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Welcome to rabble.ca's extended series on the Canadian left -- Reinventing democracy, reclaiming the commons: A progressive dialogue on the future of Canada -- a look at where it stands after the 2011 federal election, and what the future can hold. The series will run in this, rabble.ca's 10th year, and is curated by journalist Murray Dobbin.
What happened to the North American Left? Why is it that, even now, when capitalism seems so obviously unappealing, unsustainable and unfair, the Left cannot mount a more serious challenge to the Right or its grim austerity agenda?
Indeed, what happened to the Left's former ability to mobilize huge numbers into powerful social movements, to inspire working-class people with appealing visions of post-capitalist alternatives, and to strike fear into the hearts of elites who once worried that the Left posed a credible threat to their power and privilege?
The Left's role in its own decline
If we are serious about figuring all this out, and reversing this trajectory, we have to be willing to take some responsibility for our predicament. We can't just blame the "propaganda" circulated by the corporate media, the repressive role of the police and the courts, or the way electoral systems are stacked against our efforts to promote social and environmental justice and political and economic democracy. The news media, the police, and state institutions have always waged a determined struggle against the Left; but the Left used to be able to overcome these obstacles and make real gains, building powerful mass movements that sometimes racked up real victories. Above all, the Left was once able to claim the allegiance of huge numbers of people, but at least in North America this is no longer the case.
My questions here can all be boiled down to this: What has the Left done, or failed to do, that might have hastened or exacerbated its own decline, and what can we do today to help turn things around?
There is, of course, a conventional answer to these questions. Some people on the broad Left, and almost everyone on the Right, would say that the Left's historic error was to articulate a political vision ("socialism") that strayed too far from capitalism. Its supposed aim to introduce democratic and egalitarian economic planning, they say, made socialism unable to handle the overwhelming demands of information-processing that arise in a complex modern society. Only market regulation and profit-motivated investment decisions can handle these demands, according to this view.
But I would argue that the real story is almost the exact opposite of this more familiar one. The real-world experiments in "socialism" during the 20th century did not fail because the distance that separated them from capitalism grew too great, making them unworkable. On the contrary, they failed because the proximity between those efforts and capitalism made these "socialisms" -- East European command planning and Western social democracy -- too difficult to distinguish from the capitalist system that they were supposed to replace.
These supposedly socialist political projects actually embraced most of capitalism's worst features: its bureaucratic mode of governance, its technocratic approach to designing and implementing public policy, its hierarchical and authoritarian norms of workplace organization, its Realpolitik patterns of international relations, its cultural celebration of productivity and growth as ends in themselves, and its elitist understanding of who is best suited to exercise political power and spearhead social change.
At the heart of the problem was the Left's often uncritical embrace of one of the most oppressive, disempowering and alienating institutions that most working-class people ever have the misfortune to interact with in their lives: the modern state. At some point, the Left dropped its former aim of encouraging the "self-emancipation" of working people, and replaced it with an aim that to most people seems like its opposite: technocratic "public administration" by state agencies.
This shift, from the anti-statist "community-based socialism" that dominated the early Marxist, Owenite, Guild-socialist, syndicalist and anarchist Left in the 19th and early-20th centuries, was replaced in the years after the First World War by the two most influential forms of "socialism" in the 20th century: statist command planning, typified by the USSR, and Keynesian welfare state expansionism, typified by European social democracy.
In the course of this fateful shift, the Left gave up almost entirely on the emancipatory promise of liberation from alienation, exploitation and bureaucratic administration that had once been its stock in trade -- a promise which had only a few decades earlier led European radicals to embrace the bold "smash the state" ethos of the Paris Commune.
Having made this fateful wrong turn so long ago, what can the Left do today to set a new course, to restore the viability and the appeal of its project?
What the Left needs above all is to rupture its identification with the capitalist state. Government is not an actual or potential ally of the Left against Big Business. In part this is because, especially in this neo-liberal epoch, government is in fact already an arm of Big Business. But more importantly, it is because the bureaucratic structures of the capitalist state are incapable in principle of serving as a vehicle for the self-liberation of people who aspire not to be administered by a welfare-maximizing state apparatus, but to participate in the democratic self-organization of their own workplaces and communities. What is needed, in short, is a reassertion of the classical leftist ideal of a community-based socialism, a socialism of popular self-organization and horizontal democracy, not one of public sector maximalism.
In part, that means replacing the utilitarian and technocratic images of a post-capitalist social order with more appealing images of radically democratic forms of community-based egalitarian economic democracy. But, in more immediately practical terms, it means a strategic reorientation of the Left: a turn away from the habit of engaging primarily with state institutions (parliaments, regulatory agencies and the welfare state), toward engaging primarily with grassroots, community-based forms of popular self-organization.
A civil society strategy
The Left, in other words, must turn its attention back toward civil society: union locals, cooperatives, social movement organizations, mutual aid projects, popular assemblies and other community associations. These expressions of grassroots democracy and popular self-organization -- operating independently of both the market economy and the state -- offer the Left the crucial benefit that they do not replicate the alienating and disempowering character of corporations and governments (although the Left is unfortunately overpopulated with bureaucratic and staff-led union and NGO apparatuses that today emulate the administrative systems of elite institutions). Instead, these grassroots civil society organizations embody the "every cook can govern" spirit of the classical (pre-WWI) Left.
When the Left does engage with the state, as it sometimes must, its default demand should be to transfer power from corporations and the state to civil society. Such a civil society strategy is arguably already implicit in the notion of a community-based socialism.
For example, whereas a statist strategy would demand that the government's budget adopt welfare-maximizing priorities, a civil society strategy would demand that budgeting power be ceded to a grassroots participatory budgeting process, centrally involving open public assemblies. Whereas a statist strategy would demand "public housing" owned and operated by the state, a civil society strategy would demand that state funds be used to establish democratically self-governing non-profit housing cooperatives, collectively owned by their members.
And, whereas a statist strategy would demand "nationalizing" banks as "public enterprises," a civil society strategy would demand that banks be dismantled and reconstructed as genuinely democratic and member-controlled financial cooperatives ("credit unions"), operating in the public interest. This transfer of power and control from corporations and governments to civil society associations should be seen as the main aim of the Left. From this point of view, "winning" for the Left means replacing the power and prerogatives of corporations and governments with empowered participatory self-governing associations within civil society.
How we resist neo-liberalism
There is no doubt that a civil society strategy for the Left raises a number of difficult questions. Above all, it poses a very serious set of questions about how the radical Left should fight back against neo-liberalism, notably in its contemporary guise of the "austerity" agenda. Given that neo-liberalism's primary policy aspiration is to privatize public services, and to replace public administration (the "public sector" economy) with market regulation (the "private sector" economy), shouldn't the Left be defending the state (the public sector) against neo-liberal privatization?
For better or for worse, what the Left needs in addressing this question is nuance. We have to be able to distinguish between (for example) transferring control of a public housing complex to a private landlord ("privatization"), in pursuit of the corporate/neo-liberal agenda, and transferring control of that same public housing complex to the residents themselves ("cooperative conversion"), under pressure from grassroots popular mobilization.
If we refuse to make this distinction, either by celebrating privatization as a victory against the state or by vilifying cooperative conversion as if it were itself a type of privatization, we fall into one of two familiar traps: the temptation to see the state as the main enemy, letting corporations disastrously off the hook, or (more likely among leftists) the temptation to align ourselves politically with the ill-fated project of "public administration socialism," in which the Left plays the role of supporting the capitalist state as a bulwark against corporate power. This is at the heart of the Left's historic failure to champion freedom and democracy against not only their corporate enemies, but their bureaucratic-statist enemies, as well.
Once taking this path, the Left quickly finds itself defending the state against the negative experience of it that so pervades the lives of poor and working-class people, even to the point of championing the increase of taxes on workers as 'progressive' because it supports the state.
The Left, or at least the radical Left, needs to remember that its project by definition demands that sweeping social reorganization and reconstruction from below be entertained and where possible carried out. Sometimes, this means tactically defending public services, run on a non-profit basis by the state, against the immediate threat of profit-motivated privatization, which we rightly oppose as a step in the wrong direction altogether. But ultimately, the Left must aim higher than state-administration: the Left must aim to replace both the profit-motivated private sector economy and the bureaucratically administered public sector economy, in favour of a community-based, democratic and egalitarian post-capitalist economic democracy.
This means that we must admit the obvious: that publicly owned enterprises and public services offered by the capitalist welfare state do not meet this standard by any stretch of the imagination. Our project demands a civil society strategy, not a statist one. What we fight for is not a bigger, more expansive state, but more democratic and egalitarian forms of grassroots popular self-organization: a more participatory and community-based set of economic and political institutions, controlled from below by working people themselves.
Above all, a civil society strategy is necessary because our world needs a Left that can inspire hope, not just for a more productive and well-administered society, but for a freer, more democratic, less alienating society, controlled directly by its members, as opposed to being controlled by administrators, supposedly acting in the public interest. This ideal of a "community-based socialism" was a vision that once united the entire radical Left -- Marxists and anarchists, guild socialists and Owenites, syndicalists and council communists -- and I think there is reason to hope that it could some day do so again.
Steve D'Arcy is a democratic theorist and a climate justice and economic democracy organizer in London, Ontario, Canada. He can be reached at steve.darcy@gmail.com.
Read our other stories from Reinventing democracy, reclaiming the commons: A progressive dialogue on the future of Canada.
This article is an important contribution to the type of discourse needed. It is certainly an antidote to the nonsensical po-mo crap promoted by Slobo ZsiZsi (I will not use his real name as he has been promoted far, far too often here and elsewhere; I rename him so as to not promote him further 'a la the Lady GagGag hoax and because he is so much like Zsa Zsa Gabor - mindless, legless and an icon of nothing but retreaded meaninglessness).
Steve D'Arcy seriously misunderstands the nature and role of the state in capitalist society.
As a result, he entertains fantasies of abandoning any perspective of wresting state power from the capitalist class, and instead proposes a "strategy" of establishing co-ops.
He never explains how the wealth of society, the vast majority of which is concentrated in a few private hands, is to be repossessed by those who created it. He never considers that as long as the state is left in the hands of the capitalists they will use it to defend their wealth and privileges by attacking "civil society"; instead he imagines that the co-ops, the capitalists, and the capitalist state will somehow manage to coexist in peace.
The bourgeoisie would be absolutely delighted if the left followed D'Arcy's utopian advice and tried to create enclaves of "self-emancipation" within capitalism.
M. Spector,
I assume that your reference to the "bourgeoisie" indicates that your worries are coming from a point of view that you regard as 'Marxist.' For this reason, I think you should read an old text, "The Civil War on France," and then you'll better positioned to discuss the relevant issues. In that piece, Marx explains that the Left can't just "take over" the "ready-made" state of the bosses, but has to (in Marx's memorable, but seldom-remembered phrase) "smash the state" and replace it with a radically democratic alternative, in which civil society directly governs itself. If you read Chapter 27 of "Capital, III" you'll see that Marx regards cooperatives as the basis for a democratic post-capitalist mode of production ("co-operative factories," he wrote, "should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one"), but I'll leave that aside, for now.
My view, that the state is essentially a vehicle for managing the common affairs of big business, and that it is designed to disempower people and train them to comply with "directives" issued from Ministries, by means of a command-and-control bureaucratic hierarchy, no doubt shocks you. I understand that.
Unfortunately, I feel I have to leave you with some more of Marx's words, even more shocking: “I declare that the next attempt of the French Revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to SMASH it, and this is the precondition for every real people’s revolution on the Continent. And this is what our heroic Party comrades in Paris are attempting.” (Marx, 1871; emphasis in original)
I have to say, I'm delighted on Marx's behalf that his views have lost none of their originall power to shock, even after all these years.
In solidarity,
Steve.
In Capital III Marx recognized that the development of co-operative forms of labour could form the basis for a post-capitalist economy, freed of wage-labour. But he never posed a strategy of developing co-operatives as an alternative to the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist state, and he never contemplated that an economic system based on emancipated labour could exist side-by-side with capitalism for very long. The means of production (i.e. capital itself) would have to be placed under the ownership and control of the workers, and that could only be accomplished by what he called a dictatorship of the proletariat, in which the working class would create a revolutionary workers' state in place of the capitalist state, to protect its own class interests - democratically run by the working class through its organizations. This was the "radically democratic alternative" he proposed. Marx never said "smash the state" and replace it with nothing - that's where he parted company with the anarchists.
Your quotations are even better than my quotations.
Your quotation shows, obviously, that Marx was (as I like to put it) a "community-based socialist," who wanted civil society (in this case, "united cooperative societies") to "take under THEIR CONTROL," that is, to REPLACE state power with the power of "united cooperative societies" to plan the economy in "common."
It is true that he sometimes called this "dictatorship of the proletariat," by which he explicitly meant "a freer, more democratic, less alienating society, controlled directly by its members, as opposed to being controlled by administrators, supposedly acting in the public interest," to quote not Marx this time, but the last paragraph of my article. For Marx, this is a matter of "society" (his word for what I call civil society) throwing off the parasitic, disempowering, undemocratic and inherently oppressive state. For this reason, Engels quite rightly wrote, in a 'Preface' to the 'Civil War in France,' that the DoP/Paris Commune was "not a state in the proper sense of the word."
You're right that "Marx never said 'smash the state' and replace it with nothing." But neither did I. I said this:
"What we fight for is not a bigger, more expansive state, but more democratic and egalitarian forms of grassroots popular self-organization: a more participatory and community-based set of economic and political institutions, controlled from below by working people themselves."
Many will oppose us, we already know. They will rush to the barricades to defend the capitalist state. But please don't try to pretend that Marx would have been one of them.
Marx understood, as you apparently do not, that every hitherto existing form of class society has had a ruling class that had its own particular state institutions and used those institutions as a means of maintaining their rule; he never saw the state, as you obviously do, as a uniquely capitalist institution. And he understood that a future society in which the working class would become the ruling class would need to have a state in order to preserve its power and legitimacy, and to provide co-ordination, support, and defence against counter-revolution.
It's not a matter of a "bigger and more expansive state"; it would be a very different kind of state from the capitalist one, having its own unique characteristics and institutions, but it would be nonetheless a state, as an embodiment of the power and authority of the working and allied classes. This was in fact one of the lessons to be drawn from the experience of the Paris Commune, which failed in part precisely because, as Engels said, it wasn't a state in the proper sense.
Only in the fullness of time, when capitalism had been truly extirpated from the planet, would the state cease to have a function, and it would "wither away". But until then, the worker's state would be an indispensable tool in preserving and deepening the revolutionary character of society.
There are some who think that a transition from capitalism to communism can be made without establishing a proletarian state during the transition. Please don't try to pretend that Marx would have been one of them.
The word "state" is sometimes used approvingly by Marx, and sometimes rejected by him. That's because he has two ways of using the word. Sometimes he means the parliamentary/administrative/repressive institutional form that stands "above society," i.e., outside the control of civil society. That state is to be smashed, he proposes. But someties by "state" he means what he calls "the state, i.e., the proletariat organized as the ruling class..." (Marx). The state in THAT sense is not controversial (between us), except in the sense that you think this form of grassroots self-organization of workers fails to be a proper state, whereas I think it succeeds in not being a proper state.
For our part, we should try to correct this ambiguous terminology, and make the distinction explicit, by following Marx's and Engels' advice to Bebel:
“The whole talk about the state should be dropped, especially since the Commune, which was no longer a state in the proper sense of the word....We [Marx and I] would therefore propose replacing ‘state’ everywhere by ‘Gemeinwesen’ [community], a good old German word which can very well take the place of the French word ‘commune’.” (Engels, letter to Bebel, 1875).
Engels's advice to Bebel was specifically concerning the draft of the infamous "Gotha Program". When he proposes replacing the word "state" by "Gemeinweisen" he is talking about replacing it "everywhere" in the draft program - not in political discourse in general. It was a criticism specific to the context of that document.
Further context is provided by the two sentences omitted from your quotation by way of ellipsis:
In the latter sentence Engels was not using the word "state" to refer to a form of grassroots self-organization of workers, but as an institution of class rule, complete with armed force. It is beyond question that Engels and Marx understood the necessity of having a transitional workers' state to "hold down one's adversaries by force", quite apart from whatever forms of self-organization that workers might devise at the grassroots level.
Why would you attribute to Engels a contrast between (1) "an institution of [working-]class rule," i.e., "the proletariat organized as the ruling class," and (2) "a form of grassroots self-organization of workers"? It is clear to me that Engels, whatever the limitations of his version of Marxism, understands quite well that (1) is a form of (2). The Paris Commune, for instance, that no-longer-a-state-in-the-proper-sense, is both (1) and (2). Your use of the phrase, "quite apart from," in your final sentence, is particularly questionable.
What Engels is saying in your long highlighted passage is simply that (2), "the proletariat organized as the ruling class," i.e., the self-organization of workers in revolt against capital, is coercive vis-a-vis the capitalist class, and therefore it is not a form of "people's organization" in general, but a form of working-class self-organization in particular, the point of which is to expropriate capitalists, and therefore involves what the 'Manifesto' calls "despotic inroads on the rights of property."
As for your initial point, that Engels doesn't want to replace the word "state" with "community" in "political discourse in general," but only in the Program of the German socialist party, I certainly agree. One needs to be able to talk about both the "state" (that which we smash in the revolution), and to contrast it with that which we build in the revolution to expropriate capital and emancipate ourselves from capitalism ("community").
But note the concession you make: Engels does want to replace "state" with "community" "everywhere in the Program" of the anti-capitalist/socialist movement, i.e., in all formulations about what we want to build, as opposed to what we want to smash. Yes, it is precisely there, in our program, in the articulation of our political project and our revolutionary strategy, that we should replace "state" with "community."
Exactly.
Government, if based on an Earth jurisprudence, would be an ally against corporatism. An intrinsic embrace of bioregional governance would be an alternative to central state bureaucracy. Democratic community-based socialism would be the result.
My main problem with Marx is that his overall system is still one of economic determinism regardless of the label applied to the means of production. In a social system based on natural systems principles, the economy would be but one small sector of society, not the end-all of human aspiration and potential. In a truly socialist society, the working class could not become the ruling class, first because class hierarchies couldn't exist in a truly socialist society, and second because the economy isn't actually all that important to anyone other than merchants and empire builders.
As for a process to actually begin moving society in an egalitarian, life-affirming direction that focuses on improving quality of life for all life, see Coalitons of Mutual Endeavor <http://www.COMEweb.org/>