpower and continually transforms his own product into a means by which another can purchase him. In reality, the worker belongs to capital before he has sold himself to the capitalist. His economic bondage is at once mediated through, and concealed by, the periodic renewal of the act by which he sells himself, his change of masters, and the oscillations in the market-price of his labour.” Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 724. 30. Marx, Capital, Volume I, 254. 31. Marx, “Outlines” (Vol. 28), 233. 32. “The social productive forces of labour, or the productive forces of directly social, socialized (i.e., collective) labour come into being through co-operation, divisions of labour within the workshop, the use of machinery, and in general the transformation of production by the conscious use of the sciences, of mechanics, chemistry, etc. for specific ends, technology, etc., and similarly, through the enormous increase of scale corresponding to such developments. . . . This entire development of the productive forces of socialized labour . . . and together with it the use of science (the general product of social development), in the immediate process of production, takes the form of the productive power of capital. . . . The mystification implicit in the relations of capital as a whole is greatly intensified here.” Marx, “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” appendix to Marx, Capital, Volume I, 1024. “All the powers of labour project themselves as powers of capital.” Marx, Capital, Volume I, 755–56. “The development of the social productive forces of labour and the conditions of that development come to appear as the achievement of capital.” Marx, “Results,” 1055. 33. Marx, Capital, Volume I, 757. 34. “The capital-relation arises out of an economic soil that is the product of a long process of development. The existing productivity of labour, from which it proceeds

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as its basis, is a gift, not of nature, but of a history embracing thousands of centuries.” Marx, Capital, Volume I, 647. 35. “Once discovered, the law of the deflection of a magnetic needle in the field of an electric current, or the law of the magnetization of iron, cost absolutely nothing. . . . Science, generally speaking, costs the capitalist nothing, a fact that by no means prevents him from exploiting it. . . . It is clear at first glance that large-scale industry raises the productivity of labour to an extraordinary degree by incorporating into the production process both the immense forces of nature and the results arrived at by natural science.” Marx, Capital, Volume I, 508–9. 36. This point is missed by many contemporary theorists of “cognitive capitalism.” See Paolo Virno, “General Intellect,” Historical Materialism 15/3 (2007) and Carlo Vercellone, “From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism,” Historical Materialism 15/1 (2007), and the critical response to their work in Tony Smith. “The ‘General Intellect’ in the Grundrisse and Beyond,” in In Marx’s Laboratory. Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse, ed. Peter Thomas, Ricardo Bellofiore, and Guido Starosta (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 37. Some examples: “As well as tapping a valuable new source of ideas, an open approach can also lead to savings in market research, as users act as focus groups, indicating what new features they would like (and then help to develop them). Going open-source may also help to keep customers. . . . ‘It builds a community that will buy our hardware,’ says Sridhar Vaqjapey, who runs Sun’s Open SPARC program. Is Sun making money on open-source hardware? Absolutely.’” The Economist, “The Economist Technology Quarterly” (June 7, 2008), 31. “Since an army of programmers around the world work on developing Linux essentially at no cost, IBM now has an extremely cheap and robust operating system. . . . Using open-source software saves IBM a whopping $400m a year, according to Paul Horn, until recently the company’s head of research.” The Economist, “A Special Report on Innovation” (October 13, 2007), 14. 38. In an analogous manner, those performing unpaid care labor in households outside the capital/wage labor relation can also be said to be “exploited” (in a broad sense of the term different from Marx’s technical sense) insofar as they provide a necessary service for capital. The fact that those engaged in care labor typically do so voluntarily, out of a sense of obligation, empathy, and love, does not make it less appropriate to use that category. A similar point can be made about scientists at publicly funded universities or government labs who engage in research that capital then appropriates as a free gift. They may freely choose to perform this research out of intellectual curiosity, personal ambition, a desire for peer recognition, or any other sort of motivation. Their living labor is subsumed under the capital accumulation process regardless. 39. Marx, Capital, Volume I, 492. 40. Marx, Capital, Volume I, 528 ff. 41. “In no respect does the machine appear as the means of labour of the individual worker. . . . The machine, which possesses skill and power in contrast to the worker, is itself the virtuoso. It possesses a soul of its own in the laws of mechanics which determine its operation. . . . Science, which compels the inanimate members of the machinery, by means of their design, to operate purposefully as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but acts upon him through the machine as an alien force, as the force of the machine itself.” Karl Marx, “Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy” [“the Grundrisse,” conclusion], in Collected Works: Volume 29, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 82–83. 42. Marx Capital, Volume I, Chapter 25. 43. Marx, Capital, Volume I, 549. 44. “Machinery does not just act as a superior competitor to the worker, always on the point of making him superfluous. It is a power inimical to him. . . . It is the most powerful weapon for suppressing strikes, those periodic revolts of the working class against the autocracy of capital. . . . It would be possible to write a whole history of the

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inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working-class revolt.” Marx, Capital, Volume I, 562–63. 45. Simon Head, The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Ursula Huws, The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003); Ursula Huws, ed. Defragmenting: Towards a Critical Understanding of the New Global Division of Labour (London: Merlin, 2007); Ursula Huws, ed. Break or Weld? Trade Union Responses to Global Value Chain Restructuring (London: Merlin, 2008); Tony Smith, Technology and Capital in the Age of Lean Production: A Marxian Critique of the ‘New Economy’ (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000); Pietro Basso, Ancient Hours: Working Lives in the Twenty-first Century (London: Verso Books, 2003). 46. Damon Darlin, “Software That Monitors Your Work Wherever You Are,” New York Times, April 12 (2009). 47. Stephen Baker, The Numerati (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008). 48. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006). 49. “Gil Cloyd, chief technology officer at Procter & Gamble (P&G), the world’s biggest consumer-products firm, studied the life cycle of consumer goods from 1992 to 2002 (before the Internet’s full impact was felt), and found that it had fallen by half.” The Economist, “Report on Innovation,” 8. 50. Robert Hof, “Google’s New Ad Weapon,” Business Week, June 22 (2009), 52–53. 51. Julien Stallabrass, “Just Gaming: Allegory and Economy in Computer Games,” New Left Review, 198 (1993). 52. Benkler discusses two examples in detail. The first reveals the capacity of the networked public sphere to respond effectively to abuses of mass media power. The Sinclair Corporation planned to run a documentary attacking John Kerry’s Vietnam War service the night before the 2004 presidential election. At the time it owned television stations that reached one quarter of U.S. households. This documentary was a paradigmatic instance of the form of media manipulation now known as “swiftboating.” While the program was almost certainly an illicit in-kind contribution to the Bush campaign, neither the Federal Elections Commission nor the Federal Communications Commission intervened. Within days, however, a handful of bloggers were able to organize a national boycott of advertisers, many of whom then withdrew their sponsorship. The negative publicity also caused Sinclair’s stock price to fall significantly. Sinclair was forced to present a somewhat more balanced program, including arguments from the other side along with excerpts from the documentary. Benkler’s second example reflects how the networked public sphere possesses generative as well as reactive capacities. For years even the most prestigious mass media outlets in the United States ignored serious issues regarding the security and accuracy of electronic voting machines produced by Diebold Elections Systems. The dispersal of data on the workings of these machines on numerous Internet sites, and the independent analysis of this data in blogs, forced these issues onto the public agenda for the first time. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 224 ff. 53. Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (New York: Verso, 1994). 54. “This form of mediation . . . perpetuates the relation between capital as the buyer and the worker as the seller of labour. Through the mediation of this sale and purchase it disguises the real transaction, and the perpetual dependence which is constantly renewed, by presenting it as no more than a financial relationship. . . . The constant renewal of the relationship of sale and purchase merely ensures the perpetuation of the specific relationship of dependency, endowing it with the deceptive illusion of a transaction, of a contract between equally free and equally matched commodity owners.” Marx, “Results,” 1063–64. 55. Benkler himself acknowledges the importance of such “firm-specific advantages.” Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 45–46. He fails, however, to discuss their implications for global justice.

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56. Elhanan Helpman, The Mystery of Economic Growth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004), 64. These advantages would remain even if a higher proportion of global R&D were subcontracted to labs in poorer regions of the world economy, where scientific-technical labor is cheaper. 57. In the words of a leading mainstream growth theorist: “Investment in innovation widens the gap between rich and poor countries. The output gains of the industrial countries exceed the output gains of the less-developed countries. We therefore conclude that investment in innovation in the industrial countries leads to divergence of income between the North and the South.” Helpman, Mystery of Economic Growth, 85. There are, of course, many other factors underlying uneven development in the world market. See Tony Smith, Globalisation: A Systematic Marxian Account (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009), Chapter 5, and Prabhat Patnaik, Accumulation and Stability Under Capitalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), Chapters 8 and 12. 58. Marx. “Outlines” (Vol. 29), 89–90. 59. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 55. 60. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, 352. 61. Marx, “Outlines” (Vol. 29), 22. The burden of unpaid care labor disproportionately borne by women limits the time available for free development as well. Few of the “geeks” Benkler refers to above have child care responsibilities. 62. Most scientific-technological workers today are forced to sign away future claims to intellectual property rights as a condition of employment. This too undercuts the argument that without such rights no one would be motivated to engage in scientific-technological labor. 63. Michael Perelman, Class Warfare in the Information Age (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). 64. As of the fall of 2007 there were eight countries devoting over 2% of GDP per year to research and development. The Economist, “R&D,” (November 17, 2007), 113. This is, I believe, a low enough number to maintain uneven development in the global economy, while being large enough to generate the problem described in the following paragraph of the main text. 65. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (New York: Verso Books, 1994). 66. Two (of countless) corroborating examples can be given here. “Since 2006 it [China] has pursued a deliberate policy of gathering as many patents as possible and developing home-grown-technologies—not the least because Chinese companies pay around $2 billion a year in licensing and royalties to American firms alone. . . . Chinese firms are also increasingly seeking patents abroad, a sign that they plan to protect their technology when exporting it to rich countries. They won 90 patents in America in 1999 but last year they received 1,225.” The Economist, “Intellectual Property in China: Battle of Ideas,” April 25 (2009), 68. “IBM is another iconic firm that has jumped on the open-innovation bandwagon. The once-secretive company has done a sharp U-turn and embraced Linux, an open-source software language. . . . However it also continues to take out patents at a record pace in other areas, such as advanced materials, and in the process racks up some $1 billion a year in licensing fees. . . . Kenneth Morse, head of MIT’s Entrepreneurship Centre, scoffs at IBM’s claim to be an open company: ‘They’re open only in markets, like software, where they have fallen behind. In hardware markets, where they have the lead, they are extremely closed’” (The Economist, “Report on Innovation,” 13–14). 67. See David Schweickart, Against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Bertell Ollman, ed. Market Socialism: The Debate Among Socialists (New York: Routledge, 1998), Smith, Technology, Chapter 7, and Smith, Globalisation, Chapter 8, as well as various papers in this volume. 68. Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (New York: Knopf, 2010).

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REFERENCES Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 1994. Baker, Stephen. The Numerati. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008. Basso, Pietro. Ancient Hours: Working Lives in the Twenty-first Century. London: Verso Books, 2003. Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Callinicos, Alex. Equality. London: Polity Press, 2000. Darlin, Damon. “Software That Monitors Your Work Wherever You Are.” New York Times, April 12 (2009). Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006. The Economist. “A Special Report on Innovation.” October 13 (2007). The Economist. “R&D.” November 17 (2007). The Economist. “The Economist Technology Quarterly.” June 7 (2008). The Economist. “Intellectual Property in China: Battle of Ideas.” April 25 (2009). Head, Simon. The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Helpman, Elhanan. The Mystery of Economic Growth. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004. Hof, Robert. “Google’s New Ad Weapon.” Business Week, June 22 (2009). Huws, Ursula. The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003. ———, ed. Defragmenting: Towards a Critical Understanding of the New Global Division of Labour. London: Merlin, 2007. ———, ed. Break or Weld? Trade Union Responses to Global Value Chain Restructuring. London: Merlin, 2008. Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking, 2010. Kymlicka, Will. Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume I. New York: Penguin Books, 1976. ———. “Results of the Immediate Process of Production.” Appendix to Capital, Volume I. New York: Penguin Books, 1976. ———. “Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy” [“the Grundrisse,” beginning]. In Collected Works: Volume 28, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers, 1986. ———. “Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy” [“the Grundrisse,” conclusion]. In Collected Works: Volume 29, Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels. New York: International Publishers, 1987. Ollman, Bertell, ed. Market Socialism: The Debate Among Socialists. New York: Routledge, 1998. Patnaik, Prabhat. Accumulation and Stability Under Capitalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Perelman, Michael. Class Warfare in the Information Age. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Rosenberg, Justin. The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations. New York: Verso, 1994. Schweickart, David. Against Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Smith Tony. Technology and Capital in the Age of Lean Production: A Marxian Critique of the ‘New Economy.’ Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. ———. Globalisation: A Systematic Marxian Account. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009. ———. “The ‘General Intellect’ in the Grundrisse and Beyond.” In In Marx's Laboratory. Critical Interpretations of the Grundrisse, edited by Peter Thomas, Ricardo Bellofiore, and Guido Starosta. Leiden: Brill, forthcoming.

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Stallabrass, Julien. “Just Gaming: Allegory and Economy in Computer Games.” New Left Review, 198 (1993): 83–106. Virno, Paolo. “General Intellect.” Historical Materialism 15/3 (2007): 3–8. Vercellone, Carlo. “From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism.” Historical Materialism 15/1 (2007): 13-36 Woo, Tim. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. New York: Knopf, 2010. Zittrain, Jonathan. The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.

NINE Beyond Capitalism and Socialism Richard Schmitt

The term “socialism” may have been the creation of William Thompson who, in the 1830s, had worked with Robert Owens but gradually turned into a critic. He called “socialism” a cooperative system where productive property was owned collectively to distinguish it from the cooperatives founded, but also owned and run by Owens. 1 (It was Marx and Engels who gave Owen the name of (utopian) “socialist.”) The word “capitalist” did not become current until a decade or so later. The “capitalist” makes his appearance regularly in the writings of Marx and Engels, at least from 1845 on. Ever since capitalists have abhorred socialists and socialists have roundly condemned capitalists. Capitalism and socialism became mutually exclusive systems. This went on for more than 150 years. Only very recently have we seen capitalist authors be very critical of capitalism. Whereas they would have called themselves socialists 50 or more years ago, today they differentiate “good” from “bad” capitalism. They invent new labels for their anti-capitalist projects, such as “Capitalism 3.0” 2 or “New Economy.” 3 They advocate the good and excoriate the bad capitalism. Interestingly enough, their suggestions for improving capitalism sound a lot like proposals made by socialists. They, in turn, have distanced themselves from the orthodox Marxian project of replacing the capitalist system with a socialist one. Instead, they propose more complex ways to oppose existing capitalism. These interstitial projects look remarkably like the “good” capitalism of some the capitalist critics of capitalism. One can take this reconciliation between some socialists and some capitalists as an unambiguous ground for condemning both as “opportu187

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nists” or one can use some other insult hallowed in the tradition of internecine struggles among Marxist factions. Instead, I will take this recent history as a sign that the binary “capitalism/socialism”—seemingly self-evident for so many years—is breaking down. In this chapter I will document this breakdown and draw from it a new understanding of how to build a good society. Inevitably that new conception also comes with its own challenges.

TWO SIDES OF MARX Many readers of Marx have insisted on the unity of Marxism, either as a body of knowledge or as a method. 4 I will distinguish between a heroic Marxist politics and Marxism as an extended historical, economical, and cultural investigation. The former has given us the grand theory of history as class struggle, of Capitalism as creating its own “gravediggers,” of the working class which will be ready to rule when Capitalism collapses under its own internal contradictions. The details of this future are unknown. But Capitalism’s “fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” 5 Heroic Marxism bequeathed us historical materialism. This is the version of Marxism promoted by Marxist parties in Europe. But Marx’s forever intellectually curious investigations yielded many interesting texts, for instance, in Grundrisse 6 or in the letter to Vera Zasulich 7 which one would have some trouble squaring with the dogmas of historical materialism. Marx was not always sure about the role of accident and of necessity in history. Nor did he believe that the proletariat was the most promising revolutionary agent in every country. What Marx wrote and thought resists neat systematization if only because his researches never came to a quiet resting place. 8 Heroic Marxism, for present purposes, rests on two central premises: 1. the decay of the Capitalist social system is inevitable, and 2. societies are systems in which every aspects of the society is internally related to every other. This heroic Marxism became the official creed of the German SocialDemocratic Party. The German Socialists adopted a new party program in 1891. In a commentary and explication of that program, Karl Kautsky, the leader and main theoretician of the party, wrote “We consider the breakdown of the present social system to be unavoidable, because we know that the economic evolution inevitably brings on conditions that will compel the exploited classes to rise against this system of private ownership.” 9 [my italics] The inevitability of capitalist collapse had become a cornerstone of Marxist orthodoxy.

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DOUBTS ABOUT INEVITABILITY But this dogma of the inevitable capitalist collapse very soon ran into trouble. Its history since the beginning of the 20th century is a history of rejections and refutations which reduced the number of adherents to heroic Marxism but not the faith in the ultimate victory of Socialism over Capitalism of those who remained. Kautsky affirmed the inevitability of capitalist collapse in 1892. Only a few years later, between 1896 and 1898, Eduard Bernstein, a prominent member of the Social-Democratic Party and a protegé of Engels in his old age, wrote several articles in Neue Zeit, the theoretical journal of the German Social-Democrats. There he denied that the capitalist collapse was inevitable. Capitalism had not developed, as Marx had expected; capitalist contradictions had not sharpened as anticipated. Instead of fewer and fewer, there were more capitalists than ever. The middle class, instead of vanishing, had expanded. The proletariat’s position had improved instead of worsening. 10 The reaction to these assertions was nothing less than hysterical. The Social-Democratic Party debated Bernstein’s theses for three and a half days at the party congress in Hanover in 1899, ending the debate predictably with a condemnation of Bernstein’s position. But soon thereafter history weighed in on Bernstein’s side. The inevitability of socialism had two components. On the one hand, capitalist contradictions would become increasingly sharp and, for the economic system, debilitating. On the other hand, the working class, subject to factory discipline, would learn to organize itself and grow in solidarity. As Marx described it: “Along with the constantly diminishing number of magnates of capital . . . grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always growing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.” [my italics] 11 As capitalism develops so does the working class; it becomes more organized and more firmly united. In 1912, with the threat of a war on the horizon, workers from several European countries met in Basel, Switzerland, to swear solidarity to one another. They took it upon themselves “to exert every effort in order to prevent the outbreak of war by the means they consider most effective, which naturally vary according to the sharpening of the class struggle and the sharpening of the general political situation.” [italics in original] 12 When war did break out two years later both German and French workers could not wait to enlist in defense of their country. In Germany, the large Social-Democratic block of parliamentary delegates voted almost unanimously to support the Kaiser’s war against France and England. Workers could not wait to kill other workers.

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The outbreak of the war did anything but “sharpen the class struggle”; it buried it for a while under thick clouds of patriotic deception. Blind national chauvinism easily overcame any inclinations toward working-class solidarity. The international working class turned out to be disunited; the growth of working-class solidarity proved not to be inevitable. Nor did, at war’s end four years later, a socialist revolution break out in the most highly industrialized European country, Germany. Fifteen years later, in 1933, a significant proportion of German workers voted for Adolf Hitler. 13 These were weighty reasons for putting little stock in the inevitable collapse of Capitalism and the inevitable growth of the solidarity of the international working class or its class solidarity at home. The revolution in Russia encouraged some partisans of heroic Marxism. But its critics found support for their doubts in the failures of revolutionary attempts in Western Europe. For most of the remainder of the twentieth century the disagreement seesawed between the dialectic of disillusionment enacted by the Frankfurt School and the efforts of the orthodox Marxists to bolster their theory. 14

IF SOCIALISM IS NOT INEVITABLE Today a wide range of scholars and activists doubt that the collapse of capitalism is inevitable. Among prominent thinkers and activists on the Left heroic Marxism has lost support and with it the idea that historical events could ever be said to be necessary or could be predicted with certainty. 15 The notion of necessity enters into political thinking with historical materialism. Summarized briefly in Marx’s famous Preface, 16 historical materialism is committed to the belief that we can analyze concrete historical events into their constituent elements and explain them by reference to the scientific laws governing their behavior. Historical materialism is committed to claims about the general structure of historical processes which allow us to predict the course of future historical development. History can be subdivided into different modes of production. These are systems consisting of a productive apparatus (with a certain level of technology) together with rules governing the ownership and control of that apparatus. Each of these systems are torn apart by internal contradictions. In each mode of production there is a struggle between those who control the productive apparatus and those who get the leavings. The outcome of these internal struggles is not in doubt. 17 The meaning of the word “necessity” is not only unclear, but subject to disagreement. Marx’s theory of history depends heavily on Hegel’s view of human history as a sequence of cultures, each of which rises and falls propelled by its internal dynamics. Each culture creates its own

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internal contradictions and those, in turn, will lead to the culture’s downfall and replacement by a subsequent, more advanced culture. 18 For culture, Marx substitutes mode of production, a more materialist and more frankly economic entity. But the internal relations between elements of modes of production are still described in the same vocabulary derived from dialectical logic. 19 The association between Marx’s theory of history and dialectic suggests that historical events are subject to a kind of logical necessity, albeit a logic that is different from that of Aristotle or of modern mathematical logic. David Harvey agrees with that. 20 Cohen flatly denies it. 21 When Rosa Luxemburg speaks about historical necessity, she borrows from Marx and Engels a language leaning heavily on mechanics. There is talk of “the laws of motion” of society; the class struggle is very much presented as a clash of opposing quasi-physical forces. The rising power of the working class consists of the greater momentum that brings capitalism to a standstill. Whatever controversies exist about “necessity” and “inevitability,” the final outcome of history is indubitable—it is socialism. Socialism in this view is the mode of production that follows capitalism. It can only come into existence once capitalism has disappeared. Hence the uproar over Bernstein’s denial of the inevitable capitalist collapse. 22 If capitalism does not disappear from the stage of world history, socialism is impossible. What such a socialist society would be like remains unclear; Luxemburg refers in passing to the “social control and the gradual application of the principle of co-operation” to the economy. 23 Bernstein speaks explicitly about nationalizing industries. 24 Cohen writes about “a nonmarket society, with production integrated by a plan, democratically formed. . . .” 25

DOES IT MATTER WHETHER THE CAPITALIST COLLAPSE IS INEVITABLE? Nevertheless, it may well seem that rejecting the inevitability of capitalist collapse does not make a great deal of difference either to Marxist theory or to the political practice that comes with it. Perhaps we cannot be certain that capitalism will collapse, but surely that collapse is an essential goal for radicals. We do not just want to make capitalism slightly less oppressive. We want to replace it completely with socialism. We can go on and do our political work as before, only without the comfort of knowing with certainty that we will be successful, sooner or later. But on second thought, the matter begins to appear more complex. The idea of a collapse of capitalism implies a very specific picture of capitalism. However we interpret the terms “necessary” or “inevitable,” they refer to stresses and strains within the capitalist system. The picture

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of the capitalist system collapsing is like the picture of an old engine seizing up, the stresses and the wear within the engine makes it less and less efficient until it finally stops working. A collapsing economy is an economy that falls apart under its own internal strains. The problems are generated within the system; they are endogenous. But unlike a car engine, the capitalist system possesses considerable regenerative and adaptive powers. Throughout its long history, capitalism has changed from the capitalism of merchants, to the agricultural capitalism of 16th-century England, to early and mature industrial capitalism, to imperialism, to the finance and monopoly capitalisms of our day. Throughout this long period, capitalism has been subject to periodic crises. When a mechanical engine experiences a crisis, it may well have reached the end of its life cycle. But capitalism has so far emerged evermore aggressive and rapacious from its periodic crises. Rather than compare capitalism to an engine, we should think of it as some sort of organism which is not only affected by endogenous problems but also has restorative powers. It can bleed but also heal; it can shrink but also grow and adapt to changing conditions. The analogy between capitalism and an organism suggests a picture of a system in which all pieces are connected to all other ones. Wear and tear in one place will spread throughout the system and thus impair the functioning of the whole, until the damaged parts manage to grow back to restore themselves. All the parts are integrated; if one malfunctions, others will also deteriorate until the restorative powers of the organism will set things right again or perhaps produce an organism more powerful than before. (We are speaking here, of course, of the philosophers’ idea of an organism. Actual organisms have appendixes and ingrown toenails.) Transforming absolute into constitutional monarchy or modernizing the banking system, building roads and railroads will serve to prop up capitalism for another period. So will government regulation of banking and investment, or providing social safety nets that maintain consumer demand even in times of recession to keep the capitalist system going. If capitalism will not, as far as we can tell, implode due to its its own internal malfunctions, the prospect for total replacement are very dim indeed. But, that actually turns out to be an advantage. Once we distance ourselves from any notion of the inevitable end of capitalism, which results from its own workings, we no longer need to continue to think of capitalism as a quasi-organism. We are free to adopt an “alternative perspective [is] that societies are loosely coupled systems rather than tightly integrated totalities. They are more like an ecology than an organism: quite hostile elements can coexist in shifting and uneven equilibria without this system exploding.” 26 Once a capitalist collapse ceases to be inevitable, the picture of capitalism itself changes. Instead of being an organism all of whose parts are tightly bound to each other, we can embrace a

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picture of society containing many projects with many different sorts of mutual relations. A confident opposition to capitalism does not allow itself to be frightened by the picture of capitalism as an integrated organism where every move to build alternatives is sooner or later swallowed up, assimilated and turned into a feel-good capitalist institution. The new opposition not only rejects inevitability, but it also rejects the picture of capitalism as a tightly integrated organism, a kind of huge amoeba that engulfs whatever someone may start in opposition to it. The old opposition to capitalism derived its confidence from the belief in the inevitable fragility of capitalism. The new opposition trusts itself because it’s image of capitalism is less tightly integrated. The different elements of capitalism are more loosely connected and, more importantly, there are many social phenomena that are not part of capitalism at all. Thus there is space in this society to develop ways of being and living one’s day-to-day life that are outside of capitalism and are not going to be automatically swallowed up by it. Erik Olin Wright rejects the organism picture of capitalism, substituting a much looser picture of society. Gibson-Graham, similarly, says about the organism picture of capitalism that “in the classical conception, capitalism ‘has no outside.’” 27 There are no forces or institutions that affect capitalism but capitalism determines everything else. She rejects that image, quoting Laclau approvingly when he writes, “But if capitalism does have a ‘constitutive outside’ . . . the logic of capital, far from dictating the laws of movement in every area of social development, is itself contingent, since it depends on processes and transformation which escape its control.” 28 In the new concept of capitalism, the influence of capitalist economics on the remainder of the society is much more moderate. Contingency reigns in many areas. Our society is not a single organism but a multiplicity of systems, or different projects, interconnected but not determined by one master-system. Capitalism does have an outside. A very strong argument for that position comes from the debates about the role of women’s liberation and the liberation of persons of color in capitalist societies. For many years Marxist theorists tried to convince us that gender and race struggles were either distractions from the main business, the class struggle, or were simply subordinate efforts. A great deal of debate about the relation between class and gender and race has persuaded many—it has certainly persuaded me—to reject the assimilation of race and gender to class and to refuse to assign the role of “prime mover” to class struggle. By recognizing the autonomy of different kinds of conflict in this society we also recognize that there are different projects which may be connected and which may affect each other but which are not definitively determined by one or the other central undertaking. There is no “prime mover,” no central mechanism. The capitalist mode of production is not the central organizing force of society.

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Not only is capitalism not the only or the main project in our society— it is not the most central one. “Instead of viewing capitalism as The Economy, we can view it instead as an ongoing project to colonize economic space. Capitalism, with its drive for accumulation and hence its need for endless expansion into ‘new markets,’ would like to become The Economy. Fortunately for us, the capitalists have not succeeded in turning every relationship into an opportunity to make profit. Capitalism is an ongoing, but never fully successful, project of colonization. In fact, the dominant economy would fall apart if the people’s economy—these basic forms of cooperation and solidarity—did not exist ‘below the surface.’ These are the things that keep us alive when the factories close down, when the ice storm comes, when our houses burn down, or when the paycheck is just not enough. These are, indeed, the relationships that hold the very fabric of our society together, the relationships that make us human and that meet our most basic needs of love, care, and mutual support.” 29 John Holloway formulates this new approach to overcoming the miseries of capitalism by saying: “the only possible way of conceiving revolution is as an interstitial process.” 30 In the spaces left between capitalist and other projects in the society, we try to overcome the tyranny of money, of exploitative employment, of the state. Our response consists of many different undertakings.

RECONSIDER “SOCIALISM” AND “CAPITALISM” In order to distance ourselves from the heroic Marxist project and not to confuse ourselves about what our project actually is, it would be helpful to use the word “socialism” much more sparingly. Once we disavow heroic Marxism, historical materialism, and the theory about modes of production, we had better also surrender the word socialism to describe our goals and the better society we aim for. We do not aim at a totally new mode of production that one could only begin to build once capitalism (and capitalists) had disappeared from the face of the earth. It is therefore useful to use a different name for what we are aiming at. It makes sense to surrender the label “socialist” and replace it with “anticapitalist.” We are today as staunch opponents of the capitalist system as ever before, but we are no longer clearly committed to building a totally different system called “socialism.” The capitalist system is one of many systems in this society. It plays an important role but it does not determine all aspects of the society. Even in the limited realm of production there are methods of production which are not capitalist, most notably production in the home. The food we cook for our children, the clothes we provide for them and the entertainments we think up are not in the service of making a profit. 31 We do not

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care for their health or further their education in the interest of enriching ourselves. If we grow vegetables in our garden, even if we sell a surplus to friends and neighbors, we are not conducting a capitalist business. If we make clothes for ourselves, or build bookshelves, or take care of our yards and our houses, capitalism is not in play, 32 because what we do gives us satisfaction; it does not necessarily earn us money. “We take the moment into our own hands . . . refusing to let money (or any other alien force) determine what we do . . . the friends who form a chorus because they like to sing, the nurse who really tries to help her patients, the car worker who spends as much time as possible on his allotment.” 33 To be sure, some people improve their houses, redo their kitchens or put a play room in their basement in order to increase the resale value of the house. They then treat the house, primarily, as an investment. But most people work to make their house comfortable. It’s where they feel at ease, a place that, they think, reflects their personality and their taste. They are not thinking about the house when it will be for sale after they move out or die. The difference is important. Domestic production produces a house I enjoy living in. Capitalist production produces a house that might sell at a better price in the future even if, in the interim, I hate living in it. Household production is not the only alternative to capitalist production. There are many different forms of cooperation in producing goods, from editing your friend’s manuscript to getting together to help friends to erect their yurt. After the tornado strikes, neighbors help each other out to clean up and reconstruct. They carefully collect and restore to their owners family photographs and keepsakes scattered by the storm. That is production not for profit, but for kindness and cooperation. If I grab a neighbor’s child before it runs out into the street I care for a child; I am not trying to make money. Volunteering is another non-market way of producing goods and services. According to the U.S. government, volunteers in many different activities produced $169 billion worth of goods and services. 34 There are also different kinds of cooperatives where workers and/or consumers are also owners. If workers are owners, they can still suffer exploitation, but now the exploitation is chosen by them. 35 Relations between employers and employees, typical of capitalist society, are abolished where workers are also owners. In parallel ways consumer cooperatives alter the relations between merchant and consumer because here the consumer is also the owner. Community-supported agriculture frees farmers from certain market pressures. It provides consumers with farm products of higher quality than the supermarket is able to provide. Information passes from producer to consumer not through market signals but in meetings or by email. Standard capitalist procedures are interrupted opening new possibilities to producers and consumers.

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Local alternative currencies or systems of exchanging services build networks of persons with different skills meeting each others’ needs without recourse to a competitive, capitalist market. 36 Churches and other religious organizations provide valuable services without, in most cases, aiming at growing capital or even making money at all. The same applies to service clubs such as the Rotarians or Lions, as well as organizations aiming at citizen’s self-improvements. Examples are Alcoholics Anonymous or similar programs. There are innumerable support groups for people who have one problem or another in common and help each other out by giving moral support and sharing their experiences. More generally, much important work is done by organizations not for profit. They address problems they perceive locally or nationally. They collect money to support their work but their goal is to solve a problem not amassing or increasing capital. Add to that local aid associations to build community and/or to address neighborhood problems such as groups that clean up their neighborhood or just get together to enjoy each others’ company. Neighborhoods come together to build a playground at the local school, or to cleanup a park or do whatever else the neighbors think needs doing. They try to provide summer jobs for teens or attempt to keep them out of trouble in a variety of ways. One must not forget the services provided by many government agencies such as the courts. In the course of providing these services many people act the capitalist, for instance, lawyers in the courtroom, or construction companies fixing sidewalks. But the judge is not out to make money and the legal process has different goals from those of a capitalist enterprise. And the legal system is not there to accumulate capital. These and other alternative arrangements do not replace the capitalist economy. There are, so far, no community auto plants or airlines. Most of the clothes we wear are still imported from China. But there are clearly ways of producing goods and services that are outside the capitalist economy and to a considerable extent independent of it. So there is Capitalism with a capital “C” and capitalism with a lowercase “c,” which is existing capitalism. The former is construed as the master mechanism of our society that determines down to the smallest detail how we live and die. The latter is one important, but by no means the only method that governs how we provide for ourselves and fashion our daily lives. Lowercase “c” capitalism aims at increasing capital but it exists side by side with many undertakings that have other goals than enriching the owners of capital. This controversy between partisans of Capitalism and capitalism is not new. It dates back, at least, to the period after World War II, to the debate among Marxist historians about the transition from feudalism to capitalism. One of the central disagreements was between those who

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were looking for a “prime mover” for the development of feudalism. They were looking for a theory of the development of feudalism very much like the theory we have about the development of capitalism where a central mechanism—often identified as class struggle—was thought to explain all aspects of its development. Some participants in this debate believed that there was no such “prime mover” for feudalism. Subsequent theorists clearly recognized the centrality of the disagreement between Capitalism and capitalism to this debate. 37 We have already seen good reasons for using the word “socialism” sparingly. We now surrender “Capitalism” and replace it with “capitalism.” It is beginning to appear that the Capitalism/Socialism binary is losing its usefulness. Worse, the unquestioning acceptance of the capitalist and socialist binary has served to confuse theorists. As long as it was widely believed among radicals that whatever happens in this society is the effect of capitalism, diagnoses of our ills were reasonably easy to come by. They did not need much empirical investigation because whatever problem we were interested in understanding, we already knew that somehow its origin lay in the capitalist economy. I want to consider one concrete example of that just to illustrate the oversimplification of heroic Marxism that insisted that, whatever problem we might choose to discuss, its cause is capitalism. Toward the end of his defense of his particular version of historical materialism, Cohen takes up the question of the sources of consumerism. Of course he looks to capitalism as the cause and suggests that in a society that is prone to crises of overproduction, intensive advertising to encourage people to buy more is the natural response to capitalist crises. 38 He blames consumerism on advertising campaigns. But is that really all there is too it? Must we not ask why people are so responsive to advertising? Not all advertising campaigns are successful. In addition, consumerism implies an enormous passivity on the part of consumers. They no longer actively entertain each other; they gape at electronic spectacles. They do not make much themselves; often they have even stopped cooking meals. Consumerism implies waiting for others to provide for one. The consumer only needs to have the ready cash. Hence it becomes an unquestioning dogma that making as much money as possible is the good life. Consumerism encourages certain kinds of personality types. It conveys central values. Can we ascribe those deep changes in human personalities and values to successful advertising campaigns? I doubt it. We cannot be certain that these profound transformations are the exclusive effects of capitalism. Perhaps consumerism has more complex sources: a deep seated insecurity brought about, in part, by the dissolution of firm social ties in the era of the automobile and the airplane. The distance of older generations—parents, uncles, and aunts—leaves young

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families without traditional advice about child rearing or running their marriage. Advice and support by family and family friends is replaced by services we pay for. Not coming from persons known and trusted forever, we do not know how solid the advice is. We cannot find our way safely and assuredly. Uncertain of ourselves we fall prey to advertisers. The capitalist economy plays an important role here but is not the exclusive cause of consumerism. Heroic Marxism misleads us. We need to stay clear of talk about socialism and about Capitalism. But capitalism is, of course, real and as evil as ever.

DISCONTENT WITH CAPITALISM Early capitalists were traders who had amassed sufficient wealth to allow them to stay home and lay out some of their wealth when kings and princes needed money to go to war. It was not the lending out of money that made these traders into capitalists but the fact that they charged interest. Their project was to increase their capital. 39 Stripped of its historical-materialist commitments, capitalism (not Capitalism) may be summarized as follows: Resources not needed for immediate consumption are the most primitive form of capital. Capitalism exists where people have a certain amount of property which they invest in order to make it grow. The litany of complaints against that economic system is very familiar: capitalism is producing increasing inequality all over the world and with it more and more people who are poor and desperate. 40 Capitalism creates great wealth for some by exploiting the people that work in capitalist companies. The increasing inequality of income and wealth merely reflects the increasing inequality of rewards. Pay is not proportionate to the contribution made by the rich and the poor. 41 Workers are treated as objects, their ability to work consistently and creatively is just one more commodity to be traded on the labor market. Alienation—disaffection from work and from one’s own life and person—is a consequence. Capitalists, concerned above all to increase their capital, are committed to constant growth of their businesses: growth is the primary imperative. In our time growth has become “jobless.” 42 While businesses grow unemployment stays pretty steady. Capitalist enterprises manage to produce more with fewer workers. But constant growth does terrific damage to the environment. Natural sources of energy and raw materials are not growing but are drawn down increasingly by capitalist firms seeking to grow themselves. With every day the threat to the environment becomes more menacing. 43 The insatiable thirst for growth increases the environmental danger. One way of raising profits is to lower costs. One way to lower costs is not

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to pay for the inputs of one’s business. Capitalist businesses constantly try to externalize their costs—a fancy way of saying that they do not pay for the damage they do to the environment, for instance, by discharging toxic wastes, polluting air and water, or consuming resources that are not renewable. 44 The economists who calculate social well-being in purely monetary terms become the special targets of criticism. The standard scale for measuring economic improvement is the gross domestic product—a measure of goods and services that indifferently include benefits for citizens, such as housing and food, and the cost of funerals due to auto accidents, or of health care for dying patients. Critics of capitalism point out that this way of counting up how the economy benefits us encourages a perverse focus on money instead of on the well-being of citizens. 45 Capitalists and their unending advertising contribute to the perversion of values. Told 50 times a day to go out and buy, buy, buy we end up doing so—often spending money we don’t have. What used to be important to us—good work, good friends, and intimate family ties now takes second or third place to spending money, to buying things which, most of the time, will disappear unused in the closet within a few days. The savage hunger for profits spawns and keeps consumerism alive. 46 More generally, the exclusive, not to say perverse concentration on money as the supreme value transforms neighbors, friends, and co-workers into competitors. Cooperation is often discouraged; competition is thought to promote innovation and a better life for all. But the truth is that community is one more victim to the capitalist addiction to profitmaking and capital accumulation. It leaves us adrift socially and morally. 47 The great disparity in wealth brings with it a great disparity in political power. When the very rich and corporations can spend their money with few limitations to lobby for their interests, the rest of us have little to say. The great inequality does serious damage to our democracy and thus to our political freedom. 48 Capitalism creates not merely inequality between businesses and workers and consumers. It creates inequality in the business world itself where enterprises compete with each other savagely. The outcome of these fights is that one company grows while the other is absorbed or simply destroyed. Corporations grow in size and thereby in power. Global corporations are often more powerful than national governments. Global corporations are altogether too powerful. 49

ONCE MORE: BEYOND CAPITALISM AND SOCIALISM The preceding list of complaints about capitalism is certainly acceptable to people on the far left who often think of themselves as “socialists.” But

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interestingly enough, the list of authors cited in the preceding paragraphs all have written books that are highly critical of capitalism but begin with ringing support for capitalism—of good capitalism—and uncompromising rejection of socialism. These are very moderate leftists. It turns out that both socialists and anti-socialists—far left and moderate leftists— agree to a significant extent about the failures of contemporary capitalism. The critical supporters of capitalism understand by socialism a regime where most things are run by a central authority. The self-identified socialists reject socialism, thus understood, as much as anybody else. What they mean by socialism is also supported by the anti-socialists, namely an economy where, for instance, cooperatives, worker owned and managed enterprises and a robust safety net for all citizens are central institutions. Disagreements about “socialism” and “capitalism” do not clarify the current criticisms of the existing economic, social, and political system. Instead they confuse the debate. We would be better off leaving those terms aside and talking instead about people who are wholehearted supporters of capitalism, as it is today, and those who are its critics. In the latter category—the critics of capitalism—belong both self-described socialists and anti-socialists. Their agreements are clearly more important than their disagreements which have to do mostly with the definition of terms.

SOME PROPOSED CURES FOR CAPITALISM Critics of capitalism on the far left look to Fair Trade networks, Farmer’s Markets, community supported agriculture, worker-managed ESOPs and other cooperatives, anti-sweatshop actions, living wage movements, nonprofits to employ the unemployed, as some of the means for resisting capitalist institutions. 50 Different authors have different lists; some put major stress on particular institutions. David Schweickart elaborates a portrait of a post-capitalist society where enterprises are run by the people working in them and investment capital is publicly owned and disbursed according to guidelines adopted by democratically elected representatives. 51 Direct economic planning, such as in Porto Alegre, Brazil, is recommended by other authors. 52 Cooperatives are favored institutions on the far left and among centerleft authors because workplaces are owned and controlled by the workers in them; investors’ desire for profit do not determine the conduct of the enterprise. The goal is to put significant portions of our lives out of reach of profit-making competition between different capitalist enterprises. Competition sets us against each other, relationships become zerosum games where one person’s advancement is made possible by another’s loss. But human happiness requires firm and rich social relations.

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The isolation produced in a competitive society does not make us happy. 53 Some authors advocate that publicly chartered corporations be made to serve the common good instead of being vehicles for private enrichment. Governments are urged to curtail the drive of corporations to externalize their costs for environmental destruction. Corporations should be made to pay for using up non-renewable resources, for discharging wastes into the air, the water, and soil. Strengthening political democracy through campaign finance reform is another common project. 54 A favorite model institution is the Alaska Trust that pays every inhabitant of Alaska a yearly sum as their portion of the money the state earns from the exploitation of oil resources. 55 Others look for the establishment of public trusts in order to protect the environment from the ravages of capitalist corporations. The principle of public trusts is familiar: large areas of the continental United States are owned by the government and are protected—more or less—against exploitation by for-profit enterprises. The same applies to libraries from the local lending library in small country towns to the Library of Congress. Here books are available to everyone for free. No one is making any money off people’s desire to read. This proposal for public trusts includes the following: “a series of ecosystem trusts that protect air, water, forests and habitat; a mutual fund that pays dividends to all Americans . . . ; a risk-sharing pool for health care that covers everyone; a national fund based on copyright fees that supports local arts; [and] a limit on the amount of advertising.” 56 These public trust funds will not merely be used to protect the environment; they will also provide a minimum income to every adult and money for every child to get started in life. It is easy to think of some other possible proposals. Information is a very important commodity in modern capitalism. One way of besting competitors is to withhold essential information from them. A society that aims not at private profit but at cooperation with the goal of the common good must refashion its laws governing private ownership of information. The obvious example of that is the Linux operating system, the product of many programmers who work on this vast body of computer code merely for the fun of it, in order to hone their skills, and to produce a really good product. In these and other efforts, however much they may differ among each other, the central goal is very clear: to replace for-profit capitalist enterprises by others aiming at social improvement, and everyone’s good. No more aiming at private profit regardless of the damage it may do to persons or to the natural environment. But, for the most part, these proposals concern specific, fairly concrete undertakings. This is no longer socialism that will replace capitalism completely and must therefore wait until capitalism fails to function. These are efforts to create non-capitalist

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institutions however dominant capitalism may be in this society as a whole. They are attempts of groups of citizens to save themselves, and as much of our world as possible, by altering the way they work, the way they buy what they need, the way they deliver care to children and the elderly, the way they participate in politics. However different these projects may be from one another, the goal remains the same: to put capitalism behind us as much as we can. Here we notice once more that authors who seem to disagree very sharply, nevertheless agree about ways to save ourselves from the damage capitalism does to the human and the natural world. Both those on the far left and those of the moderate left agree that capitalism, as it functions today, is destroying the human and natural world. The remedies proposed are often the same: institutions run by their members, extensive democracy at work as well as in local communities, the replacement of competition by cooperation, putting people before profits. Once again we see rather clearly that the debate between advocates of capitalism and advocates of socialism only confuses. The question for a large body of thinkers is how to save ourselves from a capitalism that is going berserk.

WHAT KIND OF ANTI-CAPITALISM IS THIS? We may recall the argument put forward by Eduard Bernstein of the German Social Democratic Party, that the collapse of capitalism was not inevitable. From that observation, Bernstein concluded that socialists needed to transform capitalism from the inside through the mechanism of electoral politics. However, the history of the German Social Democratic Party before and after World War I shows that tactic to be counterproductive. Social democratic parties, up to the present time, reinforce the same historical lesson. Today, as I write this, socialist governments ram austerity programs, that mainly benefit big banks, down the people’s throats (as is currently happening in Greece). We part ways with Bernstein because we do not believe that capitalism will be replaced completely in a very short period of time. Yes we would like to see capitalism go once and for all, but we have no idea how long it will take. We do believe that portions of it can be done away with without necessarily abolishing all other aspects of the system. E. O. Wright defines this undertaking as “the social economy” which will consists of “social empowerment in which voluntary associations in civil society directly organize various aspects of economic activity. . . .” 57 Different groups develop ways of replacing specific capitalist enterprises by enterprises that have different aims and employ different methods. The long struggle to replace capitalist institutions is done piecemeal. How many institutions we are trying to alter at one time depends on the

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number of people committed to the project. In some periods, there are many people working on it, each in their different way. At other times, the effort slows down. Perhaps a war draws all the energy to patriotic activities. Perhaps a major capitalist crisis leaves many people destitute and desperate and unwilling to do any serious political work other than getting help now for supporting their families. In certain periods the resistance to capitalism makes less sense. That was the case in 1989 and some years thereafter. An important model of an alternative society had proved itself unworkable. It took 10 years or more for other alternatives to come to the surface and appear worth working on.

WHAT ARE THESE ALTERNATIVE INSTITUTIONS? What sorts of changes are we looking for? There are changes in capitalism every day—millions of them—which of those go in the right direction? Another way of raising that question is to ask why we recommend cooperatives, home production, volunteering, etc., etc. as models of the transformations of capitalism we desire, but do not recommend subprime mortgages or securitized mortgage investments? At first blush, the answer seems simple. We oppose an economic system in which growing capital is more important than anything else. Only those counter institutions are acceptable which pursue the value of the environment and of human lives over that of capital accumulation. One very interesting way of specifying that goal says that we are aiming to build institutions that allow us to be better people. 58 We are asking ourselves to shift our values from standard capitalist ones having to do with money and with making always more money, to the values of enhancing human lives and salvaging nature. But people’s values are integral to their identity. In answering a question about who someone is, we may well talk about the person’s values. “He is a person of modest needs,” we say, or “she is really into money.” If we are going to be changing our values, we will be changing ourselves. Changing ourselves is not a matter of resolving to be better persons. We make those kinds of resolutions all the time and rarely keep them or only with difficulties. Persons change with changes in their social environment. What we value, who we are, depends to a considerable extent on the social context in which we live. In a capitalist society money is important to us. It is difficult to resist the blandishments of consumer culture and however much we try we are only partially successful. If we are going to lead a reasonable life, we have to compete for jobs, for houses, for commodities. If we are going to pursue and embrace different values we have to try to build social environments in which living differently, guided by different values, is going to be easier. One function of

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the alternative institutions of the social economy is to provide us with settings in which we can be the best people we are capable of being. A wide range of alternative institutions satisfy the criterion that they not put growing capital in the center of their efforts. Some of them will focus especially on environmental protection and improvement. Others will make special efforts to improve the work life. Others again will try to improve lives by improving the quality of products regardless of costs— within limits, of course. Others again are strongly interested in democratic decision making processes; others focus particularly on young people and children. There are organizations concerned about the well-being of prisoners, of women, or of improving the conditions of persons of color. Each of them has its aims which they prize higher than making money.

DIFFICULTIES But we must not misunderstand this criterion for alternative institutions. Although alternative institutions do not put accumulation of capital ahead of all other values, even they need capital. And that capital— wherever it comes from—needs to be preserved and needs to grow enough to allow for future expansion. Alternative institutions may follow the example of Mondragon and limit each enterprise to a fairly modest size and start new enterprises instead of expanding existing ones. But however they choose to expand, the alternative economy must grow in order to become more powerful and be better able to resist the capitalist one. Therefore its capital needs to grow also. This is all the more important because the expansionary tendencies of capitalism continue to be at work. Capitalism will continue to grow while we fiddle with our small co-ops, unless we too resolve to increase our capital. Enterprises grow by making a profit or by attracting new investments. Making a profit makes it easier to attract investors. Alternative institutions face some really difficult choices. They can pursue the well-being of members and people in the community and not worry about making profit. But that will condemn them to remaining small, if not marginal. The alternative is to make a profit and retrench on efforts to improve the lives of members of the enterprise and of the community. Alternative institutions face other difficulties; they do not constitute a distinct world. They are, of necessity, involved with standard capitalist enterprises in many different ways. Producer co-ops may have to buy raw materials from straight capitalist firms and have difficulty getting a good price because those firms are hostile to co-ops. Similarly, co-ops may have to sell their product to straight capitalist firms and encounter the same difficulty there. Both producer and consumer co-ops may find themselves in competition with capitalist firms and will therefore be under heavy competitive pressure to lower their prices. Declaring oneself

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to be and acting as an alternative enterprise does not free one from the pressures of the capitalist marketplace, not to mention the hostility of capitalist firms against cooperatives. Both of these forces will put considerable pressure on alternative enterprises to act like all the other firms in the capitalist marketplace. Creating alternative institutions challenges standard capitalist institutions and capitalists do not like challenges and will therefore react to fight back. In addition, alternative undertakings have to deal with the state. Food co-ops or restaurants need a series of permits. They need their spaces to be inspected by the fire department; the health inspector needs to certify their cleanliness. In a capitalist society, the government is on the site of the capitalists if only because they have the power to force government agencies to support them. In every interaction with different government bureaus, the alternative enterprise may encounter resistance and additional obstacles. 59 Some other papers in this volume mention a more serious difficulty faced by alternative institutions. My paper on socialist solidarity pointed out that we are not clear about the means for achieving the kind of the equality we are seeking. Anatole Anton’s discussion of the division of labor under capitalism and socialism points us in the direction of questions about a socialist division of labor which, at the moment, we do not know a whole lot about. Once we give up the idea that socialism is a total system which will replace an equally total system—capitalism—and substitute a picture of individual groups trying to build their own institutions, we have to confront the fact that many of these institutions are difficult to construct. The process involves a good deal of experimentation. There are many goals of ours which, at the moment, we are not sure how to reach. The process is experimental because we will try to create the institutions we seek and if we fail, we hope others will learn from our failure and be more successful.

WILL IT WORK? We must not misunderstand this question. For heroic Marxists that question meant whether socialism will indeed—as promised—be more productive than an aging and decaying capitalism, whether it will be more democratic than a capitalism that has captured political power and has deprived the majority of genuine participation. That is the question asked by people who want to abolish all of capitalism and substitute for it, in short compass, all of socialism. But this is not the project here. The question therefore is whether building non- or even anti-capitalists institutions in the interstices of rampant capitalism will eventually serve to change the society for the better. There are several answers to this question:

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It’s not going to work. On this point the far left, even Marx at many times of his life, and right-wing capitalists agree. They do have a good deal of historical evidence on their side. The first functioning consumer co-op was founded in Rochedale, England, about 150 years ago. Advocates of co-operatives tell us about the large number of co-ops existing in the world, the large number of persons working in cooperatives, and the impressive amount of money involved in all these efforts. The cooperative movement has grown. But now consider the capitalism of mid-19thcentury England and compare it to capitalism today. The effort of the cooperative movement is respectable but it does not compare with the exponential growth of capitalism. What is more, the capitalists have taken over government all around the world. When you see the figures about cooperatives you are surprised. But cooperatives still exist at the margins. We don’t know. The preceding argument is no stronger than any argument that extrapolates from the past to the future. Two hundred years before the foundation of the first cooperative, radical Englishman demanded universal suffrage and far-going equality. They had to wait 200 years to get universal male suffrage. Someone might well have argued in 1860, a few years before the passage of the universal male suffrage law in England, that it was unlikely that all men would ever be allowed to vote. After all they had first brought up the question 200 years ago and had still not managed it. History shows us clearly the difficulties in the way of changes. History does not prove or disprove the possibility. We must be optimistic. A companion train of thought admonishes lovers of change and those who like to talk about alternative institutions to be optimistic and hopeful. Radicals are sustained by their sharp critique of existing realities. There is not much in the present world that they wholeheartedly approve off. In fact they pride themselves on being able to see the cloud attached to every silver lining. But that has not been an attitude that encourages one to be hopeful for the future. What some people may see as signs of improvement, radicals tend to greet with distrust or disappointment. If nothing is ever quite good enough, it is difficult to think that even the future will ever come up to our expectations. But such a critical attitude is obviously self-fulfilling. If we are going to change the world, we are told, we need to lighten up. That means that we should not allow the history of failure or of alternative institutions to dampen our spirits too much. We should not allow the historical argument to persuade us. 60 There have been enormous changes in the world which for the longest time no one believed to be possible. This is a companion argument to the previous one. One hundred years ago most African-Americans lived in conditions of near slavery and, if possible, with less security for life and limb than they had as slaves. Today we have a black president.

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The world does change; sometimes for the better. Sometimes quite spectacularly. Alternative institutions must be sure to network. There are many alternative institutions in our country and in the world. Many of them are struggling and making great demands on the time and energy of their members. They tend to be more isolated than they ought to be if they want to have political influence. Cooperatives and other alternative institutions are often admonished to establish ties with other similar institutions, to support each other, and to become more visible through their interconnections. The implicit thought is that the lack of political influence of alternative institutions is due to faulty strategies, which need to be remedied. We don’t know whether any of this will work.

NOTES 1. Stephen Kreis, “Lecture 22: The Utopian Socialists, Robert Owen and SaintSimon,” in The History Guide: Lectures on Modern Intellectual History. Accessed July 3, 2011. http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/lecture22a.html. 2. Peter Barnes, Capitalism 3.0 : A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2006). 3. David Korten, Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth (San Francisco: Berret-Koehler, 2010). Kindle edition. 4. George Lukacs, History and Class-Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 1. 5. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 483. This is not an isolated passage. In most of their writings, Marx, and sometimes he and Engels, assert the ineluctable sequence of historical events that will end in a proletarian revolution and a new, socialist society. See Marx’s “Preface” to The Critique of Political Economy (Tucker, 4); The German Ideology (Tucker, 195); Grundrisse (Tucker, 291); Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 763. 6. See this aside about his repeated assertion of “inevitability” or “iron necessity”: “This conception appears to be a necessary development. But there is a legitimate space for accidental occurrences.” Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Frankfurt: Europaeische Verlagsanstalt, n.d.), 30. 7. In this letter Marx cites his remarks in Kapital about the necessity of capitalism turning farmers into proletarians but adds “the ‘historical inevitability’ of this movement is expressly limited to the countries of Western Europe.” In Russia he believed, the existing agricultural communes could be the basis of a socialist society—if they could be defended against efforts to turn peasants into capitalist laborers. David McClellan, Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 576. See also Teodor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road (New York: Monthly Review, 1983). 8. Stanley Aronowitz, The Crisis in Historical Materialism: Class, Politics and Culture in Historical Materialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). 9. Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1910), 90. 10. Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism (New York: Schocken Books, 1961). 11. Marx, Capital, vol. I, 763.

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12. “Manifesto of the International Socialist Congress in Basel,” accessed June 7, 2011 from http://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/1912/ basel-manifesto.htm. 13. Richard F. Hamilton, Who Voted for Hitler? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982). 14. The most prominent example is G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). 15. Michael Albert et al., Liberating Theory (Boston: South End Press, 1986), 49, 100; Paula Allman, Critical Education against Global Capitalism: Karl Marx and Revolutionary Critical Education (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001); Sam Bowles, Richard Edwards, and Frank Roosevelt, Understanding Capitalism: Competition, Command and Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); James and Grace Lee Boggs, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review, 1974); Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (London: Verso, 2007); J. K. Gibson-Graham, A Post-Capitalist Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); André Gorz, Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology (London: Verso, 1994); David Harvey, The Engima of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2010), 9; Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (London: Verso, 2010). 16. Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader, 4. 17. G. A. Cohen, “Forces and Relations of Production,” Analytical Marxism, ed. John Roemer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 11–22. 18. G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), Chapter 1. 19. Karl Marx, “Afterword to the Second Edition” in Capital, vol. 1, Tucker, MarxEngels Reader, 302. 20. David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital (London: Verso 2010). 21. Cohen, Marx’s Theory of History, 297. 22. Rosa Luxemburg, “Reform or Revolution,” in Writings of Rosa Luxemburg (St. Petersburg, FL: Red and Black Publications, n.d.): 16. 23. Luxemburg, “Reform and Revolution,” 18. 24. Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism. 25. Cohen, Marx’s Theory of History, 315. 26. Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, 190. 27. J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), xxiv. 28. Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), 22. 29. Ethan Miller, Solidarity Economics: Strategies for Building New Economies from the Bottom-Up and the Inside-Out. Accessed July 7, 2011 at http://www.dollarsandsense. org/archives/2006/0706emiller.html, 6. 30. John Holloway, Crack Capitalism, 11. 31. It is true, of course, that women’s work in the home, not being paid, saves the capitalists a whole lot of money. But it does not follow from that that the production in the home is a function of capitalism. Have parents not cared for and cherished their children before the advent of industrial capitalism? 32. J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism, 65. 33. Holloway, Crack Capitalism, 21. 34. Accessed 6/23/2011 at http://www.nationalservice.gov/pdf/10_0614_via_2010_ fact_sheet_6_10_10.pdf. 35. Some theorists regard compulsion as essential to exploitation. Conditions chosen by the worker-owners cannot be exploitative, by definition. See Nancy Holmstrom, “Exploitation,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 7 (1978): 353–369. 36. J. K. Gibson-Graham, “Diverse Economies: Performative Practices for ‘Other Worlds.’” Accessed 6/23/11 at http://www.communityeconomies.org/Publications/ Articles-Chapters/rethinking-the-economy.

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37. Roger S. Gottlieb, “Feudalism and Historical Materialism: A Critique and a Synthesis,” Science and Society 48 (1984): 1–37. 38. Cohen, Marx’s Theory of History, 297. 39. Michael Postan, Trade of Medieval Europe: The North. Vol. II of the Cambridge Economic History of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 250. 40. Korten, Agenda; Robert Pollin, Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity (London: Verso, 2003), 12; Joseph Stiglitz, Free Fall: America, Free Markets and the Sinking of the World Economy (New York: Norton, 2010), 185. 41. Marjorie Kelly, The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy (San Francisco: Berrett and Koehler, 2003), 3. 42. Hazel Henderson, Building a Win-Win World: Life Beyond Global Economic Warfare (San Francisco: Berrett and Koehler, 1996), 95. 43. J. G. Speth, Bridge at the End of the World : Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 44. Korten, Agenda, 56. 45. Joseph Stiglitz, Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why the GDP Does Not Add Up (New York: New Press, 2010); Agenda Korten, 140; Rianne Eisler, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2007), Kindle edition. 46. Juliet B. Shor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998). 47. Jonathan Porrit, Capitalism as If the World Matters (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2007), 100. 48. Gar Alperovitz, America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming our Wealth, Our Liberty, Our Democracy (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2005). 49. Thomas Linzey, Be the Change You Can Be: How to Get the Change You Want in Your Community (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2009). 50. Gibson-Graham, Post-Capitalist Politics, Chapter 4. 51. David Schweickart, After Capitalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). 52. Wright, Real Utopias; Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, Parecon (London: Verson, 2003). 53. John Restakis, Humanizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital (Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 2010). 54. Korten, Agenda; Kelly, Divine Right of Capital, 160; Alperovitz, America Beyond Capitalism. 55. Wright, Envisioning Utopias, 217; Peter Barnes, Capitalism 3.0. 56. Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (New York: Henry Holt, 2007); Barnes, Capitalism 3.0. 57. Wright, Envisioning Utopias, 140. 58. Holloway, Crack Capitalism, 64. 59. Holloway, Crack Capitalism, 54. 60. Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (New York: Nation Books, 2004).

REFERENCES Albert, Michael, et al., Liberating Theory. Boston: South End Press, 1986. Allman, Paula. Critical Education against Global Capitalism: Karl Marx and Revolutionary Critical Education. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001. Alperovitz, Gar. America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, Our Democracy. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2005. Aronowitz, Stanley. The Crisis in Historical Materialism: Class, Politics and Culture in Historical Materialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. Barnes, Peter. Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons. San Francisco: BerrettKoehler, 2006.

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Bernstein, Eduard. Evolutionary Socialism. New York: Schocken Books, 1961. Boggs, James, and Grace Lee. Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review, 1974. Bowles, Sam, Richard Edwards, and Frank Roosevelt. Understanding Capitalism: Competition, Command and Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Cohen, G. A. Karl Marx’s Theory of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. ———. “Forces and Relations of Production,” Analytical Marxism, ed. John Roemer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Critchley, Simon. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. London: Verso, 2007. Eisler, Rianne. The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2007. Gibson-Graham, J. K. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. ———. A Post-Capitalist Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. ———. “Diverse Economies: Performative Practices for ‘Other Worlds.’” Accessed June 23, 2011 at http://www.communityeconomies.org/Publications/Articles-Chapters/rethinking-the-economy. Gorz, André. Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology. London: Verso, 1994. Gottlieb, Roger S. “Feudalism and Historical Materialism: A Critique and a Synthesis,” Science and Society 48 (1984): 1–37. Hamilton, Richard F. Who Voted for Hitler? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982. Harvey, David. The Engima of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Harvey, David. A Companion to Marx’s Capital. London: Verso 2010. Henderson, Hazel. Building a Win-Win World: Life Beyond Global Economic Warfare. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1996. Hilton, Rodney. The Transition form Feudalism to Capitalism. London: Verso, 1978. Holloway, John. Crack Capitalism. London: Pluto Press, 2010. Holmstrom, Nancy. “Exploitation,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 7 (1978): 353–69. Kautsky, Karl. The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program). Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1910. Kelly, Marjorie. The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2003. Korten, David. Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2010. Kreis, Stephen. “Lecture 22: The Utopian Socialists, Robert Owen and Saint-Simon,” in The History Guide: Lectures on Modern Intellectual History. Accessed July 3, 2011. http:/ /www.historyguide.org/intellect/lecture22a.html. Laclau, Ernesto. New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. London: Verso, 1990. Linzey, Thomas. Be the Change You Can Be: How to Get the Change You Want in Your Community. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2009. Lukacs, George. History and Class-Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971. Luxemburg, Rosa. “Reform or Revolution,” in Writings of Rosa Luxemburg. St. Petersburg, FL: Red and Black Publications, n.d. Marx, Karl. “Afterword to the Second Edition,” in Capital, vol 1. in Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Tucker. Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. Frankfurt: Europaeische Verlagsanstalt, n.d. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels, “The German Ideology,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The MarxEngels Reader, ed. Tucker. McClellan, David. Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

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Miller, Ethan. Solidarity Economics: Strategies for Building New Economies from the Bottom-Up and the Inside-Out. Accessed July 7, 2011 at http://www.dollarsandsense.org/ archives/2006/0706emiller.html, 6. Pollin, Robert. Contours of Descent: U.S. Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity. London: Verso, 2003. Porrit, Jonathan. Capitalism as If the World Matters. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2007. Postan, Michael. Trade of Medieval Europe: The North. Vol. II of the Cambridge Economic History of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Restakis, John. Humanizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 2010. Schweickart, David. After Capitalism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Shanin, Teodor. Late Marx and the Russian Road. New York: Monthly Review, 1983. Shor, Juliet B. The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998. Speth, J. G. Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Stiglitz, Joseph. Free Fall: America, Free Markets and the Sinking of the World Economy. New York: Norton, 2010. Stiglitz, Joseph. Mismeasuring our Lives: Why the GDP Does Not Add Up. New York: New Press, 2010. Wright, Erik Olin. Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso, 2010.

TEN Social Movements and Struggles for Socialism John L. Hammond

Social movements are the means by which masses of oppressed people struggle for social change. Relatively powerless people can amass and accumulate power, challenge their subordination, and win concessions from or overthrow existing power structures. The large numbers and strong commitment of participants can sometimes compensate for their lack of power. But they do more than struggle for power. They empower the participants themselves, create collective consciousness and organization, and shape the culture of the society in which they act. Participation in a social movement is a collective activity and thus is itself part of the preparation for life under socialism. In this paper I examine the ways in which social movements can contribute to the struggle for socialism. They have been an important vehicle for that struggle for the last two centuries. If socialism is to represent the goal of the large majority of the population (as I believe it must if it is to succeed), then large numbers of people must be involved in its achievement. Today’s economic and political crisis can only be resolved by socialism, so it is essential that socialists understand the importance of movements in bringing socialism about. Most of the movements I discuss are not movements for socialism, but for a much more partial kind of social change. I examine these movements because I believe that present conditions do not offer a realistic way for movements to struggle explicitly for socialism. (I do not discuss today’s sectarian parties, none of which in my opinion promotes any realistic struggle for socialism.) I will argue, however, that although the 213

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goals of such partial struggles fall well short of socialism, and even when they do not achieve their stated objectives, their process of organization, their successes, and their failures can prepare the ground for a struggle for socialism and for a socialist future. I present this discussion in the spirit of optimism of the will, emphasizing the ways in which these movements can lead the way to socialism. I do this not because I believe that they offer any guarantee (my intelligence is too pessimistic for that) but because we must understand the possibilities and keep them in mind. We must remember past experiences and envision future possibilities expansively. As we do so, we change the limits of the possible. So the emphasis in this paper is on positive possibilities, even though the reality has generally fallen short. I will not spend time discussing the shortcoming of social movements that fail to live up to their objectives. In the conclusion to the paper, however, I will discuss some limitations built into the very process of social movements which limit their chances of success. In this paper I will elide two important definitions: of socialism and of social movements. I do not lay down any prescription for the structure of a socialist society. I understand it as the fulfillment of very general values: equality, freedom, justice, and solidarity. These values must not only inform our vision of the future; they must be integral to the movements through which we pursue it. Nor will I define social movements precisely. We can apply Justice Potter Stewart’s principle regarding pornography and say we know one when we see it. When I teach courses on social movements, I prefer to leave the concept undefined and instead present social movements as a form of activity, or what Charles Tilly calls “clusters of performances.” 1 The kind of activity specific to social movements is defined principally by collective purpose, nonmaterial incentives, and noninstitutional action. That is, people who perform the activity of social movements gather on a voluntary basis to achieve some shared goal. Their action is coordinated by their commitment to that goal rather than by any exchange of money or other reward. In the cases examined here, the goal is usually public: it is intended to be binding on the whole society or some group larger than the core of activists. Further, because my interest is in socialism, I will consider only those movements that I recognize as striving for social justice in some broad sense. It can be argued that social movements are intrinsically emancipatory even when their demands are for restrictions rather than enhancements of human freedom—for example, Deirdre English has suggested that the antiabortion (“right to life”) movement, despite attempting to control women’s freedom of choice, offers some women a channel for empowering political participation. 2 Here, however, I will only examine movements in which process and goals appear to me to be congruent.

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Such collectivities must be bound together by something more than mutual self-interest or even shared goals. They develop affective bonds of identification and collectively develop a self-awareness that heightens their commitment to the goal. Because they lack the resources to win their goals through conventional political action, they use means that violate social order—their actions are disruptive or contrary to generally accepted norms of behavior, and often violate laws. They can include mass public gatherings, occupying public space illegally, and sometimes violence. Confronting power with large numbers, unity, and transgressive action is what gives them the power to achieve their goals, compensating for the lack of more conventional resources. Trying to specify what is a social movement often leads to confusion because to treat a social movement as an entity suggests a more or less formal organization. How much more or less? Too little organization, as in a crowd action or a state of consensus, and it is not a social movement. Too much organization, as in a political party or a well-established voluntary organization in which activism consists of little more than writing checks, and again it is not a social movement. And the actors in any collective action may or may not be formally affiliated with any organization—or some may be, and others not. Any movement may, moreover, be embodied in several organizations, perhaps collaborating with each other but also competing for active adherents and public support. 3 For my purposes, it is not necessary to specify the boundaries and ask whether any particular phenomenon is a social movement or not. To treat a movement as a well-defined and bounded organization is to reify; nevertheless, for purposes of this article I will assume that movements can be identified as real entities that act collectively and whose collective action has identifiable effects, oversimplifying without (I hope) reifying. In a single article I can hardly offer a comprehensive survey of social movements, or of the literature about them. Readers will see that I draw on a heterogeneous set of organizations and activities. I have made arbitrary choices to discuss movements that illustrate specific points, and I have drawn freely on my own prior research in Portugal and Latin America, which I discuss in some detail. I trust that the many U.S.-based movements which I discuss are well known enough or clearly enough described that I can discuss them more briefly. I also draw on the sociological theory of social movements, but selectively, to make specific points. I do not try to offer a general overview of social movement theory.

THE FIRST SOCIAL MOVEMENT The term “social movement” was coined by Lorenz von Stein to describe the working class movement for socialism in Europe that culminated in the mass socialist parties of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Stein first used the term in his The History of the Social Movement in France (1846) in which he proclaimed the movement to a state-centered economy that he believed was in progress. The labor movement was historically the most prominent participant in the struggle for socialism. Trade unions were the main force for socialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, especially in Europe. The earliest workers’ movements arose among artisans who were being displaced by mechanized factory production in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Luddites, handloom weavers who sabotaged factories to resist the introduction of mechanical looms, were an early example of workers who combined to develop class consciousness through daily struggles, based on their traditional sense of justice and their reaction to injustice, as E. P. Thompson’s classic and still definitive study shows. 4 These workers resisted the imposition of factory discipline. As the factory system took hold, workers organized within it to improve their wages and working conditions. In Germany, industrial workers created a mass movement that supported the explicitly socialist and Marxism-inspired Social Democratic Party. In the nineteenth century an increasingly homogeneous working class, increasingly subjected to wage labor and the discipline of the factory, lived in relatively cohesive communities where the movement organized social life. Workers participated in a cultural life of musical, theater, hiking, and other kinds of clubs in which they could develop a social identity as workers and socialists. As we will see, community life and cultural offshoots are an important part of social movements even today. The homogenization of the working class was a slow process. Buffeted by economic fluctuations and political repression, its political organization was never secure. The German movement encompassed various visions of socialism. Ostensibly united around a written program, it was nevertheless divided by strategic differences, particularly regarding its relation to the bourgeois state and the electoral process. Some believed that socialism could be achieved by constitutional means; others saw electoral participation as a way station in preparation for a future rupture; still others argued for complete abstention from formal political participation. 5 Today the working class, broadly defined, is increasingly heterogeneous in skill, education, and ethnic background, and does not live in homogeneous communities defined by their class composition. Nevertheless the lesson of those early workers’ movements remains instructive. In the United States today, the labor “movement” is called a movement only by historical memory. Organized unionism, weakened by the changing industrial structure, the globalization of the economy, and the political attack it has suffered under increasingly conservative federal administrations, has also been weakened by its own organizational scler-

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osis. Large unions are ossified bureaucracies; most do not work for social change. Their steadily shrinking membership is enrolled through involuntary (whether or not unwanted) dues checkoffs from their paychecks and has no active association or activity within the “movement.” Some current efforts to revive unionism follow the social movement model. A relatively small number of locals within a few unions have adopted what is called “social movement unionism,” organizing workers and allies on the basis of community membership. Social movement unionism is modeled on union movements that fought dictatorships in the last decades of the twentieth century, notably in Brazil, South Africa, and South Korea. In the United States, this new form of organizing has broken new ground, especially in low-paying service sectors such as hotels, building services, and health care facilities, all of which are locationdependent, giving a strategic advantage to organizing efforts because they cannot be outsourced. 6 Movements that occupy the same spaces in which people live often have a stronger base for socialization and political activity. They are part of real communities whose existence usually predates the mobilization. The communities in which they are rooted create common sentiments and common interests and provide networks of communication through which people can be activated. As we have already seen, the German working class movement for socialism in the late nineteenth century was rooted in homogeneous communities. Some movements today grow out of, or are located in, homogeneous communities of subordinate people who recognize their shared interest and mobilize on that basis. The indigenous movements that have recently won striking political victories in Andean countries, especially Bolivia and Ecuador, are based in communities that are often far from urban centers and outside the dominant mestizo culture. The people living in them are poor and discriminated against as “Indian.” These communities arise naturally. The same organizations that mobilize for political activity have important functions in everyday life: in agricultural communities they organize market relations and in some cases allocate communal lands for cultivation. They conduct community rituals and festivals. Networks that join people in daily life can be mobilized for political action when it is called for. Community-based organizations are also the site and vehicle for the assertion of a distinct indigenous culture. 7 Another movement where the spaces for work, living, and mobilization are nearly identical is the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or MST), a rural movement that occupies land to create farms for farmers without access to land. For more than a decade the MST has been the most dynamic social movement in all Brazil. It organizes unemployed and landless farm workers to take over idle, absentee-owned farmland. When occupiers take over a

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property to farm, they create a community where they live and work. Through engagement in earning a living, political self-defense, and education, they develop a sense of solidarity. The MST’s settlements are collective, and the people in them create a community life and local institutions (such as schools and marketing cooperatives) whose existence is part of their mission to create a just and productive society. 8 The MST is one of the few movements discussed in this paper that is explicitly committed to socialism. In pushing for land redistribution, the movement offers peasants a means to make a living on the land and at the same time pursues its goal of a general agrarian reform as part of a socialist society. The MST’s communities are therefore created by the movement itself. While most people live and work on the farms full time, activists are recruited from them for full-time organizing or to study to be teachers or cooperative specialists in the movement’s high schools and in universities. Those living on the settlements are available to participate in the movement’s mass actions—land occupations, marches, and educational and cultural activities. The most important political movement in the United States in the twentieth century, the civil rights movement, was also rooted in communities. Oppressed blacks in the American South came together, primarily in churches, to protest segregation and their exclusion from full citizenship. The existing networks of communication and solidarity formed the basis from which they organized to protest and demand their rights. 9 Worker cooperatives and worker-controlled firms, examined in more detail below, are in some ways similar; members of cooperatives do not necessarily live together but they collaborate daily to keep their businesses going. The primary incentive for the farm workers and the cooperative members is, of course, material: they earn a living through the movement. But the solidarity incentive of working together to achieve a goal is important in sustaining them. Today social movement activists do not usually share a community life or a work life that creates links beyond their common activism. Nor is movement activism the center of most people’s lives. In most movements in industrialized countries and in urban movements in poorer countries, participation is segmental and detached from work, family, and other activities. Nor are they necessarily socially homogeneous. How can movements get organized when they do not have a natural community base and when participation is segmented? Drawing on such community relations strengthens movements, but most movements today organize without them. Networks are still key in organizing social movements—people who participate in the same social network are likely to share the identification and affective bonds on which participation in social movements at least partly depends; they may also, at least potentially, share a predisposition to embrace the same causes. Today, how-

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ever, networks are less tied to the residential community so mobilization must occur on other bases. 10 Electronic networks form the basis of many movements today, but some argue that increased breadth does not makeup for a shallowness that is due to the lack of face-to-face interaction.

THE EFFECTS OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS In Gramscian terms, the movements discussed in this paper wage a war of position rather than a war of maneuver; they do not assault the state directly but work in civil society to create the cultural and organizational conditions for political change. 11 I will argue that they contribute to political struggles in four main ways: 1. Empowerment: For individuals, social movements cultivate skills, confidence, and commitment. Acting in concert with others for a common cause solidifies one’s commitment to the cause. The very act of transgressing everyday norms creates a sense of power by showing that it is possible even for people who consider themselves powerless to take action on behalf of their commitments. 2. Prefiguration: At the collective level, movements prefigure the social relations that we hope to see prevail in socialism. They do so in three major ways: community, democracy, and decommodification. 3. Cultural shift: Movements influence culture beyond their own activists by challenging received norms and presenting alternatives that redefine the universe of permissible discourse. When activists transgress boundaries, they demonstrate the existence of new possibilities to others who actually or potentially share their interests even if they are not directly involved, and may be encouraged to join them or at least reconsider their assumptions. 4. Policy impact: Through movements, subordinate groups acquire the power to win political victories. They can exert pressure on officials to adopt policies they favor, compelling those who are hostile to the cause and fortifying the ones who are sympathetic. Before considering each of these possible effects of social movements in more detail, let me pause for a brief theoretical reflection and an example. This article cannot offer a complete account of social movement theory, but it will be useful to introduce some conceptual distinctions. The first two effects are felt in the movement itself and by its participants; the last two are effects on the world outside of the movement. The sociological theory of social movements has conventionally distinguished between two types of movements (or sometimes two functions of movements), expressive and instrumental (or, in Jean L. Cohen’s formulation, focused on identity or strategy). In this view, when a movement’s activities are focused inward, they serve expressive functions, and when they are focused outward, they serve instrumental functions. Sometimes the same

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movement is characterized by some analysts as primarily instrumental and by others as primarily expressive. 12 I believe, however, that movements must be understood as having elements of both. Let me illustrate this with a brief discussion of the U.S. women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s. I will assume that, despite all its internal diversity, it can be characterized as a single movement. It evidently embodied elements of both strategy and identity. The women’s movement had two branches, generally referred to as the older and younger branches. 13 The main organizational embodiment of the older branch was the National Organization for Women (NOW); the younger branch was more loosely organized in the consciousness-raising groups that proliferated during the period. They did tend, though not absolutely, to attract older and younger women respectively. NOW emphasized legal change in the status of women; other related organizations concentrated on the election of women to public office; in both cases they directly worked for change in public policies that oppressed women. The younger branch was more concerned to establish that “the personal is political,” and attempted to raise women’s consciousness of the oppression to which they were subject in interpersonal relations, especially with intimate partners but also in everyday interaction with work colleagues, superiors, and friends and acquaintances. It also showed a penchant for audacious public performances which dramatized the demand for freedom from sexist oppression. Important legal and political changes followed, upholding women’s rights to abortion and to equality in education and employment. Some changes came with amazing speed, although taken together they fell far short of abolishing sexism. Personal change ensued as well, in the intimate relations and career goals not only of the most committed feminists but in the lives of many other women who did not participate actively in the movement, and in a broader (male) public forced to confront its own sexist practices. The two branches were complementary and, in retrospect, the distinction between them loses much of its meaning. Their complementarity is evident in Betty Friedan’s choice of a title for her memoir of the movement: Friedan, first president of NOW and leading figure of the older branch, called her book by the younger branch’s mantra It Changed My Life. 14 While the women’s movement has been criticized for emphasizing the aspirations of middle class women to professional and well-paid employment and neglecting the needs of women who were poor, from the working class, or members of minority groups, 15 it exposed the depths of women’s oppression and made major strides toward overcoming it. The movement was not entirely homogeneous in class or racial terms; “bourgeois feminism” opened up opportunities for women of all backgrounds to organize and assert their claims.

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With more detail, I will now present some examples of recent social movements and the ways in which they have the four effects that I highlight above as potential contributions to socialism. Empowerment Participation in social movement activity is empowering. The fact of collective participation and the recognition that it is possible to struggle for social change create a sense of power in participants, even in the event of failure. People who participate in actions that are costly in time and effort, and even more when the actions are disruptive and risk sanctions, find their commitment strengthened by their participation and by the recognition that they can transgress normal rules for the sake of their commitment. The very fact of gathering with large numbers in a public space to express a demand can be a heady experience ratifying one’s commitment to the cause and creating confidence in the result, especially when such gatherings are forbidden or subject to repression. The reports and images from the Arab uprisings in the winter and spring of 2011 provide stirring examples. Participation gives activists a new light on their world: their new interpretation of social reality makes the cause (more) central to their lives, recasts their understanding of the rest of the world in light of it, draws boundaries between those who are for and against, and identifies allies clearly. Numerous studies, as well as anecdotal evidence, testify to the longterm consequences of movement activism in people’s lives. Most studied are the activists of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States and Europe. Research has shown that they—who were generally young when they were most active—remained active in their adult lives in support of the causes that they had worked for and others that grew out of them. Most notably, many of the women formed in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements became committed and active feminists when the women’s movement flourished. Women and men were more likely than others of their generation to choose careers in which they could continue to work for social change. 16 Some movements, especially those that recruit among the underprivileged and less educated, make a point of educating their activists so that they develop the skills that will give them the confidence to assert themselves collectively. Popular education in El Salvador during the civil war in the 1980s and freedom schools in the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 are instances where education in skills, beginning with basic literacy, and political education about the nature of their oppression equipped people to assert their rights. Both educational experiences used a pedagogy of empowerment in which learning was active and drew on the learn-

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ers’ life experiences, and teachers identified with learners and learned with them. Educación popular means education of, by, and for the pueblo—organized by people in their own community, outside of the control of the official education system. It was an integral part of political struggle in El Salvador. In Christian-based communities before the war, in refugee camps in Honduras, and in communities in zone controlled by the FMLN (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional), people who themselves had only a few years of education taught others to read. They promoted education in order both to cultivate skills necessary for participation in the struggle and to affirm a belief in the proposition that people are equal by right and a commitment to make them equal in fact. Popular education uses a pedagogy that was adopted by politically inspired education campaigns across Latin America based on the work of the Brazilian literacy pioneer Paulo Freire. Education means more than learning to read. To become politically conscious actors, people had to acquire the skills of the classroom both to achieve confidence in themselves and to be able to perform political tasks. Beyond that, Freire argued that the goal of education should be conscientization, the development of the critical consciousness that will enable learners to recognize and combat the sources of their oppression. Education is not just the acquisition of skills; it is the development of the whole person to exercise the capacity for independent and critical thinking. Communities organized popular education in FMLN-controlled and contested zones and also in cities and relatively peaceful rural areas. Most combatants and civilians were peasants and few had had much opportunity for schooling in the communities where they grew up. The teachers themselves were poorly educated—many had only a year or two of formal schooling. They had to improvise as they went along. The war constantly interrupted their work, not only when combat fell nearby, but when tasks of organizing and defense demanded priority over holding classes. But the setting of education in poor communities and in a war zone also created an opportunity. Using the methods of popular education, the insurgent movement strove to fill the gap and provide the education they had never had. It was guided by a vision of education which was tailored to those circumstances, a vision summarized by the very name “popular education.” Popular education in El Salvador made a material contribution to the insurgents’ relative victory in the civil war—they fought the U.S.-backed Salvadoran armed forces to a standoff—because it formed people to perform the necessary tasks, to believe in the goal, and to have a sense of efficacy that they could indeed contribute to that struggle. The will to teach and learn grew out of the commitment to struggle together for economic justice and dignity. Popular education was about politics and organization as much as education. It created a focus for organizing; it

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provided trained personnel to carry out political tasks; and it put into practice the ideology which underlay the Salvadoran struggle, an ideology which declared the equality of all and insisted on the full development of their capacities. The freedom schools in Mississippi during the heyday of the civil rights movement are another example. Freedom schools were part of the 1964 Mississippi summer project sponsored by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other organizations; it also promoted voter registration and a challenge to the Democratic Party’s presidential nominating convention. The schools themselves, though organized somewhat spontaneously, attracted several thousand black children, teenagers, and adults. According to John Dittmer, they offered “a creative, anti-authoritarian, student-centered approach to learning.” 17 Literacy was particularly important to the civil rights struggle because of the literacy requirement for voting and the discriminatory manner in which it was applied. But the Mississippi freedom schools were about much more than learning to read. First, knowing how to read was an assertion of one’s independence and determination to struggle. Second, the political knowledge gained taught people to oppose segregation and claim their rights. Education of activists with little formal schooling is part of the participatory budget process in Porto Alegre, Brazil (discussed in more detail below). Activists are trained in the technical issues of bureaucracy, infrastructure, and budgeting, skills they need to press their demands on their city government. Movement participation also empowers people by confirming their identity. As used by social movements theorists, “identity” refers to collective identity, understood as shared with others of the same social condition (in some sense). Francesca Polletta and James Jasper define collective identity as “an individual’s cognitive, moral, and emotional connection with a broader community, category, practice, or institution. . . . It is distinct from personal identities, although it may form part of a personal identity.” 18 The concept draws attention to the need of subordinate groups to assert their identity, which may provide the basis for particular lifestyle choices. Some movements (often called “new social movements”) are primarily about identity construction. 19 With the exhaustion of the New Left in the Unites States, the practice of many social movements shifted from efforts to achieve political change (“strategy”) to identity formation, and movements were increasingly analyzed in those terms, under the heading of new social movements. To some theorists, generally identified with the resource mobilization perspective on social movements, and perhaps to many casual observers, what a social movement is about is its attempt to change the society that surrounds the movement; if a movement focuses on the identity of indi-

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viduals, it downplays social change goals. As I have argued in the case of the women’s movement, this opposition is overdrawn. People who are oppressed as members of a group gain strength by affirming pride in their identity. Not only is the shared identity important as an affirmation of membership. It can also be a necessary resource for social struggle. At the same time, emphasis on identity can favor collective actions that are not exclusively oriented to the state. Oppressed people can affirm their identity by creating autonomous spaces of democratic practice. 20 The experience and success of one movement can serve as an example to other constituencies. The civil rights movement in the United States inspired many struggles for liberation among other ethnic groups, women, gays, and the disabled, who adopted and adapted its goals and strategic repertoires. 21 Prefiguration Many movements for social justice attempt to anticipate in their own social relations the future society they aim to create. They are prefigurative: they try to embody “within the ongoing political practice of a movement . . . those forms of social relations, decision‑making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal.” 22 Social movements attempt to prefigure future social relations in three main ways: community, democracy, and decommodification. The creation of community in the spirit of socialist construction is illustrated by G. A. Cohen’s introduction to his book Why Not Socialism? He presents a group camping trip as a model for socialist social relations: Our common aim is that each of us should have a good time, doing, so far as possible, the things that he or she likes best. . . . [P]eople cooperate within a common concern that, so far as is possible, everybody has a roughly similar opportunity to flourish, and also to relax, on the condition that she contributes, appropriately to her capacity, to the flourishing and relaxing of others. In these contexts most people, even most antiegalitarians, accept, indeed, take for granted, norms of equality and reciprocity. So deeply do most people take those norms for granted that no one on such trips questions them: to question them would contradict the spirit of the trip. 23

I belong to a group which operates very much like Cohen’s camping trip except that it is ongoing. For ten days every June, a group known variously as Summer Camp or Bear Rock (the name of the camp where we gather) meets to share a common life. We swim, boat, play games, hike, have discussions, and take meals in common. The tradition is nearly forty years old (I have not been part of it for nearly that long) and the group is multigenerational. People who grew up going to Summer Camp every year now bring their own children.

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A varying population of around one hundred people takes part. During the rest of the year a core group does the work necessary to hold the group together and ensure that the June gathering will go smoothly. At camp we form work teams that rotate among the duties of cooking, cleaning, and child care (all the adults, including those who are not parents, as well as the older children, do a stint to free the parents during at least part of every day). Everyone is free to participate or not in any recreational activity. Probably no one believes that we are changing the world by going to Summer Camp, but our common politics is one of the things that brings us together and our gatherings do help sustain us for other activities that we hope will contribute to changing the world. Social movements try to capture the spirit of community that Summer Camp exemplifies in their relations within the group. Feelings of solidarity and community are an important part of the motive for participation. This is not to say that community is always achieved, especially in the contentious atmosphere frequently found in left movements in the United States. Nevertheless, because participation is voluntary, it must be enjoyable; so participants look for good social relations. Closely related to the ideal of community in prefigurative social movements is that of participatory democracy. In the antinuclear movement of the 1980s, Barbara Epstein finds a new kind of movement: many in the Clamshell Alliance in New England and the Abalone Alliance in California felt that community building and acting out their vision were at least as important as contesting nuclear power. 24 Prefigurationists often emphasize nonviolent direct action as their preferred mode of operation, but the prefiguration comes not so much in their public protests as in their adoption of a style of interaction among themselves based on consensus formation, affinity groups, and pacifist principles of action to govern the movement itself. Francesca Polletta shows that participatory democracy has a longer history. She identifies the internal structure that participatory movements consciously work to implement: a minimal division of labor, decentralized authority, an egalitarian ethos, direct and consensus-oriented decision making. 25 In such movements, leadership is limited; all participants have an equal opportunity to influence decisions. Polletta examines several movements in the United States in the twentieth century that have attempted to implement participatory democracy, emphasizing the civil rights movement, the New Left, and the women’s movement. The principles of voice and equality within a movement, usually with rigorous attention to procedures to insure it, are inseparable from each movement’s social change goals. Activists embraced the Gandhian principle, “Be the change you want to see.” Or, one might say, the movement is the message.

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Polletta shows that it took work (“an endless meeting,” in the title of her book) and some activists felt that it distracted from goal-oriented activity, but she argues strongly that internal democracy, in addition to expressing the ideal of the movements, was adopted for pragmatic reasons and made the movements more effective. A final aspect of prefiguration is decommodification, the production and distribution of products or services outside of the marketplace. I will discuss two examples: worker-controlled workplaces and alternative institutions. Rather than attempt to survey a vast literature on workercontrolled workplaces, 26 I will draw on my own research on worker control in the Portuguese revolution of 1974–1975. 27 During that revolution many production and service firms came under worker control. Most of the worker-controlled firms were rescued by their workers from the brink of bankruptcy. They were inspired less by ideology than by the need to keep firms running in the face of owner abandonment and an economic crisis that made other employment opportunities scarce. Nevertheless, they practiced real worker control. (They called it autogestão or self-management.) Though they generally maintained traditional work organization, all received equal incomes; workers took steps to level hierarchical authority; and, by mobilizing their commitment to the firms and to each other, they salvaged foundering enterprises and often increased production and employment. Worker control is difficult and requires a great deal of commitment from all participants. The firms’ precarious economic circumstances often meant that workers had to accept reduced salary (or none at all) for periods of time. In addition to the daily routine of production, they spent a lot of time debating management decisions. Most of the worker-controlled firms were small (many larger firms were nationalized outright; in others, government officials named the managers) and had been directly managed by their owners, so there were few workers with management experience; the most politically active workers, often from jobs low in the hierarchy, constituted a management committee. But consultation with all workers was intense, with frequent meetings to establish policies and monitor the managers’ implementation of them. Those who assumed management positions had to learn how to get credit, make purchases, and distribute products (or in the case of service industries, find customers). Despite the commitment to universal participation, the firms I studied did little to alter work routines. Consultation was continuous, but some workers were clearly the managers and directed the work of others. They did not adopt job rotation; where there was an assembly line, it was maintained. But they were equal in other ways: the salary range was dramatically narrowed, especially at the top. In some cases new benefits were offered equally to all workers (such as bus passes and supplements to state-provided disability payments). Some instituted nominal profit-

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sharing, though usually retaining in the firm the profits that were credited to the workers. Beyond these incomplete steps to economic equality, an atmosphere of social equality prevailed in these firms which workers compared favorably to extreme expectations of deference toward capitalist managers in the past. Some firms had an extracurricular social life of outings, parties, and soccer teams. Workplaces were brightened with potted plants, birds in cages, and murals that demonstrated the affection workers had for their shops. Workers spoke quite consciously of the social value of such activities to the firms; in precarious economic conditions they knew that the firms’ survival depended on their getting along well. These firms operated on different principles from those under capitalist management. Because workers took over to maintain secure employment, the imperative governing major decisions was not to maximize profits but to maximize and stabilize employment. The emphasis on secure employment meant that workers often refused to let fellow workers be fired, even when a management committee believed that their performance clearly warranted dismissal. An assembly of all workers had to pass on any firings, and they frequently rejected management recommendations and insisted that a worker be given another chance. Job security meant that employment was not subject to the market; workers had control over an aspect of their fate that is normally determined by capitalist imperatives. The firms institutionalized their commitment not to treat labor as a commodity. Effective job security also reinforced workers’ commitment to the demands of economic stability in the firms: they were willing to work very long hours without extra pay as long as they received their basic salary. They claimed that they worked not only longer hours, but harder and with greater enthusiasm. For many of them, worker control was a learning process in which they demonstrated unsuspected abilities. These worker-controlled firms were hardly free of commodity relations. They had to compete in a marketplace with capitalist firms and produce a product that they could sell for money. Though they could not operate completely outside of the market, however, profit was not their main goal. Instead, it was meeting the needs of members and potentially serving larger social and political goals as well. Thus worker control is intrinsically a challenge to capital, both in ownership and in authority, even though it was usually inspired by practical necessity more than ideological conviction. It therefore prepares the ground for socialism. Socialism, moreover, frequently became an explicit objective in many of the Portuguese firms. Alternative institutions, institutions that provide services that are also commercially available but that provide them on a nonmonetary basis, are another example of organizations set up to decommodify exchange. According to Joyce Rothschild and J. Allen Whitt, these organizations

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reject the norms of rational bureaucracy and are governed by collectivistdemocratic principles. Rothschild and Whitt’s definition could encompass the worker-controlled firms just described but their empirical cases are a narrower set of organizations of a type that arose in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, such as free medical clinics, free schools, and legal collectives. The services these organizations provide are available on the market but alternative institutions seek to provide them for free or at low cost to people who may not be able to pay for them. 28 More than providing free services for the needy, these organizations adopt an egalitarian internal organization in contrast to the hierarchical organization common in professional service provision. They practice equality in rewards; authority resides in the collectivity as a whole. All members participate in a consensus process to negotiate and formulate decisions collectively. “Members” may include those who in mainstream organizations would be regarded as clients as well as the employees. The organizations cultivate close personal relations rather than bureaucratic impersonality. They eschew formal rules. People are motivated to join and remain not by material rewards or the opportunity for professional advancement but by commitment to an organization’s ideals and by the social reward of collaborating with like-minded people who work cooperatively. Diane Elson talks about an “associative sector” of social organizations formed around social rather than commercial objectives. She offers as an example Socialist Register, the annual volume in which her article appears. It and similar organizations are embedded in a market because they must produce and sell a product using financial resources, some paid staff, and a distribution network. But they mainly rely on voluntary labor and supporters’ donations. For Elson, the point is not to abolish or bypass markets but to embed them in egalitarian social relations. A publication like Socialist Register is not the same as a social movement, but it serves movements for socialism and draws on the same kinds of commitments from people who write for it for free or work for it for lower pay than they could command in a commercial enterprise. 29 Elson calls this process “socializing” the market rather than withdrawing from it. Whether one regards this as changing or rejecting the market, however, the point is the same: to make market relations egalitarian. Decommodification is not complete: all these groups are entangled with the capitalist market. Organizations where people earn wages do not neatly fit my criteria of social movements, precisely because those who work in them are not volunteers; but they rely on the same sort of commitment both to goals and to processes that establish within the present society institutions and social relations to be expanded and consolidated in the future. In all these cases, activists practice social-movement-like activity to create institutions which will prefigure social relations as they will exist

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in a future socialist society, even though they are conditioned by market relations. I have presented them in their ideal form and do not want to imply that they all succeed at establishing a utopia of perfect harmony. I will discuss some of their shortcomings in the conclusion to this article. At their best, however, they exhibit the prefigurative process through which social movements can contribute to the future construction of socialism. Cultural Shift Empowerment and prefiguration represent the impact of movements on their own activists; for some, however, the real payoff of movements, the real test of their effectiveness is their impact outside of the movement itself, on the larger society. That impact, when it occurs, can take two broad forms: it can operate through the state or outside of the state. Impacts that pass through the state I call policy impacts; those outside of the state I consider cultural shifts. Movements can have significant influences on culture, causing changes in the perception and evaluation of the claims made by movements and of the groups whose claims a movement puts forward. Without being too precise, I define culture broadly as encompassing the thoughts, opinions, and practices prevalent in a society or in a substantial segment of a society. People usually take culture for granted. They interpret events and perceptions in the light of their preconceptions. How we understand our conscious perceptions depends on the frame we place around them without thinking. Frames are “‘schemata of interpretation’ that enable individuals ‘to locate, perceive, identify, and label’ occurrences within their life space and the world at large. By rendering events or occurrences meaningful, frames function to organize experience and guide action.” 30 A frame consists of background assumptions that affect the way we see what is contained in it. Disruptions of perception or action break frames open. The public performances of movements challenge the taken-for-granted, and in so doing shift the frame: people become aware of new ways to see things. Shifting the frame may engender hostility among those whose unquestioned world views are challenged. A movement must shift the frame in such a way that the new possibility becomes not only recognized but accepted, or at least acknowledged as legitimate. The shift to majority support for gay marriage in U.S. public opinion is a clear example. A decade ago the notion that two people of the same sex could marry was, if not repugnant, then laughable to a large part of the population. Without the active legal challenges to the prohibition, the flood of marriages when they became legally permitted, and even the mobilization of opposition, gay marriage could not have become the rec-

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ognized and acceptable option that many people now find it. (Legitimation of gay marriage is a state action but at least as noteworthy is the change in public acceptance.) The formation of new identities can be part of a cultural shift. Studies of how movements form identities generally analyze the effect of participation on participants’ sense of themselves, 31 but movements can also contribute to identity formation in larger publics, and to the public’s view of groups that share a collective identity. In this sense, identity formation is part of a process of cultural shift. Views can differ as to whether cultural shift or policy impact is more important. The difference to a degree parallels that between identity and strategy, already discussed. As I have suggested, the two approaches cannot be neatly separated, though in some cases either cultural shift or policy impact may take priority, either in practice or in the intentions of movement participants. The claim that a movement was the cause of a cultural change is hard to prove even when heightened mobilization and cultural change in the general public appear to happen concurrently, or nearly so (though in my view causation is hard to deny in the case of gay marriage). A movement is not in any case the only cause of such a change; it often parallels broader social, demographic, and economic changes that affect the culture or the cultural predispositions of a society. Nevertheless an active, mobilized population supporting new views would seem to be an important, possibly a necessary step in achieving that change. Dieter Rucht has argued that the environmental movement in Europe and the United States did shift the environmental agenda even when it secured few tangible political measures. It affected both public opinion about the need for environmental protection and the individual behavior of people who conscientiously recycled or adopted other practices to lighten their own environmental footprint. 32 Social movements protesting authoritarian rule and promoting a transition to democracy in Latin America and Eastern Europe in the 1980s found that democratization required more than ousting dictators. Citizens had to develop a whole new conception of themselves and their relation to the state, recognizing the “right to have rights.” Their culture had been constrained by political repression and its after-effects persisted. In Latin America the democratic transitions were engineered to promote stability and preserve the power of the right. Military rulers only surrendered power on the condition that the new “democratic” governments kept the scope of democratization narrow: notably, officials of the ousted regimes would go unpunished and neoliberal reforms would be maintained. 33 Mass demonstrations nevertheless erupted and people debated endlessly in informal groups and in institutions about the reconstruction of their societies. In these interactions they proved to themselves that they really were free to act in the public space. 34

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Some movements actively seek to use the media to mold the culture around them. To do so, they stage events to garner attention. Success at getting covered is not an unalloyed blessing, however. Media reports are also contained within a frame. According to William Gamson, “news frames are almost entirely implicit and taken for granted. They do not appear to either journalists or audience as social constructions but as primary attributes of events that reporters are merely reflecting. News frames make the world look natural.” 35 A movement will wish the media to frame its claims in terms of injustice and the agency of the people combating the injustice, 36 but reporters may instead resort to stereotyping or ridicule. Frames can shift, however, as some messages (whether from the media or from movement spokespeople) successfully challenge assumptions. Movements cannot normally expect that their message will form the media’s unquestioned frame, but can only hope that it will be presented at all; the best they can usually hope for is that they will move the discourse to a point where their frame is admitted as a contender and the dominant frame is recognized as susceptible to challenge. 37 Policy Impact Many social movements relate primarily to the state and seek some state action. The goals can be formulated in narrow or very general terms and may entail legislation, administrative action, or court judgments. Actions that vividly portray their grievances and demonstrate the breadth of their support can compel officials to act. When officials respond favorably, the movement can claim credit. It is perhaps slightly easier to evaluate the impact of social movements on government action than on a broader culture, if only because government actions are specific and identifiable, whereas cultural shifts are diffuse and hard to verify. But state actions, like cultural shifts, rarely if ever have a single cause. Social movements do not act in a vacuum, and state action depends on many political factors, including public opinion, leadership, alliances, and political opportunity. Even when a state action corresponds to a movement’s demands, then, the movement may not have influenced the outcome—or it may be one among many factors that determined the outcome. 38 A great deal of research has examined the effect of movements on state actions to identify which types of movement and which political conditions are more likely to produce successful outcomes. Gamson’s pioneering study, based on a random sample of challenging groups in the United States, found that many of them succeeded in gaining advantages for their constituencies. Applying statistical controls, he contended that many successes can be attributed to the action of the challenging group itself. 39

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As with the media, success may consist not in getting the desired outcome but in raising an issue to the consciousness of the public and officeholders. It may also be true that movements are more able to exercise veto power, that is, to prevent undesired outcomes, than to secure exactly the outcome they want. Alliances matter too. According to one argument, movements that adopt disruptive tactics need alliances with elites, because by resorting to confrontation they lose their legitimacy with authorities, but their disruption enables elites to bargain with those authorities. Jack L. Walker found that when black protest leaders organized disruptions in Atlanta during the segregation era, they “start[ed] fights they [were] unable to finish.” The moderate, acknowledged leaders of the black community could then step in to negotiate a resolution with elected officials. 40 But Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, in their classic analysis of protest in the United States in the 1930s and 1960s, argue much the opposite: that disruption by the civil rights movement and poor people’s protests in the 1930s won concessions precisely because they rejected such alliances, and that when they moderated their tactics to claim legitimacy they lost influence. 41 A movement often has multiple goals, and they are not always clearly articulated. Even to speak of a movement’s goals is to reify; different actors within a movement may have different goals, and movement protest is often a blunt instrument whose goals are ambiguous. But even government actions that adopt the movement’s goal only minimally may reflect the movement’s impact. With all these qualifications, there are cases in which we need to have few reservations about affirming that movement action contributed to policy change. Sometimes politicians explicitly acknowledge the persuasive or pressure power of social movements, as with the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. In other cases the close match between a movement’s pressure and official actions is sufficient to establish the connection. The civil rights movement, which I believe was the most effective social movement of the twentieth century in the United States—as well as the most important—won dramatic (though less than complete) victories over racial domination at many levels of government and in many policy areas. After the global justice movement (often referred to as the antiglobalization movement) made its public debut at the Battle of Seattle in 1999, multilateral free trade agreements moved off the fast track at least for several years. 42 Social movements can contribute to electing progressive governments at the local and national level and push them to implement their progressive programs. In a detailed study of welfare state regimes in advanced industrial societies, Evelyne Huber and John Stephens show that generous welfare states with universal benefits and government responsibility

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for fulfillment arose almost exclusively in countries where the dominant political forces were social democratic parties and trade unions. In countries where Christian Democrats were strong (and especially where they were in competition with social democratic forces), relatively generous welfare states arose but were more likely to vest benefits in the private sector. Liberal secular states without popular movements did not develop generous welfare state regimes. The mobilization of women was also important: where they entered the labor force in large numbers and organized effective feminist movements, welfare states were more likely to take responsibility for family needs. 43 Erik Olin Wright and his collaborators present several examples of what they call empowered participatory governance, in which a mobilized population pushes a government to adopt public policies designed to meet social needs. 44 In the participatory budget process already mentioned, pioneered in Porto Alegre, Brazil (and which has since spread to dozens of cities in Brazil, elsewhere in Latin America, and Europe), the state and participatory social movements interact in a process of mutual influence, cooperation, and conflict. Every year, open community assemblies in sixteen regions of Porto Alegre debate the municipal investment budget and make recommendations that are passed upward for final approval. They set priorities on how the budget should be allocated among major areas of expenditure, including health, education, urban infrastructure, and economic development, and recommend the specific projects to be funded in each area. Because attendance at local assemblies is one of the criteria for funding, neighborhood residents have an incentive to mobilize. Mobilization also encourages groups in the regions to assess needs and to present them forcefully. Under the participatory budget process, municipal spending in Porto Alegre shifted massively to the poorer areas of the city and citizen participation was high and sustained. 45 (The Porto Alegre experience also illustrates the mutual dependence between popular mobilization and favorable political conditions. The participatory budget has been much less effective since the Workers Party, which originally promoted it, lost the mayoralty.) T. M. Thomas Isaac and Patrick Heller examine decentralized planning in the state of Kerala, India. There, biennial assemblies in local communities review state economic plans, typically revising their priorities significantly from those made at the district level, emphasizing basic needs such as housing, clean drinking water, sanitation, and irrigation. 46 The process makes planning an instrument of mobilization and redistribution of resources. One can question whether institutions of empowered participatory governance are social movements. They are often initiated from the state itself. The same question can be asked about worker control, which is not usually state-initiated but where the fundamental incentive is material.

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But both empowered participatory governance and worker control require mobilization resembling that in social movements: participants are actively engaged, mobilize collectively, and are committed to the goals. A favorable political context enables them to accumulate sufficient power to press their demands on the state and achieve significant outcomes. They engage in deliberation over their common problems and seek solutions, in the process educating themselves to balance their needs with the technical possibilities. These processes emphasize popular participation and citizenship. New mechanisms for popular participation attempt to unite representative and direct democracy. Having reviewed four potential effects of social movements—empowerment, prefiguration, cultural change, and policy impact—I must add a fifth, which at first glance is a specification of the first but really subsumes all of them. Participation in social movement opens up new possibilities and opens up participants to new ways of thinking. People learn that the dominant view of how the world works is not an objective fact but a hegemonic imposition. The claim that only those in power are capable of ruling is disproved in practice. They learn that they can challenge the rules and institutions which govern them and apply their power to winning dramatic changes in the conditions of their lives. People become aware of the possibility of transcending their institutions. In social movements people change their minds, and in changing their minds they equip themselves to change the world. By no means do I claim that power is only in our minds and that we can overturn it just by deciding to challenge it. Overcoming received assumptions is nonetheless the necessary first step. That is why we need to study and create movements to carry out socialist construction of thought, of relations, and of institutions.

SOCIAL MOVEMENT DILEMMAS Some readers will doubtless be impatient at my uncritical optimism. I can hear the objections: Not all social movements empower their activists. Not all social movements construct communities of unalienated social relations. Not all social movements cause broad shifts in the surrounding culture. Not all social movements win the political clout to enact policies that establish social justice. No, they don’t. I have admittedly written only about the positive effects of social movements. Many fall short of their goals. In view of the weak state of social movements and the lack of any significant socialist consciousness, especially in the United States, it might appear futile to make this article’s argument. But we must find ways to work for socialism. The crisis of the national and international capitalist system demands it. I believe that the lessons

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of past experiences that I have presented in this article can help us take advantage of that crisis. I have deliberately chosen to present the maximalist position and overlook shortfalls. I do, however, want to examine some problems that arise not because social movements do not live up to their own ambitions, but because of contradictions in their internal working. I will discuss five problems: the demand for participation, the problem of free riders, the problem of oligarchy, the divisiveness of identity politics, and the impermanence of movements. The demand for participation: Does socialism really require us to be fully engaged participants, all of the time? According to models of participatory democracy, everyone must participate in political deliberation. Not everyone finds active debate and discussion gratifying, however. Even when such discussions maintain a reasonable level of civility (often they don’t), they privilege intellectual agility and make some people feel inadequate; many will find them a burden. Besides, they take up a lot of time. As Oscar Wilde reportedly said, the problem with socialism is that it would take too many evenings. For many, and to some degree for everyone, the obligation to participate may not enhance but detract from the kind of life we want. 47 Free riders: The free rider problem is in a sense the inverse of the demand for full and equal participation. If some choose to abstain, others will have to shoulder their share and bear an undue burden, while those who opt out will get the benefits of others’ participation. If each contributes according to his or her ability, then no one should resent unequal contributions. But if some refuse to contribute their share, others will be justifiably resentful and the system will be weaker overall. Oligarchy: Unequal participation can lead to unequal power. Those who participate more actively, because they are better at it or because they enjoy it, are in a position to coordinate a movement’s activities. But coordination easily becomes authority over other people. Participatory movements aim to prefigure a society free of centralization and authority. But when they are successful, they tend to become institutionalized, and leaders gain privileges—often leading them to identify with the existing structure of power rather than challenge it. Robert Michels presented this process as inevitable, citing the supposed “iron law of oligarchy.” 48 It is not inevitable, but it is common. In a world of disciplined parties, it led to dictatorship. In the contemporary world it more often takes the form of transformation of a movement into a nongovernmental organization, needing funding and cultivating close relations with state institutions, thereby undercutting the movement’s critical edge. 49 Identity politics: Does identity politics contradict universal solidarity? We know well enough from the political struggles of the mid- to latetwentieth century that we are not all alike and that overcoming oppression based on ascribed characteristics may require cultivating positive

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identification with those characteristics. But the danger is that groups based on collective identity will become exclusive, separate from if not rivals of others. And those who do not fall into any subordinate ascriptive category but who nevertheless embrace the goals of socialism may feel marginalized—straight white males, for example, are sometimes relegated to second-class status in the movement. Even when identity-based movements do not develop rivalries, they can distract from broad struggles for universalistic social justice. That criticism must be balanced with the realization that seemingly universalistic claims may cover up oppression, and oppressed groups must claim recognition on the basis of their identity in order to establish their right to equal citizenship. But the tension with universal solidarity remains. Evanescence: Social movements do not last. Mobilization extinguishes itself. 50 The reasons for decline are diverse. They include the aging out of activists, exhaustion, repression or cooptation by authorities, radicalization in the face of short-run failures, and a contagion effect that at times serves the growth of movements but at other times can deflate a broad spectrum of movements simultaneously. The end cannot be predicted and sometimes it can be staved off by heightened efforts or by external shocks, but it makes movements an unreliable vehicle for sustained efforts to achieve change. (This is another reason for the importance of movements rooted in pre-existing communities and organizations.) Often gains are reversed in phases of declining mobilization. It is possible, however, to use such times to consolidate and institutionalize those gains. Fears that a movement will end must not become an excuse for inaction. Activists must recognize when mobilization is winding down and find ways to make any gains permanent. I do not have a solution for any of these problems. We as socialists must be attentive to them in organizing. Social movements do not always produce these contradictions, but they are dangers. Activists must guard against them as we try to struggle through social movements for the construction of a socialist society. To wage that struggle, I argue, social movements, with all their imperfections, are all that there is. They are the vehicles though which people who hunger for justice and lack other resources can unite to pursue their shared goals. It is incumbent on socialists to do everything we can to create or reactivate movements across a broad range of issues to create the society of equality, freedom, and solidarity we all aspire to. That task undoubtedly seems utopian in the current political climate of the United States. It is hard to have faith in the power of social movements to move the country even slightly in the direction of socialism at a time when progressive movements seem to be totally quiescent. In 2011, the most active movement in the country is the Tea Party. A Herbert Hoover congress is working hard to drive the economy back into reces-

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sion. Inequality of wealth and income is at record levels, and growing. Progressive movements are hard to find. But we must not despair. We must remember the vital contributions that social movements have made in the past and take them as inspiration and guide to moving forward today. Social movements offer tools that can be used to fight for the kind of society we believe in. We must activate progressive social movements to fight for the social justice and shared prosperity that the country so evidently needs. Or, as Joe Hill said, don’t waste any time mourning, organize!

AFTERWORD When I completed this essay early in September, 2011, I wrote that it was hard to have faith in the power of social movements when they appear to be totally quiescent. Shortly thereafter, Occupy Wall Street erupted. The phenomenon bears on several of the issues that I discuss in this essay. On September 17, inspired by the Arab spring and appealing to the many people who (like myself) are frustrated at the lack of progressive opposition to the interminable wars and the government’s bailing out the banks instead of holding them accountable for the financial crisis, a small group occupied Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan and renamed it Liberty Plaza. Calling themselves “Occupy Wall Street” (OWS), they camped out and proclaimed their opposition to economic inequality and the power of corporate finance. Despite the anticorporate stance, OWS is (like most of the movements I have discussed) not explicitly a movement for socialism. It does, however, ratify my counsel not to despair. It is astounding that an electronically networked movement with no formal leadership could spread so quickly to hundreds of cities in the United States and elsewhere and involve hundreds of thousands of activists. It reflects a widespread discontent with capitalist institutions, notably gross income inequality and financialcorporation domination of politics and social life. It has permeated the culture rapidly, brought these issues into popular consciousness, and provoked widespread discussion of them. The movement has evidently touched a nerve, because the response has been phenomenal. It is a spectacular demonstration of the power of transgression to move people’s minds. Violating public order is a mindaltering experience. Regardless of the results, by the very act of defiance protesters deny the power of authorities that is normally taken for granted. Occupiers and those who applaud them have learned that they can stand up to authorities in defense of a cause about which they feel deeply. Indefinite occupation is a new tactic, and it has caught on. Tens of thousands have come out in support in New York, and spinoffs have

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sprung up in over 1500 cities and towns in the United States and around the world. It is not only the occupiers who are ready to defy authorities. When the city threatened to send in police to dislodge the occupation from Liberty Plaza on October 14, thousands showed up at six o’clock in the morning to defend it. Their presence persuaded the police to call off the eviction. A few days later Governor Cuomo ordered the Albany police to evict an occupation of state government grounds, but the mayor and police chief refused for fear of provoking a riot. These victories demonstrate the power of the people acting collectively to challenge authorities. One cannot spend an hour at the occupation site in New York without feeling the sense of pulsating, vibrant energy. People mill about, peddle their causes, talk and debate in informal groups and somewhat more formal committees, or meet in the daily General Assembly to make collective decisions. There is a people’s library with donated books. Groups are preparing artworks or drumming. Others are busy with logistics: keeping the place clean, receiving food donations and distributing them, preparing the seemingly daily demonstrations, and chatting up the local merchants who have generously allowed the people camping out to use their facilities. The occupiers emphasize the participatory process of consensus building that has been developed in other direct democracy movements that I have described. But OWS adds an element which is not highlighted in discussions of those groups. It is decentralized: an infinity of activities goes on at the occupation site or proceeds out from it. Any group can try to drum up supporters for a joint action, cultural activity, or small group meeting on the site or off. Sometimes someone shouts out an appeal and raises a small, spontaneous crowd of a few hundred to march to a demonstration called by some other group, such as United for Peace and Justice on the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan or the picketing strikers at Sotheby’s art auction house. The many occupations around the country are all autonomous and have endorsed diverse goals, and they range widely in numbers. All have been inspired by the action in New York, but each operates on its own in response to its local situation. The occupation has won the attention of the mainstream media. The first reports complained that the occupation was frivolous and had no clear political platform. But the idea of indefinite occupation demands attention for its novelty. After the police violently broke up several demonstrations, sympathy to OWS grew in the press and the public. The press began to cover the occupation respectfully and discuss its issues seriously. As I have shown, while movements often cultivate the attention of the media, the movements cannot control the message, and the media often prefer to highlight the dramatic and bizarre aspects rather than a movement’s cause. OWS offers plenty that is dramatic and bizarre,

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and the media have reported it that way, but to a surprising degree the coverage has been about economic injustice. Not only mainstream news stories but opinion journals and commentaries have discussed the extreme degree of inequality in wealth and income in the United States; many people around the country have learned about it, and nationwide polls show majority support in public opinion for the occupiers’ positions. The occupiers have created their own media, too, with a polyphonic (or cacophonous) outburst of creativity. They have many websites; they have produced several issues of an attractive four-page broadsheet; they videotape everything and immediately post it to Youtube. The most innovative practice (other than the occupation itself) is the “people’s microphone.” Using bullhorns in public in New York requires a police permit, so they have come up with an alternative: at mass meetings, a speaker pauses after each sentence and the people near him repeat it in unison to the crowd; if the crowd is big, a second circle shouts it out. If it is even bigger than that, people on the periphery listen on their phones and shout it to those near them. I can personally attest that if you say something and dozens of people repeat it, you feel like you have been heard. While the movement depends heavily on the Internet for initial and ongoing organizing, it has also shown the Internet’s limitations because the real action has been on the ground. In recent years much “activism” has been limited to sending e-mails and soliciting signatures for online petitions. OWS has understood that however important electronic communication is, it achieves little except as preparation for face-to-face interaction in which people do more than respond reflexively. It is when people act together that social movements can empower them and prefigure future social relations. Some sympathizers have complained that the occupation has no political platform. Its demands are a melange and none have been issued authoritatively. Many of the organizers and occupiers want nothing to do with mainstream politics. Progressive organizations that are more institutionally oriented and were not part of the original movement have tried to seize the momentum to promote their own issues. Some of them have claimed an affinity with the occupation that core activists, wary of cooptation, might not acknowledge. The diversity and decentralization which are the movement’s strength right now clearly make translation into government policies difficult. Movements are ephemeral. The occupation will have to end sometime. How long will the hard core of activists camp out as winter comes? How long will the broad network of supporters continue to offer their money, their sympathy, and occasionally their bodies to help keep the occupation going? Occupy Wall Street has clearly already achieved far more than what anyone might have predicted at the start. As I write, the

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first snow has fallen on New York, and the occupiers have put out requests for donations of warm clothes and sleeping bags. Beyond what happens at Liberty Plaza, it is an open question whether it will produce any action to mitigate economic inequality, curtail the power of the financial corporations, or hold them accountable for their destructive effects on the economy and people’s livelihoods. It is still true that even with a powerful and widespread movement like the occupation movement, results are not immediate or guaranteed. For longlasting impact, multiple and diverse initiatives will have to be ongoing around the country. The struggle continues. But at the same time, let’s rejoice that this movement has blossomed, grown, provided such rich experiences, and stimulated a serious discussion of economic injustice that has captured much of the country’s attention. To rewrite Joe Hill, let’s spend (not waste) time celebrating, then organize! Author biography: John L. Hammond is a longtime social movement activist, notably against U.S. military intervention from Vietnam to Iraq. He is also active in his union, the Professional Staff Congress. He has studied social movements in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, and is the author of Fighting to Learn: Popular Education and Guerrilla War in El Salvador and Building Popular Power: Workers’ and Neighborhood Movements in the Portuguese Revolution. He teaches sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

NOTES 1. Charles Tilly, “Social Movements as Historically Specific Clusters of Performances,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 38 (1993–1994), 1–30. 2. Deirdre English, “The War Against Choice: Inside the Antiabortion Movement,” Mother Jones (February–March 1981), 16–32. 3. Mayer Zald and his collaborators contribute to clarifying the relation between social movements and social movement organizations (SMOs). See Mayer N. Zald and Roberta Ash, “Social Movement Organizations: Growth, Decay and Change,” Social Forces 44 (1966), 327–41; John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald. “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory,” American Journal of Sociology 82, No. 6 (May 1977), 1212–41. 4. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966). 5. Norman MacKenzie, Socialism: A Short History (New York: Harper Colophon, 1966); Mary Nolan, “Economic Crisis, State Policy, and Working-Class Formation in Germany, 1870–1900.” In Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, edited by Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 352–93; Guenther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany: A Study in Working-Class Isolation and National Integration (Totowa: Bedminster Press, 1963). 6. Kate Bronfenbrenner et al., eds., Organizing to Win (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1998); Rick Fantasia and Kim Voss, Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Gay W. Seidman, Manufacturing Militance: Work-

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ers’ Movements in Brazil and South Africa, 1970–1985 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 7. John L. Hammond, “Indigenous Community Justice in the Bolivian Constitution of 2009,” Human Rights Quarterly, 33 (August 2011), 649–81; Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson, Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics (London: Verso, 2007); Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “Liberal Democracy and Ayllu Democracy in Bolivia: The Case of Northern Potosí,” Journal of Development Studies, 26, No. 4 (July 1990), 97–112; Deborah J. Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 8. John L. Hammond, “Law and Disorder: The Brazilian Landless Farmworkers’ Movement,” Bulletin of Latin American Research, 18, No. 4 (1999), 469–89; Angus Wright and Wendy Wolford, To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for a New Brazil (Oakland, CA: Food First Books, 2003). 9. John Dittmers, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Aldon D. Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Free Press, 1986); Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 10. Bert Klandermans and Dirk Oegema, “Potentials, Networks, Motivations, and Barriers: Steps Towards Participation in Social Movements,” American Sociological Review 52, No. 4 (August 1987), 519–31; Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, second edition, 1998); Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1978); Charles Tilly, “Agendas for Students of Social Movements.” In States, Parties, and Social Movements, ed. Jack A. Goldstone, 246–56 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003). 11. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 229–39. 12. This is a basis for the distinction between theories of resource mobilization or strategy and theories of new social movements or identity, discussed below. Some older theories tend to characterize movements in general as expressive, even when they claim instrumental purposes, with the argument that these activities have no instrumental consequences and only meet the subjective needs of the participants. See Jean L. Cohen, “Strategy or Identity: New Theoretical Paradigms and Contemporary Social Movements,” Social Research 52 (Winter 1985), 663–716; Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Alberto Melucci, “The Symbolic Challenge of Contemporary Movements,” Social Research 52 (Winter 1985), 789–816; Tarrow, Power in Movement. 13. Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation: A Case Study of an Emerging Social Movement and its Relation to the Policy Process (New York: McKay, 1975). 14. Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 15. Hester Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women’s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2009). 16. Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Tarrow, Power in Movement, 173–76. 17. Dittmer, Local People, 261; cf. Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); McAdam, Freedom Summer. 18. Francesca Polletta and James M. Jasper, “Collective Identity and Social Movements,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 285. 19. Though the term “new social movements” is well established in the literature, I find it problematical, because what is “new” about these movements is not what is specific to them. Though the overlap between designated new social movements and

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movements based on identity politics is not complete, I will use the term identity politics to refer to them. 20. Arturo Escobar and Sonia E. Alvarez, “Introduction: Theory and Protest in Latin America Today.” In The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategy, and Democracy, ed. Arturo Escobar and Sonia E. Alvarez (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 5. 21. Sara N. Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage 1980); David S. Meyer and Nancy Whittier, “Social Movement Spillover,” Social Problems 41 (1994), 277–98. 22. Carl Boggs, “Marxism, Prefigurative Communism, and the Problem of Workers’ Control,” Radical America 11 (November 1977), 100. 23. G. A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 3–5. 24. Barbara Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 25. Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 6. 26. For the classic theoretical statement, see Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); for a recent survey, see Dario Azzellini and Immanuel Ness, Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011). 27. John L. Hammond, “Worker Control in Portugal: The Revolution and Today,” Economic and Industrial Democracy 2 (December 1981), 413–53; Hammond, Building Popular Power: Workers’ and Neighborhood Movements in the Portuguese Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1988). 28. Joyce Rothschild and J. Allen Whitt, The Cooperative Workplace: Potentials and Dilemmas of Organisational Democracy and Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 29. Diane Elson, “Socializing Markets, Not Market Socialism,” in Socialist Register 2000: Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias, 36, ed. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 67–85. 30. David A. Snow, E. Burke Rochford, Jr., Steven K. Worden, and Robert D. Benford, “Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation,” American Sociological Review 51 (August 1986), 464, quoting Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis (New York: Harper Colophon, 1974), 21. 31. See especially Hank Johnston and Bert Klandermans, ed., Social Movements and Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 32. Dieter Rucht, “The Impact of Environmental Movements in Western Societies.” In Marco Giugni, Doug McAdam, and Charles Tilly, eds., How Social Movements Matter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 204–24. 33. Nancy Bermeo, “Myths of Moderation: Confrontation and Conflict during Democratic Transitions,” Comparative Politics 29, No. 3 (April, 1997), 305–32; John Higley and Richard Gunther, eds., Elites and Democratic Consolidation in Latin America and Southern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Terry Lynn Karl, “Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America,” Comparative Politics 23, No. 1 (October 1990), 1–21; Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, eds. Transitions from Authoritarian Rule III: Comparative Considerations (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1986). 34. Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (New York: Vintage, 1993); Eder Sader, Quando Novos Personagens Entraram em Cena (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1988); Evelina Dagnino, “The Cultural Politics of Citizenship, Democracy, and the State.” In Cultures of Politics/ Politics of Cultures: Re-visioning Latin American Social Movements, edited by Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 33–63.

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35. William A. Gamson, “Goffman’s Legacy to Political Sociology,” Theory and Society, 14, No. 5 (1985), 618. 36. William A. Gamson, Talking Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 37. Charlotte Ryan, Prime Time Activism: Media Strategies for Grassroots Organizing, (Boston: South End Press, 1991), 70; cf. William A. Gamson, The Strategy of Social Protest (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Co., second edition, 1990). 38. Marco Giugni, Introduction. In Marco Giugni, Doug McAdam, and Charles Tilly, eds., How Social Movements Matter, xiii–xxxiii. 39. Gamson, The Strategy of Social Protest. 40. Jack L. Walker, “Protest and Negotiation: A Case Study of Negro Leadership in Atlanta, Georgia,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, 7, No. 2 (May 1963), 121. 41. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Pantheon, 1977). 42. In a decade during which social movements were distressingly absent despite the provocations of two seemingly endless wars of humanitarian aggression and the financial meltdown of the international capitalist system, the global justice movement stands out for its protest against capitalist globalization at massive demonstrations against meetings of international financial institutions and at the World Social Forum and its regional and national offshoots. It deserves more than a brief mention, but the issues of transnational organization and electronic communication as an organizing tool are too complex to give it the attention it deserves. See John L. Hammond, “The Possible World and the Actual State: World Social Forum in Caracas,” Latin American Perspectives, 33, No. 3 (May 2006), 122–31; Hammond, “The World Social Forum and the Rise of Global Grassroots Politics,” New Politics, 42 (Winter 2007), 173–80; Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The Rise of the Global Left: The World Social Forum and Beyond (London: Zed Books, 2007); Jackie Smith, Social Movements for Global Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2007). 43. Evelyne Huber and John D. Stephens, Development and Crisis of the Welfare State: Parties and Policies in Global Markets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 44. Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (London: Verso, 2010); Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright, “Deepening Democracy: Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance.” Politics & Society 29, No. 1 (March 2001), 5–41; T. M. Thomas Isaac and Patrick Heller, “Democracy and Development: Decentralized Planning in Kerala.” In Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance, ed. Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 77–110. 45. Rebecca Neaera Abers, Inventing Local Democracy: Grassroots Politics in Brazil (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000); Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Militants and Citizens: The Politics of Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 46. T. M. Thomas Isaac and Patrick Heller, “Democracy and Development: Decentralized Planning in Kerala,” 90–98. 47. Michael Walzer, “A Day in the Life of a Socialist Citizen,” in Walzer, Obligations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). 48. Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (Glencoe: Free Press, 1949). 49. Sonia E. Alvarez, “Latin America Feminisms ‘Go Global’: Trends of the 1990s and Challenges for the New Millennium.” In Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures (Boulder, CO: Westview Press), 306–8; James Petras, “Imperialism and NGOs in Latin America,” Monthly Review 49, No. 7 (December 1997), 10–27. 50. Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting, 239; Tarrow, Power in Movement, 147–50.

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REFERENCES Abers, Rebecca Neaera. Inventing Local Democracy: Grassroots Politics in Brazil (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000). Azzellini, Dario, and Immanuel Ness, Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011). Alvarez, Sonia E. “Latin America Feminisms ‘Go Global’: Trends of the 1990s and Challenges for the New Millennium.” In Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, eds., Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures: Re-visioning Latin American Social Movements (Boulder, CO: Westview Press), 306–8. Baiocchi, Gianpaolo. Militants and Citizens: The Politics of Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Bermeo, Nancy. “Myths of Moderation: Confrontation and Conflict during Democratic Transitions,” Comparative Politics 29, No. 3 (April 1997), 305–32. Boggs, Carl. “Marxism, Prefigurative Communism, and the Problem of Workers’ Control,” Radical America, 11 (November 1977), 99–122. Bronfenbrenner, Kate et al., eds., Organizing to Win (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1998). Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Cohen, G. A. Why Not Socialism? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Cohen, Jean L. “Strategy or Identity: New Theoretical Paradigms and Contemporary Social Movements,” Social Research 52 (Winter 1985), 663–716. Dagnino, Evelina. “The Cultural Politics of Citizenship, Democracy, and the State.” In Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, eds. Cultures of Politics/ Politics of Cultures: Re-visioning Latin American Social Movements (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 33–63. Dittmers, John. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). Eisenstein, Hester. Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women’s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2009). Elson, Diane. “Socializing Markets, Not Market Socialism,” in Socialist Register 2000: Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias, 36, ed. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 67–85. English, Deirdre. “The War Against Choice: Inside the Antiabortion Movement.” Mother Jones (February–March 1981), 16–32. Epstein, Barbara. Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Escobar, Arturo, and Sonia E. Alvarez. “Introduction: Theory and Protest in Latin America Today.” In The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategy, and Democracy, ed. Arturo Escobar and Sonia E. Alvarez, 1–15 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992). Evans, Sara N. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage 1980). Fantasia, Rick, and Kim Voss. Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Freeman, Jo. The Politics of Women’s Liberation: A Case Study of an Emerging Social Movement and its Relation to the Policy Process (New York: McKay, 1975). Friedan, Betty. It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Fung, Archon, and Erik Olin Wright. “Deepening Democracy: Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance,” Politics & Society 29, No. 1 (March 2001), 5–41. Gamson, William A. The Strategy of Social Protest (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Co., second edition, 1990). Gamson, William A. Talking Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Gamson, William A. “Goffman’s Legacy to Political Sociology,” Theory and Society, 14, No. 5 (1985), 605–22.

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Index

abortion, 11, 220 activism, 60, 61, 73, 76 administration, 14 advertising, 183n52, 170, 197, 199 affection, 67, 68, 73–74 affective economy, 67, 67, 68–69, 74; concept of, 68; male domination of, 81n1 affective energy, 75 affective exploitation, 82n19, 71 affinity, 44n15, 32–33, 37 African-Americans, 206 After Capitalism (Schweickart), 56, 58 aggression, 129n38; biological basis of, 106; Death Instinct and, 129n27; dominance and, 129n36, 108; drive of, 104, 107, 109, 126; Freud on, 105; human nature and, 105–109; primary, 107; property ownership and, 106; secondary, 107, 108; violence and, 109; will to live as, 107 agriculture, 93 Ahmed, Sara, 79 Alaska Trust, 201 Albert, Michael, 4, 94, 130n61, 153n4 alienation, 15–16, 17, 198; labor and, 122; work and, 25, 122 alliances, social movements and, 232 altruism, 115 American Federation of Labor, 29 anarchism, 144 anarcho-communism, 104 anti-capitalism, 52, 202, 205 anti-utopianism, 28 anti-war politics, 80 Anton, Anatole, vii, ix, 205 apes, 131n63 artificial scarcity, 177 Aryan Nation, 79 associate sector, 228

atheism, 47 Atkinson, Ti-Grace, 70 authority, 68 autonomy, 32–33, 150, 151, 163; commons-based peer production and, 181n16, 161, 165–169, 171; participatory, 49 Autonomy/Dependency, 71 banks, 25, 52; bail-outs of, 15; investment, 58 barbarism, 23–26 bargaining, 141 Barry, Brian, 61 Beauvoir, Simone de, 70 benevolence, 99 Benkler, Yochai, xi, 180n3, 157, 160 Bentham, Jeremy, 117 Bernstein, Eduard, 189, 191, 202 “Beyond Capitalism and Socialism,” xi biological determinism, 112, 126; onesidedness of, 112; society and, 109–111; theories of, 111 biological drives, 106, 107 biology, human nature and, 112–115 Blair, Tony, 65n17 The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Pinker), 129n39 blood donors, 180n8 Bolivia, 43 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 89 Boulding, Kenneth, 51 Bowles, Sam, 137 brain, 131n63; cell pruning of, 112; human behavior and, 113; size of human, 110 Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), 217–218 Bronner, Stephen, 9 Buller, David, 113 249

250

Index

bureaucracy, 14 Burke, Kenneth, 90 campaigns, 50 capital, 181n32, 181n34, 166, 170; exploitation and free gifts, 167–168; human flourishing and, 169 Capital (Marx), 117 capital-assets tax, 57, 58 capitalism, vii, 123–124; alternative institutions of, 202–207, 227; alternative to, 32, 53, 63, 152, 192; anti, 52, 202, 205; collapse of, xi, 1, 188, 189–190, 191–194; colonization and, 194; commons-based peer production and, 165; competition and, 39–40, 144; consumption and, x; crises of, 92; cures for, 200–202; damage of, viii, ix, 25, 28; danger of, 23; definition of, 196; discontent with, 198–199; discrimination and, 31; economy and, 15, 194; ending, 26; environmental policy and, 18; evolution of, 192; flaws of, 50–52; Marx’s critique of, 57; opposition to, 193; oppression and, 30; as organism, 192–193; power and, 7; public goods in, 42; reconsidering, 194–198; reform of, xi, 28, 62, 111; requirements of, 9; restricting dominance of, viii; ruling class of, 109; social collapse and, 25; socialism and, 187; society and, 194; survival of the fittest and, 102; transformation of, 8; transitioning out of, 6–7; trust and, 142; wage system and, 93; worker in, 181n29 Capitalism: A Love Story, 42 capital markets, 55 care workers, 90 caring labor, 82n23, 69, 71, 73, 94, 182n38, 167; exploitation of, 82n18–82n19, 73, 75, 182n38, 167; gender and, 82n19, 208n31; quantity of, 74; stepparents and, 82n20 Carnegie, Andrew, and John D. Rockefeller, 102 Carson, Rachel, 93 Carver, Terrell, 85

Cassidy, John, 65n11 Cassirer, Ernst, 90 Castro, Fidel, 34 central planning, 4–5, 55 change, strategies for, 27 Chávez, Hugo, 34 Chiapas, 77 children: raised in patriarchal society, 68; step, 82n20, 74 chimpanzees, 129n22, 129n37 China, 4, 196 Chomsky, Noam, 10; on human nature, 98; on language, 98, 114 churches, 196 Churchill, Winston, 54 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud), 129n28, 105 civil rights, 79, 218, 223, 224, 232 Civil Rights Acts, 232 civil rights movement, 218 class: division, 42, 135, 193; exploitation, 81n1; solidarity, 190; universal, 40. See also working class Cloward, Richard, 232 Code Pink, 80 coercion, 6, 166, 169, 178 cognitive science, 113 Cohen, G. A., 141, 191, 224 collective consciousness, 213 collective organization, 168 collective responsibility, 49 colonization, 194 commodification, 16, 157, 160, 170, 176; decommodification, 226, 228; of everyday life, 171; of goods/ services, 16; of labor, 15; reasons for, 16 commons-based peer production, 158; allocation of financial resources and, 174; allocation of labor in, 175–176; autonomy and, 181n16, 161, 165–169, 171; Benkler on, 160; capitalism and, 165; distribution of knowledge products in, 176–177; as free gift, 169; global justice in, 162–163, 173; human flourishing and, 179; labor relations of, 159; legislation and, 178; means of, 158–159; output distribution in,

Index 180n14, 159–160; The Political Project and, 163–164, 173–177; politics and, 171–172; public discourse and, 161–162, 170–172; public goods and, 160, 161; social forms and, 174; stifling of, 164 communism, 122; aim of, 38; anarcho, 104; council, 4–5; crude, 48; Freud’s criticism of, 105–106; in Italy, 147; Marx on consciousness of, 8; Marx’s vision of, 124; political parties and, 38 Communist Manifesto, 8, 45n24, 89 communitarians, 136, 150 communities, 4, 55, 61, 103; indigenous, 32; intentional, 146, 149; social movements and, 217, 224–228 Community Supported Agriculture, 195 commuting to work, 71 companionate friendship, 81n13, 72–73 compassion, 29, 99 competition, 11–12, 36, 101, 200; capitalism and, 39–40, 144; cooperation and, 40, 48, 188, 199; emulation and, 11; exploitation and, 40; Huxley on, 103; job, 51; in markets, 11; mutual aid and, 104; natural selection and, 103; in politics, 12; production and, 41; socialism and, 48; in socialist democracy, 12; solidarity and, 144; wage, 65n13 compulsion, exploitation and, 208n35 computers, 159, 166 conflict resolution, democracy and, 13 confrontation, 108 consciousness, 86, 110; collective, 213; language and, 119 consumerism, 197 consumption, 51, 59, 170; capitalism and, x; environment and, 60; excessive, 14; leisure and, 60; planned, 4–5 contempt, 79 conviviality, 25 cooperation, 39, 132n102, 104, 106, 115, 119; competition and, 40, 48, 188, 199; labor and, 135; natural selection

251

and, 114; in production, 45n30, 30, 144 cooperatives, 195, 200; first consumer, 203; viability of, 205–207; worker, 77, 218 corporations, 5, 30, 77, 199, 201 council communism, 4–5 couples. See romantic relationships credit, 59 Critique of The Gotha Programme (Marx), 87 crude communism, 48 culture, 112, 113, 116, 119; frames and, 229, 231; identity and, 230; neural circuitry and, 113; social movements and, 216, 219, 229–231; society and, 110 currency, 196 Darfur, 25 Darwin, Charles, 102 Death Instinct, 129n27, 105, 107 DeBach, Paul, 93 Debord, Guy, 170, 171 debt, 42 decommodification, 226, 228 defense, 34–35, 42 deflection, 182n35 Deleuze, Gilles, 68 deliberative democracy, 10 Delphy, Christine, 74 democracy, 9, 34, 50; Athenian, 14; conflict resolution and, 13; deal making and, 14–15; deliberative, 10; direct, 35, 36, 42; participation and, 13; power and, 13; problems of, 10–15; socialism and, ix, 48; time consumption of, 94; types of, 10–11; workplace, 55, 57. See also Economic Democracy; socialist democracy democratic feminist socialism, 76–81 de-skilling, 88, 168 development, 88, 124; constraint and, 98; free time and, 184n61, 176; human, 128n5, 132n102, 122, 125, 163; of language, 114; self, 6 Development as Freedom (Sen), 65n17 Diebold Election Systems, 183n52 direct democracy, 35, 36, 42

252

Index

direct economic planning, 200 disagreements, 13 disasters: simplification of life during, 145; solidarity and, 137, 143–146, 147 discrimination, 31 distress, empathy and, 100, 114 distribution, 39, 176–177 Dittmer, John, 223 division of labor, 14, 85, 87, 94, 119, 122, 205; concept of, 89–90; as contradictory, 93–94; democratic, 94; gender, 73; Marx on, 87–88, 89; as seminal concept, 90–92; social identity and, 95 Dobzhansky, Theodosius, 112 domestic production, 195 dominance, aggression and, 129n36, 108 Durkheim, Emile, 136 Dussel, Enrique, 138 Eagleton, Terry, 120, 123–124 Eastern Europe, 48 ecological sustainability, 49 economic cooperatives. See cooperatives Economic Democracy, 51, 56–58; current crises and, 58–60; ecological crises and, 59; financial system of, 58; investors and, 59; markets of, 58; model of, 54–56, 55, 60–64; social protectionism, 65n13; workers in, 59, 60 economic exchange model, 81n1, 68 economics, of socialism, 1, 2 economy: capitalism and, 15, 194; centrally planned, 4; freedom and, 52; instability of, 50; markets and, 54; material, 81n1; networked, 159, 163, 164, 169, 171, 175; no-growth, 59–60; planned, 15; socialist, 31, 39–42; society and, 30. See also affective economy education, 13; class division and, 42; for enjoyment, 25; goal of, 222; moral, 99; popular, 222–223; social movements and, 221–223

egalitarians, 180n3, 157, 160, 161, 162, 167, 171 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx), 125 elective affinity, 44n15, 32–33 electoral democracy, 10 electronic commons, 179 El Salvador, 221–223 Elson, Diane, 228 Ember, Carol, 129n39 embryo, 98 empathy, 99, 100, 101, 114, 115 emphasized femininity, 71 employees, 208n35, 195 employee share ownership plans (ESOPs), 15, 62, 200 employers: employees and, 208n35, 195; government as, 56 empowerment, social movements and, 219, 221–224 emulation, competition and, 11 encryption software, 160 enemies, of society, 27 energy flow model, 81n1, 68 Engels, Frederick, 6, 8, 28, 86, 131n63, 116, 207n5 English, Deirdre, 214 entrepreneurs: incentives for, 57; laws for, 57; role of, 57, 58 environment, 24, 51, 58, 198, 201; consumption and, 60; ecological crises, 59, 62 environmental policy, 18 Epstein, Barbara, 225 equality, 16–17; gender, x; kibbutzim and, 150; solidarity and, 149–150; for women, 149 Eritreans, 153n16 erotic love, 71 ESOPs. See employee share ownership plans essence, 86 essentialism, 137 ethics: of care, 138; liberal, 138 Ethics, 61 ethology, 106 evanescence, 236 evolution, 131n63, 108, 110, 112, 114 evolutionary psychology, 113

Index experts, 13 exploitation, 29–33, 135, 140, 166; affective, 82n19, 71; of caring labor, 82n18–82n19, 73, 75, 182n38, 167; class, 81n1; competition and, 40; compulsion and, 208n35; free gifts as, 167–168; self, 40; systematic, 140; of wage labor, 178 fairness, 115 fair price index, 77 Fair Trade networks, 200 family, 82n20, 82n23, 74, 103 “The Farm,” 149 father, 82n20, 68, 75, 76 femininity, 70, 71 feminism, 8 feminists, 73; commoning love energy solution of, 75–76; democratic feminist socialism, 76–81; material, 81n1; radical, 81n13, 70, 80–81; solidarity and, 136 Ferguson, Ann, x, 82n19 feudalism, 43, 196 Feuerbach, 86, 87, 94, 116 financial system, 65n11; of Economic Democracy, 58 Firestone, Shulamith, 70 Fisk, Milton, ix food co-ops, 205 forgiveness, 114 foster parents, 82n23 Fraser, Nancy, 75 freedom, 27; economy and, 52; justice and, 162–163; socialism and, 48 freedom fighters, 139 free gifts, 182n38, 173, 174, 175, 178; commons-based peer production as, 169; as exploitation, 167–168 free rider problem, 152, 235 free time, 184n61, 176 Freire, Paolo, 222 French Revolution, 89 Freud, Sigmund, 68, 129n27, 129n28, 105; on aggression, 105; criticism of communism, 105–106 Friedan, Betty, 220 friendships, 67; companionate, 81n13, 72–73

253

Fritz, Charles E., 137 Fromm, Erich, 131n85 future, of planet, 52–53 Gamson, William, 231 Gandhi, 80 Garro, Aitor, 140 Gaskin, InaMay, 149 Gaskin, Stephen, 149 gay marriage, 82n18, 70, 71, 75, 229 gender, 23; caring labor and, 82n19, 208n31; division of labor, 73; equality, x; identity, 68–69, 70; inequality, 74; justice, 67, 75 General Motors, 65n20 genes, 112 genetics, 115 genus, 86 Geras, Norman, 131n72, 131n87, 117, 127 German Democratic Party, 38 German Ideology (Marx & Engels), 8, 86, 87, 116–117 German projects for co-determination, 9 German Social-Democratic Party, 188–189, 202, 216 Giddens, Anthony, 53 global households, 79 globalization, 77, 243n42, 216 global justice, 162–163, 173, 243n42, 232 global market system, 162 global solidarity networks, 77 global warming, 24, 26, 30, 43 Golding, William, 105 goods/services, 51, 55; commodification of, 16; information, 180n5, 158. See also public goods Gould, Stephen Jay, 104, 110, 112 government, 144, 146; agencies, 196; as employer, 56; function of, 14; social movements and, 231, 232 Gradualism, 2 greater market share, 11 greed, 101 gross domestic product, 199 Grundrisse (Marx), 119, 207n6, 188 Guattari, Félix, 68

254

Index

Hahnel, Robin, 4, 135 Hammond, Jack, xi hand love, 75 happiness, 26, 28 harmony, 28 Harvey, David, 191 hate, 79 health insurance industry, 42, 43 Held, Virginia, 138 Heller, Patrick, 233 Heroic Marxism, 188, 190, 197, 205 heterosexism, 79 Hill, Joe, 237, 240 historical materialism, 131n64, 116, 188, 190 The History of the Social Movement in France (Stein), 215 Hobbes, Thomas, 101, 104, 126 Hoffman, Martin L., 114 Holloway, John, 194 home, 195 homophobia, 61 Horn, Paul, 182n37 Huber, Evelyne, 232 human behavior, 108; biological factors of, 109, 112; brain and, 113; transhistorical components of, 131n87, 116, 120, 123, 126, 127. See also social behavior human beings, 86, 98; brain size of, 110; development of, 128n5, 132n102, 122, 124, 163; distinguishing characteristics of, 118–119; innate moral sense of, 130n61, 115; needs of, 118, 120; self-definition of, 87 human essence, 98, 116 human flourishing, 116–125, 121–123, 125, 127, 162, 224; capital and, 169; commons-based peer production and, 179 human genome, 129n22, 126 humanity, 27, 86 human nature, 10, 97–98, 143; aggression and, 105–109; biology and historical concept of, 112–115; characteristics of, 99–101, 126; Chomsky on, 98; defects of, 105; as evil, 100–101; evolution of, 111, 112, 116, 117, 120, 125; Geras on, 127;

historical component of, 131n87, 116; Marx and, 116–125; Mencius on, 128n5, 99; modes of production and, 117, 118–119; mutual aid and, 103; optimism and, 125–127; seeds of development in, 128n5–128n6, 99; socialism and, x, 99, 125–127; solidarity as, 137; war and, 101 “Human Nature and Socialism: Taking Human Nature Seriously,” x human personality, in socialist society, 8–9 human rights, 42 hunger, 120 hunter-gatherer society, 129n39, 109, 122 Hussein, Saddam, 24 Huxley, Thomas H., 102; on competition, 103; on survival of the fittest, 103 IBM, 182n37, 184n66 identity: collective, 230; culture and, 230; division of labor and social, 95; gender, 68–69, 70; occupation and, 88; oppression and, 223; of social movements, 241n12, 219, 223, 235–236; violence and, 17. See also sexual identity Identity and Violence (Sen), 17 identity politics, 235–236 ideology, 130n40 imagination, 118 immigrants, 42, 79 imperialism, 37 incentives, 124, 176; for entrepreneurs, 57; production, 97; socialism and, 97 “In Defense of Marxism,” ix individualism, 23, 48, 60, 70 individuality, 119; forms of, 131n84–131n85, 119 industrial age, 158, 159, 162 industrial information age, 158, 159, 162 industrialization, 70, 163 industry, leisure and, 122 inequality, 50, 62, 63, 198, 199; gender, 74; wealth and, 129n28, 236, 238

Index information, 12, 172, 201; as nonrivalrous, 180n5, 158; technology, 169 innovation, 89, 184n57, 177 instinct, 110 insufficient effective demand, 59 integration, 29 Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology (Sohn-Rethel), 91 intellectual property rights, 43, 184n62, 184n66, 163, 173, 177, 178 intentional communities, 146, 149 intergenerational love, 73–76 intergenerational solidarity, 49, 60 internationalism, 5, 18 International Working Men’s Association, 38 Internet, 164, 170, 179, 239 Internet shopping, 170 inventions, 175 investment banks, 58 investment funds, 5, 51, 176 investments, 174, 175; democratic control of, 6, 54, 55; into machinery, 168; market socialism, 6; priorities of, 179 investors, 59, 172 Iraq, 17, 24 Isaac, Jeffrey, 53 Isaac, Thomas, 233 “Is Socialism Relevant in the ‘Networked Information Age’? A Critical Assessment of The Wealth of Networks,” xi Jasper, James, 223 jealousy, 82n19, 71 Jim Crow legislation, 17 jobs: competition for, 51; of parents, 75; security, 227 joy, 146 judges, 18 justice, 44n8, 27, 32; definition of, 77; freedom and, 162–163; gender, 67, 75. See also global justice Kantian, 167 Katrina (hurricane), 143, 144 Kautsky, Karl, 188, 189

255

Kerry, John, 183n52 Khrushchev, Nikita, 34 kibbutzim, x, xi, 147–148, 148; beliefs of, 149; children’s house of, 150; equality and, 150; free rider problem, 152; labor and, 151–152; mothers of, 150–151 Kibbutz Samar, 151 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 80 Knipe, Humphry, 129n36 knowledge products, 159, 176–177 Kropotkin, Peter, 102, 103, 104, 106, 114, 126; on Anarchists, 144; on solidarity, 137 Krugman, Paul, 65n21 Kupperman, Joel, 101 labor: alienation and, 122; commodification of, 15; in commons-based peer production, allocation of, 175–176; cooperation and, 135; directly associated, 30; ESOPs, 15; free rider problem of socialist, 152; gender division of, 73; groups, rank-and-file, 42; intensification of, 50; kibbutzim and, 151–152; living, 164; market, 5, 6, 55, 71, 88; Marx on, 26, 181n29; mental, 90, 91, 119; movement, 42, 216; productivity of, 182n35; relations of commons-based peer production, 159; rights, 33, 43; scientific-technical, 184n56, 184n62; social, 181n32, 168; technology and, 50; unions, 7; wage, 29, 31, 32–33, 51, 52, 165, 166; worker as seller of, 183n54. See also caring labor; division of labor; wage labor Landless Farm Workers, 77 Langer, Suzanne, 90 Langford, Wendy, 70 language, 117; Chomsky on, 98, 114; consciousness and, 119; development of, 114; morality and, 130n61 laws, 18, 97; for entrepreneurs, 57; social movements and, 215 Lebowitz, Michael, 132n102 Lefebvre, Henri, 130n40

256

Index

legal system, 196 legislation, 7, 36; commons-based peer production and, 178; Jim Crow, 17 leisure, 123, 170, 178; consumption and, 60; industry and, 122 Lenin, V. I., 8, 10, 14 liberalism, 31, 180n3, 178; socialism and, 3–4; solidarity and, 139 Liberty Plaza, 238, 240 libraries, 201 literacy, 223 loans, 58 lobbyists, 50 Lord of the Flies (Golding), 105 Lorenz, Konrad, 106, 108 love, x, 68, 137; affective energy of parents and, 75; energy solution, feminist commoning, 75–76; erotic, 71; hand, 75; intergenerational, 73–76; oppression and, 70; parenting, 75; pillow, 75. See also relationships; romantic relationships; solidarity love lust, 71 Luxemburg, Rosa, 191 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 97 machines, 181n32, 158, 169; investment in, 168; Marx on, 182n41; productivity and, 168; workers and, 182n44 Maclay, George, 129n36 macro-economic planning, 56 markets, 51; capital, 55; competition in, 11; of Economic Democracy, 58; economy and, 54; global system of, 162; types of, 55 market socialism, 4–5; different, 5–6; investments, 6 marriage, 77; gay, 82n18, 70, 71, 75, 229; heterosexual, 70; monogamous, 70, 71; polygamous, 71, 72; resistance to, 72; stepparents and, 82n20 Marx, Karl, 6, 28, 117, 119, 207n5; on Bonaparte, 89; on communist consciousness, 8; critique of capitalism, 57; on division of labor, 87–88, 89; on future, 52; human nature and, 116–125; on labor, 26,

181n29; legacy of, 86–88; on machines, 182n41; religious background of, 47; terminology of, 132n89; two sides of, 188; vision of communism, 124; on wage system, 25 Marx and Human Nature (Geras), 117 Marxism, ix, 23; Heroic, 188, 190, 197, 205; minimalist tendency of, 28; as science, 3; traditional, 1 Marxism and Human Nature (Sayers), 131n87, 122 Marxist theory, vii, viii, 1, 91, 120, 190, 191, 193; beliefs of, 3; socialism defined in, 2 masculinity, 70, 73, 76 Mason, Andrew, 140 Mason, W. A., 129n37 material economy, 81n1 materialism, 30, 85 materialist feminists, 81n1 McLeod, Andrew, 140 meaningful work, 49 mechanical solidarity, 136 media, 183n52, 231, 232, 238, 239 medicine, 162 Mencius, 128n5, 128n7, 99, 101, 113, 126 mental labor, 90, 91, 119 Michels, Robert, 235 Middle Ages, 30 Middle East, 63 militarism, 23, 61 military, 34–35, 42, 88 Mill, John Stuart, 168 minimalist tendency, 26, 28 Mitchell, Juliet, 72 mobilization, social movements and, 180n8, 233, 236 monarchy, 128n7 Mondragon, 15, 140, 204 money, 180n8, 166 monogamy, 70, 71 Montagu, Ashley, 129n38, 129n39, 109 Monteagudo, Graciela, 78 Moore, Michael, 42 morals: education, 99; five spheres of, 130n62; in human beings, innate sense of, 130n61, 115; language and, 130n61; solidarity as stance of,

Index 138–140 motivation, 8–10, 124, 166. See also incentives movements. See social movements MST. See Brazilian Landless Workers Movement Muslims, 79 mutual aid, 132n102, 102–103, 104, 106, 114, 125, 137; competition and, 104; human nature and, 103 Mutual Aid (Kropotkin), 102, 104, 137 “Myths about hunter-gatherers,” 129n39 Napoleonic wars, 89, 94 national investment fund, 56 nationalization, 50 National Organization for Women (NOW), 220–221 natural selection, 106; competition and, 103; cooperation and, 114 The Nature of Human Aggression (Montagu), 129n38 Nazi socialism, 93 necessity, 190, 191 neighborhoods, 196 net neutrality, 163 networked economy, 159, 163, 164, 169, 171, 175 networked information age: policy formation in, 162; production in, 159 neural circuitry, culture and, 113 New Lanark, 146 New Left, 225–226 New Left Review, 53 news: frames, 231; in socialist democracy, 12 9/11, 143 no-growth economy, 59–60 normality, 146 North/South conflict, 43 Norway, 65n21 NOW. See National Organization for Women Nowak, Martin, 114 nutrition, 162 occupation, identity and, 88 Occupy Wall Street (OWS), 237–240

257

oligarchy, 235 Ollman, Bertell, 124 On Aggression (Lorenz), 106 On Human Nature (Wilson), 110 open hardware, 182n37 open software, 180n14, 182n37, 160, 176 oppression, 26, 29–31, 32–33, 236; capitalism and, 30; ending, 32; identity and, 223; love and, 70; national, 30; patriotism and, 30; racial, 29, 31, 32; social collapse and, 29, 63; socialist confrontation of, 31; solidarity and, 138; workers and, 30 optimism, human nature and, 125–127 organic solidarity, 136 output distribution, in commons-based peer production, 180n14, 159–160 outsourcing, 59 overwork, 58 Owen, Robert, 146, 147, 187 ownership, 2, 3, 201 OWS. See Occupy Wall Street A Paradise Built in Hell (Solnit), 143 parecon, 153n4 parenting love, 75 parents, 82n23, 71; foster, 82n23; heterosexual, 69; intergenerational love and, 73–76; jobs of, 75; love, affective energy and, 75; rights of, 75; step, 82n20; work of, 74 Paris Commune (1870) 34, 135 participation, 12, 213; democracy and, 13; oligarchy, 235; in public discourse, 170; in social movements, 221, 233–234, 235 participatory autonomy, 49 parties. See political parties The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man (Engels), 131n63 patents, 184n66 paternity leave, 75 patriarchal society, 67, 68 patriotism, 17, 190, 202 peacekeeping, 18 peasantry, 89, 94 pecking order, 108

258

Index

peer-to-peer file-sharing software, 181n16, 160 Peoples’ Charter, 27 perfectionist tendency, 26, 28 permits, 205 personal computers. See computers personality types, 197 pets, 72 petty capitalists, 57 pharmaceutical companies, 43 Piercy, Marge, 75 pillow love, 75 Pinker, Steven, 129n39, 130n62, 109, 113, 115 Piven, Frances Fox, 232 policy formation, 10, 13; in networked information age, 162; social movements and, 219–221, 231–234 political parties, 45n24, 37–38; communism and, 38; leftist, 38; multiple, 38; social movements and, 37 The Political Project: commons-based peer production and, 163–164, 173–177; limits of, 173–177 political solidarity, 138 politics, 30; anti-war, 80; commonsbased peer production and, 171–172; competition in, 12; definition of, 171; identity, 235–236; personal as, 220; reactionary solidarity love, 78–79; socialist, 8; society and, 27 Polletta, Francesca, 223, 225 polyamourous. See polygamy polygamy, 81n13, 71, 72 popular education, 222–223 Porto Alegre, 7 post-modernism, 8 poverty, 39, 65n13, 50, 58, 61, 62, 77 power, 68, 161; capitalism and, 7; democracy and, 13; violence and, 11 primary aggression, 107 primary mutual hostility, 105 Prisoner’s Dilemma, 114 privacy, 149 private investors, 55 production, 39; animals and, 118–119; capitalist mode of, 45n29;

competition and, 41; concentration of, 39; cooperation in, 45n30, 30, 144; domestic, 195; history and modes of, 190; human nature and modes of, 117, 118–119; incentives, 97; in industrial age, 158; in industrial information age, 158; modes of, 1, 2, 3, 190; in networked information age, 159; organization of, 119; of public goods, 35; responsibility and, 88; social, 160; workers, 90. See also commons-based peer production productivity, 179; of labor, 182n35; machines and, 168; wages and, 59 profit system, 31, 40, 55, 167; public, 41; public goods and, 41; social assets and, 41 progressive solidarity love, 76–78, 80 promotion, 8 property ownership, 2, 89, 106 prosumers, 170 psychology, 109, 110, 122; evolutionary, 113; sociology and, 111 public discourse: commons-based peer production and, 161–162, 170–172; participation in, 170 public goods, 35, 51, 62, 176; in capitalism, 42; commons-based peer production and, 160, 161; definition of, 41; production of, 35; profit system and, 41; taxation and, 41 public patriarchy, 79 public trusts, 201 punishments, 101 race, 193 racism, 16–17, 23, 31, 32, 61, 81n1, 79 radical feminists, 81n13, 70, 80–81 rank-and-file labor groups, 42 Rawls, John, 44n3, 32, 139 reaction, response and, 110 reactionary solidarity love politics, 78–79 Reich, Robert, 90, 94 relationships, 194; abusive, 74; wage, 93. See also romantic relationships religion, 30; fundamentalism, 42, 47; socialism and, 47; remuneration, 39

Index research and development, 173 resistance, solidarity of, 153n16, 138, 139 resources, mobilization of, 180n8 respect, 128n6 response, reaction and, 110 responsibility: collective, 49; production and, 88 The Revolutionary Law of Women, 77 revolutions, 43, 48, 87 right and wrong, 128n6 rights, 230; civil, 79, 218, 223, 224, 232; human, 42; individual, 161; intellectual property, 43, 184n62, 184n66, 163, 173, 177, 178; labor, 33, 43; parenting, 75; women’s, 220–221 ritual principles, 101 Rochdale cooperative store, 146 Rockefeller, John D., 102 Roemer, John, 5–6 role playing, 171 “Romantic Couple Love, the Affective Economy, and a Socialist Feminist Vision,” x romantic relationships, 67, 68–69; erotic love/lust in, 81n13, 71; ideal of, 70–72; stepparents and, 82n20 Rome, 30 Rorty, Richard, 28, 53 Rucht, Dieter, 230 rural life, 89 Russia, 48, 207n7 Sahlins, Marshall, 122 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 65n17 Sayers, Sean, 85, 131n87, 119, 120, 122, 123 Schmitt, Richard, vii, ix, x, xi, 157 Scholz, Sally, 138 Schweickart, David, ix, 5, 6, 56, 58, 135, 200 science, 92, 173 scientific-technical knowledge, 173, 175, 179 scientific-technical labor, 184n56, 184n62 secondary aggression, 107, 108 Section 5, 37 Seeger, Pete, 64

259

segregation, 218, 223, 232 self-absorption, 89 self-development, 6 self-interest, 101, 104, 115, 138 selfishness, 101 self-management, 226 self-realization, 121–122, 123, 124 self-respect, 49 self-sacrifice, 137 self-valorization, 167 Sen, Amartya, 17, 65n17, 62 services. See goods/services sex/affective triangle, 74 sexism, 81n1, 112, 220; heterosexism, 79; internalized, 69 sexual affairs, 71 Sexual Democracy: Women, Oppression and Revolution (Ferguson), 82n19 sexual drive, 107 sexual identity, 81n13, 69, 70, 71 sexuality, 68 shame, 128n6 share cropping, 29 Sinclair, 183n52 slavery, 29, 31, 206 Smith, Tony, xi, 3 SMOs. See social movement organizations SNCC. See Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee social assets, 44n3, 25, 41 social behavior, 109–110; forms of sociality, 131n84–131n85, 119; psychological dispositions of, 113, 115. See also human behavior social bond, 24 social character, 131n85 social collapse, 24; avoiding, 26; capitalism and, 25; oppression and, 29, 63; societal change and, 25; wage system and, 25 social conditions, 120 social context, 110 social contribution, 124 Social Darwinism, 128n13, 102 social distinctions, 145 social forms, commons-based peer production and, 174 Social Forum movement, 8

260

Index

social hierarchy, 129n36, 108 social identity, division of labor and, 95 social institutions, 111 socialism: blueprint of, 1; capitalism and, 187; core values of, 49; definition of, 2, 3, 47–48, 51–52; economics of, 1, 2; failures of, x; freedom and, 48; history of, vii–viii; human nature and, x, 99, 125–127; inevitability of, 207n7, 189–191; liberalism and, 3–4; Marxist theory definition of, 2; origin of term, 187; politics and, 8; reconsidering, 194–198; religion and, 47; society and, viii, 135; Soviet, 57; theories of, viii; transitioning into, 6–7; types of, 93. See also market socialism socialist democracy, 10, 11; competition in, 12; news in, 12 socialist movement, 32–33, 34 Socialist Party, 8 Socialist Register, 228 “Socialist Solidarity,” x socialist state, 18 social labor, 181n32, 168 social movement organizations (SMOs), 240n3 social movements, xi, 8, 77, 240n3, 243n42, 213–214; alliances and, 232; associate sector of, 228; communities and, 217, 224–228; culture and, 216, 219, 229–231; definition of, 214; dilemmas, 234–237; education and, 221–223; effects of, 219–234; empowerment from, 219, 221–224; the first, 215–218; free riders in, 235; goals of, 215, 232, 233; government and, 231, 232; identity of, 241n12, 219, 223, 235–236; identity politics and, 235–236; laws and, 215; mobilization and, 233, 236; modern, 218; nature of, 239; NOW, 220–221; oligarchy in, 235; organization of, 243n42, 215, 218; OWS, 237–240; participation in, 221, 223, 233–234, 235; policy formation and, 219–221, 231–234; political parties and, 37; prefiguration of, 219, 224–228;

resource mobilization, 180n8, 223; sociological theory of, 219; of workers, 216–217 “Social Movements and Struggles for Socialism,” xi social movement unionism, 217 social production, 160 social protectionism, 65n13 social relations, 180n8 social roles, 119 social safety net, 192 society, 119; attributes of, 24; biological determinism and, 109–111; capitalism and, 194; culture and, 110; economy and, 30; enemies of, 27; human personality and socialist, 8–9; hunter-gatherer, 129n39, 109, 122; modern industrial, 10, 14; politics and, 27; protection of, 27; saving, 24; social collapse and change of, 25; socialism and, viii, 135; threats to, 23, 32, 41. See also patriarchal society sociobiology, 110, 114 Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Wilson), 110 sociology, psychology and, 111 software, 180n14 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, 91 solidarity, x, 10, 25, 42, 125, 135, 225; character structure of, 142; class, 190; competition and, 144; definition of, 83n26; disasters and, 137, 143–146, 147; equality and, 149–150; example of group, 141; feminists and, 136; as given, 136–137; as human nature, 137; intergenerational, 49, 60; Kropotkin on, 137; liberalism and, 139; mechanical, 136; as moral stance, 138–140; oppression and, 138; organic, 136; political, 138; Rawls and, 139; of resistance, 153n16, 138, 139; socialist, 135–136, 140, 140–142, 142, 148–152; suffering and, 139; trust and, 141–142; varieties of, 136–140; war and, 189; xenophobia and, 139

Index solidarity love, 76; definition of, 83n26; dilemma, 80; politics, reactionary, 78–79; progressive, 76–78, 80 Solnit, Rebecca, 137, 143 Soviet Union, 4, 57 specializations, 88 species, 86 Spencer, Herbert, 128n12, 102 Speth, James Gustave, 62 state socialism, 28, 34–36 Stein, Lorenz von, 215 Stephens, John, 232 stepparents, 82n20 Stewart, Potter, 214 Stiglitz, Joseph E., 63, 64 “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society,” 102 Struhl, Karsten, x Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 223 suburbanization, 90 Sudan, 25 suffering, 114, 139 summer camps, 224–225 Sumner, William Graham, 128n13 supervision, of workers, 35–36 support groups, 196 survival of the fittest, 128n12, 102, 103 sustainability, 59 sweatshops, 43 Sweden, 65n21 Swedish Meidner Plan, 9 symbolic analysts, 90 sympathy, 137 talent, 44n3, 25 taxation, 55–56; capital-assets, 57, 58; public goods and, 41 Taylorism, 88 Teamsters for a Democratic Union, 42 Tea Party, 236 technology, 163, 173; coercion and, 169; information, 169; labor and, 50; science and, 92; social consequences of, 169; unemployment and, 168, 169; wage labor and, 168 territory, 129n38, 108 There Is No Alternative (TINA), 53 Theses on Feuerback (Marx), 87

261

Thompson, Clara, 107 Thompson, William, 147, 187 Tilly, Charles, 214 TINA. See There Is No Alternative tools, 118, 119 total social capital, 174 Toward a New Socialism (Anton & Schmitt), vii, ix trade unions, 215 transparency, 12 tribes, 103, 106 Truman, Harry S., 29 trust, 25; capitalism and, 142; risks of, 142; solidarity and, 141–142 “25 Questions about Socialism,” ix Tzu, Hsün, 99, 100–101, 104, 113 unemployment, 32, 56, 58, 168, 169 unionism, 216–217 United for Peace, 238 United States, 64; socialism and, 42–43; wealth in, 63, 64 Universal Caregiver, 75 universal class, 40 universal grammar, 114, 115 universal suffrage, 206 University Students against Sweatshops, 43 utopianism, 26–29 valorization, 166, 167, 176 values, 52, 199 Vaqjapey, Sridhar, 182n37 Venezuela, 43 Via Campesina, 77 violence, 7, 11, 17–18, 112, 166, 238; aggression and, 109; identity and, 17; peacekeeping with, 18; power and, 11; against women, 77 virtual worlds, 171 volunteering, 195 voter manipulation, 36 vouchers, 6 wage labor, 25, 29, 31, 32–33, 51, 165; capitalism and, 93; competition, 65n13; exploitation of, 166, 178; Marx on, 25, 52; productivity and,

262

Index

59; replacing, 25; social collapse and, 25; technology and, 168 wage relationship, 93 Walker, Jack L., 232 war, 17–18, 24, 25, 145; human nature and, 101; solidarity and, 189 wealth, 39, 50, 102, 198; equalizing, 97; inequality of, 129n28, 236, 238; in United States, 63, 64 The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Benkler), 157 Weber, Max, 44n15, 32 welfare, Scandinavian, 75 “What Good Is Wall Street?” 65n11 Why Not Socialism? (Cohen), 224 Wikipedia, 180n14 Wilson, E. O., 110, 114 Wolf, Susan, 146 Wolff, Peter, 153n16 Woman on the Edge of Time (Piercy), 75 women: conservative, 74; economic independence of, 71, 72; equality for, 149; liberation, 193; NOW, 220–221; rights of, 220–221; violence against, 77 Wooley, John, 65n11 work, 50, 122, 123; alienation and, 25, 122; meaningful, 49; organization of, 116, 125, 179; over, 58; of parents,

74; right to, 56 workers, 55; capitalist and, 181n29; care, 90; controlled firms, 218, 226–228; cooperatives, 77, 218; in Economic Democracy, 59, 60; factories and, 216; machines and, 182n44; oppression and, 30; production, 90; as seller of labor, 183n54; social movements of, 216–217; supervision of, 35–36; symbolic analysts, 90; treatment of, 198 Workers Party, 233 work ethic, 78 working class, 33, 38, 216–217 workplace democracy, 55, 57 World Social Forum, 243n42 World War I, 29, 202 World War II, 29, 48, 92 Wright, Erik Olin, 193, 202, 233 xenophobia, 139 YouTube, 180n14, 239 Zapatistas, 77 Zasulich, Vera, 188 Zionists, 147 Zuccotti Park, 237

About the Contributors

Anatole Anton is professor emeritus of philosophy at San Francisco State University. He has been active in the Radical Philosophy Association for the last fifteen years. He writes and researches in the areas of political and social philosophy, philosophy of social science, and Hegel and Marx. He edited Not for Sale with Milton Fisk and Nancy Holmstrom and later edited Toward a New Socialism with Richard Schmitt. This later anthology was recently translated into Spanish and published by El Viejo Topo under the title Hacia un Nuevo Socialismo. Anatole Anton was an active participant in the student/faculty/staff strike of 1968–69 that led to the founding of the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. Ann Ferguson, a feminist philosopher and social justice activist, is an emerita professor of philosophy and women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has written numerous articles on feminist theory, ethics, and politics; written two books, Blood at the Root: Motherhood, Sexuality, and Male Dominance (1989) and Sexual Democracy: Women, Oppression, and Revolution (1991); and co-edited two books, Daring to Be Good: Essays in Feminist Ethico-Politics, with Bat Ami Bar On (1998), and Dancing with Iris: The Political Philosophy of Iris Marion Young, with Mechthild Nagel (2009). Milton Fisk is a professor emeritus at Indiana University. As an author, he has written on metaphysics, ethics, and politics. As an activist, he served in union positions, the single-payer health care movement, and several socialist groups. His doctorate is from Yale, and he taught at Notre Dame, Yale, and Indiana University. He has made the notion of public goods a centerpiece of his thinking on ethics generally and health care reform in particular. His recent work stresses social survival as the major consideration in the project of fashioning and refashioning ethics. John L. Hammond is a longtime social movement activist, notably against U.S. military interventions from Vietnam to Iraq. He is also active in his union, the Professional Staff Congress. He has studied social movements in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, and he is the author of Fighting to Learn: Popular Education and Guerrilla War in El Salvador and Building Popular Power: Workers’ and Neighborhood Movements in 263

264

About the Contributors

the Portuguese Revolution. He teaches sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Richard Schmitt, for many years philosophy professor at Brown, is now adjunct professor of philosophy at Worcester State University. He has been active in a variety of political movements for many years and has written books and articles about Marx and Engels, Martin Heidegger, alienation, and feminist, and political theory. David Schweickart is professor of philosophy at Loyola University, Chicago. He holds PhDs in mathematics and philosophy. He is the author of three books and coauthor of one, the latest being After Capitalism (2002; Chinese translation 2005; 2nd edition 2011). He is the author of numerous articles on social and political philosophy, some of which have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, French, and Catalan. He has given presentations in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, El Salvador, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Philippines, Venezuela, and China. Tony Smith is a professor of philosophy at Iowa State University. He is the author of numerous publications in Marxism, the philosophy of technology, and social theory, including The Logic of Marx’s Capital (1990), Technology and Capital in the Age of Lean Production (2000), and Globalisation: A Systematic Marxian Account (hardcover 2005; paperback 2009). Karsten J. Struhl teaches political and cross-cultural philosophy at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY) and at the New School University. He has co-edited Philosophy Now (1972, 1975, 1980), Ethics in Perspective (1975), and The Philosophical Quest: A Cross-Cultural Reader (1995, 2000). He writes about such topics as ideology, human nature, justwar theory, global ethics, radical democracy, visions of communism, ecology, Marxism, and Buddhist philosophy. His articles have appeared in a variety of journals, books, and encyclopedias.