Socialism, Democracy, and the Division of Labor

Professor Richard Wolff is a prominent, influential intellectual, with a big following on the left. He is an erudite, clear, and passionate speaker and writer. He is well-regarded for his exposition of Marx’s ideas-- a “go to” when the media tolerates a conversation critical of capitalism, one even advocating “socialism.”

For all of that, he does not represent Marx’s thought well, nor does he offer a viable, serious alternative to capitalism.

It is not a question of Wolff’s scholarship or his commitment to justice. It is, instead, a deep-seated, unwavering hostility to the real existing socialism of the twentieth century and the century’s leading Marxist exponents, the Communists. Of course, Wolff is not alone in this prejudice-- and it is a prejudice and not a reasoned conclusion. Since the intense US Red Scare of the 1950s, since the demonization of everything even vaguely linked to Soviet power or Communist and Workers’ Parties, this prejudice has contaminated social, cultural, and political life in this country. Every radical upsurge was forced to or willingly submitted to ABC: Anything But Communism. 

In its place, US leftists embraced a kind of radical democracy: the view that bringing the furniture of formal democracy-- “one person, one vote, full participation, and majority rule,” quoting Wolff-- into every institution, every practice, every activity-- would in due time sweep away the exploitation, the inequalities, the indignities of capitalism. Radical, comprehensive democratic practices would be necessary and substantially sufficient to trigger the march to socialism.

There is evidence that Marx and Engels once also believed that universal suffrage alone (as advocated by the Chartist movement in England) would be an adequate measure on the road to overcoming capitalism. Their practical experience in the 1848 revolutions and the lessons of the Paris Commune dispelled that illusion. They concluded that a revolutionary defeat of the existing order and the replacement of that order with a democracy in the service of the working class would be necessary for moving beyond capitalism. The furniture of formal democracy was sometimes useful, but often unreliable elements in that endeavor. Marx and Engels did not presume that bourgeois democracy would advance those interests or protect them.

But with anti-Communism established as the national religion of the US, generations of US leftists, from the sixties’ SDS to Occupy and DSA, were hostile to Soviet socialism and repelled by Communist ideology. As a result, a “rethought” Marxism became the nourishment for young activists and the sustenance of veteran Cold War radicals. The expansion of certain democratic practices served and serves as the lodestar of these movements.

Professor Wolff rose to prominence in this milieu and it is reflected in his thought. 

A recent brief and commendably clear statement of Wolff’s views on the presumed shortcomings of real, existing twentieth-century socialism appears in the article, Socialism’s Self Criticism and Real Democracy. Originally appearing in City Watch, the piece has achieved wide currency: Economy for All, CounterPunch, LA Progressive, NewsClick, Countercurrents, Eurasia Review, and many others.

Because he takes it as a settled truth that the socialist countries lacked “real democracy,” Wolff poses the following challenge:

A certain irony of history made the absence of real democracy in socialist countries an ongoing target of many socialists in those countries…

Because this time it is many socialists who make the encounter, they ask why modern socialism, a social movement critical of capitalism’s lack of real democracy, would itself merit a parallel criticism. Why have socialist experiments to date produced a self-criticism focused on their inability to create and maintain authentic democratic systems??

Wolff searches for an explanation for this presumed lack of democracy in “socialist experiments.” The search takes him to a common feature of capitalism and socialism (and he sometimes seems to suggest in previous social formations): “The answer lies in the employer-employee relationship.”

The employer-employee relation is indeed often a feature of capitalist and socialist enterprises. Soviet enterprises had managers who presumably hired individuals at state-owned enterprises. No doubt, it could have reflected a hierarchical relationship; it could have reflected a relation of dominance; and, further, it could have reflected the exploitation relationship. But it need not do so simply because of the existence of an employer/employee relationship. That can easily be shown with a simple, mundane hypothetical example:

Faced with a plumbing catastrophe, Jones engages the Smith Plumbing Company. Jones hires Smith’s firm to fix the kitchen sink. Jones employs Smith and company; Smith sends a worker, an employee (but not an employee of Jones), to make the repair. Jones is the employer and Smith’s company is his/her employee. Yet there is no hierarchy, no dominance, nor any exploitation by Jones.

Further, Smith has five employees, who Smith lords over, dominates, and exploits. Here, the employer-employee relationship generates entirely different, negative socially-significant outcomes. 

We have one innocuous, one exploitative employer/employee relationship. 

Why does the employer/employee distinction fail to reveal anything relevant regarding real democracy or the struggle for socialism?

The character of employment, the nominal expression for the employer/employee relationship, is historically determined by the division of labor. Under capitalism, its character is tied to the exploitation relationship. That is, given that ownership of enterprises resides with private individuals or groups, owners establish employer/employee relations as hierarchical, dominating, and exploitative to secure surplus value. Capitalists engage this particular division of labor to secure their ends.

But, presumably, under socialism, with social ownership of enterprises, a non-antagonistic, non-exploitative employer/employee relationship could be established strictly based on the division of labor. The “employer”/manager could be determined by credentials, test-results, past experience, past performance, seniority, or a host of other relevant, merit-based terms. 

Formal democratic procedure is, thus, no unique, magic elixir. In these circumstances, Wolff’s democratic procedure-- election of “employer” -- might well clash with merit and/or efficiency.

That is surely why Marx and Engels placed exploitation and the relations between capitalists (owners of enterprises) and the proletariat (the workers) at the center of their analysis. They attend little specifically to the employer/employee relationship, except when it is shorthand for this exploitation nexus. 

Moreover, Marx and Engels (and many of their successors) believed that a revolution was the most democratic expression of the popular will-- what Wolff might want to call “real democracy.” While they would undoubtedly find setbacks to democracy in the historical trajectory of twentieth-century socialism, they would also have seen the removal of the power of the capitalist class and the end of labor exploitation as marking the most broadly democratic advance since the French revolution. 

Where Wolff sees a surfeit of democracy (“socialism’s self-criticism”), others see a harbinger of a far more democratic future. Wolff says correctly: “Democracy is incompatible with class-divided economic systems.” I would add that democracy is only possible with the elimination of class-divided economic systems. 

Fixated on democratic form, Professor Wolff is led away from the democratic content of Marxist socialism and its realization in real, existing socialism. Further, he fixates on a particular democratic form associated with the capitalist republic that may or may not be the best mechanism for exercising the will or interests of the working class. Every revolutionary generation is faced with a different set of challenges. Nation-states typically suffer or gain from uneven development, as Lenin always stressed. The advance of industrialization, the degree of poverty, the levels of education, external and internal opposition, complex social strata, national conflict, and a host of other factors make the choice of democratic form a test for the first and later generations of revolutionaries.

Western Marxists, often quick to measure all by the democratic forms established by the bourgeois revolutions of past centuries, just as often fail to grasp these complexities. They are willing to forgo pressing the socialist project for the “purity” of so-called “real democracy.”

In Wolff’s case, he chooses to secure this purity by basing his anti-capitalism around the idea of worker-owned cooperatives. To be sure, they could meet the cherished standards of “one person, one vote, full participation, and majority rule” in ways that the ultimate class conflict-- the overthrow of capitalism-- might not. It is possible that cooperatives can and do establish and survive on the margins of the capitalist system, but only a dreamer believes that these worker utopias will ever seriously challenge the behemoth of monopoly capitalism. 

Wolff is not alone in retailing a polite version of Marxism rather than the radical ideas that the working class so desperately needs.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Marxism Without Socialism, Socialism Without Marxism

With an unparalleled, multi-faceted crisis only beginning in the US, one would expect that our deeper thinkers would rise to the occasion and offer bold, creative answers. With a popular revulsion against racism; a raging, death-wielding virus; a two-party electoral catastrophe; and only the first wave of a likely unprecedented economic disaster, one would hope that radical solutions would come forward to meet equally radical challenges. 

Instead, many of the US Left’s most influential thinkers are offering weak tea-- a tepid, shopworn, unimaginative crazy quilt of answers. Since the stultifying anti-Communist purges of the 1950s in the US, labor, peace, racial and women’s equality, and economic justice movements have been shackled to anarchist, liberal and social democratic ideas. As a result, anti-Communist Western “Marxism” only enters the conversation shorn of a commitment to socialism. And socialism is only discussed apart from the basic ideas of Marx and Lenin. 

Perhaps the most popular “Marxist” in the US is Professor Richard D. Wolff. Throughout his career, he has done much to popularize Marx and Marxism. He is the go-to individual whenever the media needs a facile and well-spoken “Marxist.” Unfortunately, popularity and facility are not always a guarantee of clarity or audacity of vision. 

Professor Wolff correctly sees this moment, this bizarre combination of biological, economic, social, and political catastrophe, as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for change. In a recent article (How Workers Can Win the Class War Waged Against Them, Counterpunch, 6-19-2020), Wolff gives a brief, but competent recounting of the key events leading to this moment and the importance of the working class in advancing beyond it.

He answers the crisis with three points: “What then is to be done? First, we need to recognize the class war that is underway and commit to fighting it. On that basis, we must organize a mass base to put real political force behind social democratic policies, parties, and politicians. We need something like the New Deal coalition.” 

A revitalized New Deal coalition? While hardly a new idea, that would require a sea-change in the Democratic Party, a party that demonstrated emphatically in the 2016 and 2020 primary elections that it would thwart social democratic ideas encroaching on its thoroughly corporate capitalist turf. Moreover, the Roosevelt coalition brought together Northern progressives and Southern racists in a last-ditch effort to save capitalism. After capitalism regained strength through the war economy, the corporate, reactionary wings of the coalition slammed the brakes on progressive politics with the Red Inquisition. Wolff knows this. He acknowledges this in his second point:

“Second, we must face a major obstacle. Since 1945, capitalists and their supporters developed arguments and institutions to undo the New Deal and its leftist legacies...  Those positions gave capitalists the financial resources and power—politically, economically, and culturally—repeatedly to outmaneuver and repress labor and the left.” True enough.

“Third, to newly organized versions of a New Deal coalition or of social democracy, we must add a new element...The new element is thus the demand to change enterprises producing goods and services. From hierarchical, capitalist organizations (where owners, boards of directors, etc., occupy the employer position) we need to transition to the altogether different democratic, worker co-op organizations.”

And there you have Wolff’s answer. With a rebuilt New Deal coalition that should magically spring up because the professor wills it, a “demand” for worker cooperatives should be advanced (against whom?) and a transition engineered (how?) to a New Jerusalem. Of course this is a modern iteration of the Fourier, Owen, Cabet utopianism that Marx sarcastically described in the Communist Manifesto: 

Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful ends, and endeavor, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for a new social gospel...They still dream of experimental realization of their social utopias…--pocket editions of the New Jerusalem-- and to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois.

Marx understood that, as an anti-capitalist tactic in his time, cooperative experiments ultimately would have to be financed by capitalists in order to compete against giant enterprises. Imagine how they would need to be capitalized to compete against monopoly transnational corporations in our time! Perhaps Goldman Sachs would fund them?

Lenin believed that cooperatives could help the working class struggle, but not replace socialism as the goal. As his party affirmed in 1910: 

[T]he improvements that can be achieved with the help of the consumers’ societies [cooperatives] can only be very inconsiderable as long as the means of production remain in the hands of the class without whose expropriation socialism cannot be attained… consumers’ societies are not organisations for direct struggle against capital and exist alongside similar bodies organised by other classes, which could give rise to the illusion that these organisations are a means by which the social question may be solved without class struggle and the expropriation of the bourgeoisie.

Clearly Lenin (and Marx and Engels) did not see cooperatives as anything but an illusive challenge to capitalism. They saw the cooperative movement as, at best, a helpful companion to the fight for socialism, at worst, a distraction.

In a curious turn, Wolff argues that “[w]e could describe the transition from capitalist to worker co-op enterprise organizations as a revolution. That would resolve the old debate of reform versus revolution.” So by verbal legislation, the cooperatives become revolutionary and not reformist. And the fight for socialism (unmentioned by Wolff) is removed from the historical stage. Wolff serves “Marxism” without socialism at a time when there is an unprecedented interest in socialism and an unprecedented need for a replacement for capitalism. 

David Harvey is another celebrity “Marxist.” In truth, he has written several insightful, thought-provoking books in the Western Marxist tradition (an academic tradition bereft of praxis). Like Wolff, he is an able expositor, bringing a nourishing taste of Marx (especially political economy) to hungry readers. But like Wolff, his disconnect from popular movements, his self-imposed distance from 20th century Marxism (Communism), cripples his answers to the pending 21st century catastrophe. 

In a recent video (Global Unrest, December 19, 2019) in his Anti-Capitalist Chronicles series, Harvey makes a startling claim: “Capitalism, right now, is too big to fail.” We must manage it, nourish its accumulation process, while tempering the inequality that it generates. In a bizarre, Malthus-like argument, he asserts that, unlike in Marx’s time, “70 or, maybe 80%” of the world would not survive if capitalism were brought down. His comments are worth quoting at length:

We cannot afford any sustained attack upon capital accumulation. So the kind of fantasy that you might have had-- socialist or communist, and so on, or might of had in 1850, which is that well, ok, we can destroy this capitalist system and we can build something entirely different-- that is an impossibility right now. We have to keep the circulation of capital in motion, we have to keep things moving, because if we don’t do that, we are actually stuck with a situation in which, as I’ve said, almost all of us will starve. 

And this means, in general, that capital is too big to fail… We have to actually spend some time propping it up, trying to reorganize it, and maybe shift it around very slowly and over time to a different configuration. But a revolutionary overthrow of this capitalist economic system is not something that is conceivable at the present time. It will not happen, it cannot happen, and we must make sure that it does not happen…

“We must make sure that it does not happen…” In fairness, Professor Harvey may feel differently today, six months later, as capitalism is imploding under its own weight. I had to listen to the video three times before I could grasp that a student of Marx could cast such a dire shadow over the prospect of socialism.

Another paragon of the US left, Noam Chomsky, while professing a personal kind of libertarian-socialism, never embraced Marx. He, along with Edward S. Herman, exposed the deeply undemocratic role of the capitalist media and its commitment to “manufacturing consent,” that is, serving the ruling class by constructing a corporate-friendly shared narrative. In addition, his activism, his self-effacing solidarity has been an example for academic political authenticity, especially his willingness to criticize Israel. But the twists and turns of the late US empire have challenged his critical understanding. 

In late October, Chomsky called for US troops to remain in Syria, a strange deviation from his long-standing opposition to US intervention in the affairs of foreign countries.

More recently, on June 25, Chomsky announced that Donald Trump “is the worst criminal in history, undeniably.” In an interview with Jacobin magazine, he elaborates: “There has never been a figure in political history who was so passionately dedicated to destroying the projects for organized human life on earth in the near future...That is not an exaggeration.”

But, of course, it is an exaggeration. It is one that diminishes the criminality of a Hitler or a Tojo. It trivializes the mindless slaughter and bombing of millions of Vietnamese under Johnson and Nixon, a crime that Chomsky himself opposed vigorously. 

It stains the anti-Trump movement with an in-itself immature, gross magnification of the damage that Trump --this childish, swollen ego, prevaricator-- has perpetrated. It serves no purpose to overplay the real, existing case against Donald Trump. Most importantly, it muddies the important insight that Trump is the product of a long trajectory of rot in US politics. 

Chomsky is adding little clarity to the task facing a left caught off guard by the severity and depth of the 2020 crisis. Instead, he leads people back to the two-party travesty.

It would be mean-spirited to not acknowledge that there are thousands of people motivated by and introduced to left activism by Wolff, Harvey, Chomsky, and a handful of other celebrated left pundits. Undoubtedly, they share a genuine interest in promoting change in the US. But their popular status depends upon their not exceeding the bounds established decades ago by the vile Red-hunters, the thought-police who protect the US people from a robust idea of socialism. There is no need to judge their anti-Communist sincerity. It doesn’t matter whether they believe the Cold War mythology that is foundational to the capitalist world view. The simple fact is that Wolff, Harvey, Chomsky, and others would not enjoy the notoriety they command if they deviated too far from those myths.

Because they are unable to break from these limitations, they are ill-suited to lead in the battle of ideas at this critical time. They cannot imagine a world without capitalism; they cannot envision politics outside of the dreary prospect of two-parties or two-and-a-half parties divided by contrived optics; they find no ideas worth considering in a hundred years of real existing socialism.

At a time when literally millions of young people are searching for a meaningful alternative to capitalism, when they accept that socialism may be the answer to poverty, inequality, and war, it is tragic that those enjoying their trust cannot give life to that vision. 

Success in the coming period will depend on whether the labor movement, the broadly progressive movement, and young activists can remove the blinders forced on them by the ideological ‘iron curtain’ that denies them an understanding of the organizational and programmatic pre-conditions of capturing the capitalist state and replacing it with a peoples’ state. The Cold War fetters must be cast aside to allow the fight for a new world without commodities, market competition, and exploitation. 

For most of the last century and a half, the fertile ideas of Marx, Engels, and Lenin have served as a guiding light for that program. Working people, certainly since the last years of the 19th century, found no better beacon. Nor were they afraid to pronounce socialism as the goal of their struggles.

Isn’t it time to recognize and return to that path?

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Out of the Wilderness

As the Soviet Union and our historical memory of it disappear in the rear-view mirror, ideological clarity about socialism disappears with it. It is not that the Soviet Union had a monopoly on socialist thinking-- there were certainly contributors from within and without the then-existing socialist world who reflected different times, different circumstances, and different traditions-- but the Soviet Union represented a historical constant, an evolving constant that connected the rise of revolutionary Marxism in the early twentieth century to later socialist thought.

One didn’t have to agree with Soviet socialist theory in the late twentieth century, but one had to reckon with it; one had to locate one’s thinking longitudinally and latitudinally from that pole.

Because it served as a frame of reference for other leftist movements-- purported Communist, non-Communist, and anti-Communist leftism-- there was a certain logic to the politics of the global left, best expressed by the division between the Communist, revolutionary left and the social-democratic, reformist left. These two trends captured left politics, with various wrinkles and departures playing a lesser role.

Subsequent to the demise of the Soviet Union, left ideology became unhinged. Social democracy retreated to applying a modest, slightly more human face to capitalist triumphalism, reaching full-expression with the self-described Third Way of Clinton, Blair, and Hollande. Without competition from the historical legacy of revolutionary Marxism (Marxism-Leninism), a rightward swing was inevitable.

Within the Marxist-Leninist movement, frustration and disappointment led to bitter fights, splits, and retreat to what Lenin described so well as “the years of reaction” after the defeat of the 1905 Russian revolution:

All the revolutionary and opposition parties were smashed. Depression, demoralisation, splits, discord, defection, and pornography took the place of politics. There was an ever greater drift towards philosophical idealism; mysticism became the garb of counter-revolutionary sentiments… It is at moments of need that one learns who one’s friends are. “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder

Many academic Marxists-- theorists whose ideas never took root in the working class, but who commanded much influence, nonetheless-- abandoned revolutionary socialism for social criticism, spurred on by a shiny new intellectual toy, postmodernism. The ideology that coalesced around the idea of class was shattered into the politics of individual identities and varied interests. Too often this thinking seeped into left-wing politics, confusing younger comrades, by nature, enthralled with the new.

Other academics believed that they had found a more rigorous foundation for Marxism in the neo-positivism of optimized choice, self-interest, and individualism, the growing intellectual consensus of bourgeois social science. After sterile debates-- often couched in formal language-- proponents concluded that the most interesting, most original ideas in Marxism could not be reduced to statements about isolated individuals maximizing their self-perceived, narrow, immediate interests. So Marxism must be abandoned to preserve the beloved method, a patent absurdity!

In the last decade of the 20th century, a process of soul searching had begun in major sections of the left, especially in the West. Both the centrality of class politics and the legacy goal of constructing socialism receded in the newly minted approaches of the broad left.

In the wake of the 2007-2009 global economic crisis, the idea of class reemerged, albeit in a simplistic, primitive way. In 2011, activists, organizing around the slogan “Occupy!”, introduced the dichotomy of the 1% and the 99% as an expression of the great and growing inequalities of wealth and income in the US. Lacking any grasp of the complexities of class and strata, the slogan “the 99%” was bound to conjure an illusory unity of the supposed have-nots that was naive and unattainable. And the idea of “the 1%” reduced the historically evolved power and rule of the capitalist class to a mere actuarial number.

The retreat from class (as Ellen Meiksins Wood so aptly characterized it) continued unabated. And the retreat from any real advocacy of socialism accompanied it.

Dissatisfaction with a soulless Democratic Party increasingly catering to a more affluent, petty bourgeois base, revived an interest in social democracy in the US. This new interest grew from the campaign of independent Democrat Bernie Sanders who refused to renounce the moniker “socialist.” Young people, in particular, were drawn in great numbers to a ‘legitimized’ socialism, energizing a number of leftist organizations and electoral campaigns.

Ironically, this new social democratic moment occurred in the US when social democracy in Europe-- its traditional address-- was discredited and marginalized.

While acceptance of the word “socialism” in the US was welcome, it was attached to a tepid, incremental socialism deeply embedded in the Democratic Party and virtually indistinguishable from its 1930s New Deal precedent.

Certainly, this leftish turn was welcome, and the freeing of the word “socialism” from its Red Scare chains marked progress.

But so-called democratic “socialism” was not socialism by any measure, but a brand associated with the left-wing of the Democratic Party.

The retreat from the real-- real-existing and real-theoretical-- socialism and the abandonment of the tool of class analysis disables and disarms the left in every way, leaving it vacillating between accommodating capitalism with patchwork reforms and surrendering the socialist project all together until a time off in the distant future.

My own advocacy of socialism has often been met with the patronizing dismissal: “Sure, but tell us how we get there from here.”

But we can’t get anywhere unless we settle on where we want to go. And surely, we must choose our route collectively.

The signs that our left has abandoned the goal of socialism, along with class partisanship abound… unfortunately.

The contradiction-- and the Marxist term is most appropriate-- between surging inflation and shrinking growth has capitalist policy makers in a bind. Their consensus-- and their consensus follows from bourgeois theory-- is that spending must be retarded. The conventional way to do this is through restraining economic activity, exactly what the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate increases are meant to do.

Given that a hard braking of the economy will inevitably produce widespread and deep pain on an already struggling working class, one would think that this would be a powerful, unassailable argument for socialism. Given that this moment in US history presents a seemingly intractable problem for the ruling class with only two possible and disastrous outcomes-- escalating inflation or a deep recession-- that the left would lay the portended disaster at the doorstep of capitalism.

But, no, that is not happening.

Instead, the left is blaming the Federal Reserve or searching vainly for ways to save capitalism from its dilemma.

● A headline in Jacobin-- a journal of “socialism”-- and reposted in Portside states ominously: To Fight Inflation, The Fed is Declaring a War on Workers. No, it is not the Federal Reserve declaring war on workers. The Federal Reserve is a capitalist institution. It is always at war with workers-- that’s its job. It is-- as it always is-- capitalism that is at war with workers. Say it! C-a-p-i-t-a-l-i-s-m…

The article ends by suggesting how capitalism could “forge” an alternative path to reducing inflation-- a brief suggestion unrelated to the dilemma that capitalism finds itself facing, but having the merit of evading the elephant in the room.

● Then there is Michael Hudson’s response to the Federal Reserve's interest-rate action, The Fed’s Austerity Program to Reduce Wages, found on numerous websites from Counterpunch to TeleSur. Hudson commands a huge following, despite having no history or connection with the organized left aside from apparent youthful happenstance with Trotskyism. His long history as a financial industry insider and his loquaciousness seem, somehow, to bolster his popularity.

Again, it is not capitalism that is responsible for the mess facing working people, but “neoliberalism,” “the tunnel vision of corporate managers and the One Percent,” and “Biden’s Cold War.” Hudson punches the explanation up by invoking his two favorite bêtes noires: debt and the rentier-class. But not capitalism.

I have no quarrel with the term “neoliberalism” if it is shorthand for the socio-politico-economic adjustment made by and for capitalism during the 1970s stagflation crisis and after the failure of Keynesian solutions. But today it is used far too often and with zeal to conjure an evil malignancy that attacks otherwise stable and enduring capitalism and imposes onerous conditions on a disgruntled, but somewhat-satisfied-with-capitalism working class.

This is sheer nonsense, of course, but it is the latent assumption behind the obsession with neoliberalism held by most left punditry. If only we could expel neoliberalism… Again, capitalism as an all-determining socio-economic formation gets a free pass.

● Professor Richard Wolff is an impressive expositor of many Marxist ideas. He is the go-to interview when center-left media, like Democracy Now!, wants to hear from Marxism. But Professor Wolf is no Marxist. Nor is he a socialist, though he might challenge this claim. While he is unquestionably dedicated and earnest, it is not to socialism that he is dedicated. Instead, he advocates for a snail's-pace assault on capitalism through small-business-like consumer and producer cooperatives, a persisting utopian strategy of nipping away at the edges of capital. That strategy has no answer for monopoly capitalism, the capitalism of our ages.

Like so many others, Wolff demonstrates an aversion to locating capitalism as the material, formal, efficient, and final cause of today’s crises, preferring to find the reparable flaws in capitalism and to search for a fix.

In his Three Anti-Inflation Alternatives to Raising Interest Rates appearing in Economy for All, In These Times, Popular Resistance, and other places, Wolff signals more interest in finding a way to manage the inflation-stagnation crisis than attacking its cause.

Wolff proposes not one, but three alternatives available to capitalism to escape the clutches of inflation.

First, he proposes a wartime solution: ration cards. One can only imagine how that would be received by a citizenry already divided by masks, vaccines, and lockdowns, not to mention guns. Indeed, this proposal might unwittingly be a stealth spark for further misunderstanding and mindless conflict.

Second, Wolff revives the Nixon-era tactic of the wage-price freeze. Like rationing, a freeze-- including Nixon’s brief wage-price freeze-- freezes injustices as well and merely temporarily bottles up the growing, deep-seated inflationary pressures. In Nixon, Ford, and Carter’s case, those pressures exploded for the rest of the decade to no relief or benefit to working people. Like rationing, price freezes give the impression of action, while leaving the cause of economic distress-- capitalism-- untouched and unspoken.

While not mentioning socialism, Wolff’s third “alternative” invokes its spirit with the possibility of “[t]the socialization of private capitalist enterprises…” But before one can anticipate Marx’s call in The Communist Manifesto for “the abolition of bourgeois property,” Wolff dashes our hopes. He is not calling for the end of “the exploitation of the many by the few” but something else entirely. Instead, he says, let’s borrow from the history of public utility commissions that have failed so miserably to protect consumers from fraud, unjustifiable price increases, and other abuses:

Across the United States, insurance, utility, and other public commissions limit private capitalist enterprises’ freedom to raise their prices in the markets they regulate. Private capitalists in such markets cannot raise prices without the permission of those commissions to do so. A government could establish all sorts of commissions in all sorts of markets with criteria for granting or refusing such permissions. Suppose, for example, that some or all food items were socially (democratically) deemed to be basic goods, such that no producer or seller could raise its prices without approval by a federal food commission. Fighting inflation could be among the approval criteria in this case (just as that is a criterion now for the Fed’s monetary policies).

Is this less utopian, less fabulist, less unrealistic, more promising than the call to abolish bourgeois property? Is championing socialism a more remotely possible solution than establishing “commissions” that would regulate capitalist prices and, accordingly, profits? Wolff simply issues a fanciful wishlist to address an impending disaster.

A survey of the various “solutions” to the contradiction of exploding capitalist prices and slowing economic activity offered by prominent left thinkers shows that they have no solution at all. Moreover, the offered “solutions” all portend to manage capitalism better than its bourgeois managers. They all seek to improve capitalism, to make it friendlier, to tame its “excesses” while guiding it through its internally generated crises.

If today’s left refuses to seriously discuss socialism, deferring it to another time and place, it consigns the people to eternal wandering in the biblical wilderness.

It is not another half-hearted attempt at reformist or utopian change (after centuries of disappointing attempts), but a commitment to revolutionary socialism that will deliver the working class “out of the hands of the [capitalists], and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey…” (with apologies to Exodus 3:8).

The working class deserves better than another thirty years of wandering through the wilderness of misdirection, muddled ideas, and fear of socialism.

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

The Greek Tragedy

They were young, attractive, well-educated, and the darlings of the non-Communist left (and even some Communists!). The leaders of the Greek party, SYRIZA, promised the Greek people an escape from the jaws of the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Commission. Instead, they delivered the humiliating surrender of a people who only a week earlier had demonstrated a clear rejection of accommodation to the EU ruling classes.

The Financial Times headlined: “Greek PM likely to rely on opposition to pass most intrusive programme ever mounted by EU.” (My emphasis)

Regarding the SYRIZA surrender, The Real News commentator, Dmitri Lascaris, declared that “this is one of the worst political debacles in modern European history.”

Journalist and award-winning documentarian, John Pilger acidly commented: “An historic betrayal has consumed Greece. Having set aside the mandate of the Greek electorate, the Syriza government has willfully ignored last week’s landslide “No” vote and secretly agreed [to] a raft of repressive, impoverishing measures in return for a ‘bailout’ that means sinister foreign control and a warning to the world.”

Predictably, the non-revolutionary left scrambled to put an apologetic spin on the embarrassing collapse of the SYRIZA program. Before the draconian deal, the entire spectrum of the US left—from “progressive” Democrats to neo-Marxists and other hyphenated pseudo-Marxists---were swept into a love fest for SYRIZA unlike any since the orgy of Obama-mania. Typical of the post-referendum SYRIZA craze was the statement by the loquacious “Marxist” economist Richard Wolff on Democracy Now!

...And if Syriza can pull that off, the message sent to the comparable groups in every other European country is a staggering reconception of what the future of Europe may look like, where the words "anti-capitalism" become a unifying slogan for people across that continent...

You cannot impose economic structural reforms on a population that has voted 60 percent against them, with the television blaring out propaganda for them, every TV station and every newspaper, virtually, doing that. You just can’t do it. It’s not a question of argument; it’s a question of fact. (7-7-15)

Well, Professor Wolff, the Troika did it, thanks to the capitulation of SYRIZA.

Rather than heap deserved blame on the SYRIZA leadership, it is surely more useful to draw lessons from a fiasco that will have disastrous consequences for the Greek people. Of the many possible lessons, I offer the following three:

1. Social democracy offers no answer to the crisis of capitalism in its many manifestations. Whether it is the untenable strategy of overturning the neo-liberal model of capitalism and returning to the “golden age” of welfare statist policies, the once popular doctrine that “a rising tide raises all boats,” or the contradictory notion of democratizing capitalism, reformist programs that accommodate the bourgeois state and capitalist relations of production will fail to deliver the people from increasing immiseration and degradation. The European experience teaches nothing if not that.

Europeans have understandably lost patience with the evolution of their parliamentary systems toward two poles: tyranny of markets and tyranny of markets with a human face. They are turning instead to “radical” parties of the right and left. SYRIZA is an example of a “radical” party of the left that occupies the untenable space of defying the logic of capitalism while accepting its legitimacy. This is akin to diagnosing cancer while refusing treatment.

Clearly, the newly minted Euro-left parties that hide social democratic accommodation of capitalism behind the mask of “anti-capitalism” promise no more success than SYRIZA.

2. The Greek Communists (KKE) won a moral and ideological victory with their steadfast position that the SYRIZA program would end in disaster. They argued consistently that SYRIZA's attempt to “manage” capitalism would end badly. Speaking before a July 2 rally in Athens, General Secretary Dimitris Koutsoumpas stated emphatically:

•Both the YES and the NO mean the acceptance of a new memorandum of anti-people measures, perhaps the worst that we have seen up to now.

•Both the YES and NO will lead the people to new torments and tragedies. •Both the YES and the No mean anti-worker, anti-people measures. •The referendum is an alibi for a new memorandum-agreement at the expense of the Greek people.

•The KKE calls on the Greek people to reject all the blackmail, to cast its proposal into the ballot box and say:

WE DO NOT CHOOSE ANTI-PEOPLE MEASURES-WE DO NOT CHOOSE A NEW MEMORANDUM-WE CANCEL OUT THE FALSE DILEMMAS.

Nearly 6% of the voters-- a remarkable write-in result-- complied with Koutsoumpas' call.

Not surprisingly, the bourgeois media ignored KKE's campaign against the maneuvers and manipulations of the SYRIZA-ANEL government; one would expect no less from the mouthpieces of the capitalist ruling classes. However, the nearly total disregard of the KKE critique and counter-program by the broad left is indefensible. Apart from a few Leninist organizations, KKE's position was either ignored or subjected to derision. Particularly in the US, intense anti-Communism and ideological conformity led to an almost complete misreading of the Greek tragedy, a development that could have been avoided with a measure of non-sectarian tolerance toward the KKE analysis.

With the collapse of SYRIZA as a left oppositional party, only KKE holds the banner of left resistance. Let's see if our “left” friends will support its struggle.

3. For those of us living in the US, those of us destined to suffer through a tortuous, sensationalized, but ultimately disappointingly predictable Federal electoral campaign, the SYRIZA debacle holds some interesting parallels. As a friend and comrade so astutely points out, the Bernie Sanders campaign is a similar Trojan horse channeling dissatisfaction with capitalist institutions away from truly radical, effective solutions.

Instead of mounting a truly independent campaign outside of the two-party black hole, Sanders chose to run in the Democratic primary while promising neither to bolt the Party nor to withhold support from the primary victor regardless of the outcome. Thus, when he falls in the primaries to Hilary Clinton's corporate coffers-- as every serious commentator acknowledges he will, Sanders will dutifully urge the Party's progressive wing to accept defeat and climb aboard Clinton's juggernaut.

Apologists for this quixotic campaign will argue that Sanders will at least move the campaign conversation leftward. Of course this flies in the face of every primary campaign in any voter’s memory. Every Democratic Party primary season swings leftward in deference to the hard-core base, only to swing even further rightward to accommodate the “centrists” that strategists hope to cultivate. More often than not this strategy backfires; yet it remains an irreproachable axiom in the age of television and the Internet.

Sanders says in his campaign literature: “...the billionaire class is spending huge amounts of money to buy candidates and elections. We are now witnessing the undermining of American democracy and the rapid movement towards oligarchy where a handful of very wealthy families and their Super PACs will control our government.”

Does he think this process will be suspended for the 2016 primary season? Does he not count the Clinton family, its foundation, and its massive fund-raising machine as part of that “oligarchy”?

If Senator Sanders believes his words, he would support a movement away from this trap and not lend his name to legitimizing a corrupted, bankrupt process.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Cooperatives: A Cure for Capitalism?

Co-ops-- cooperative economic enterprises-- have been embraced by significant groups of people at different times and places. Their attraction precedes the heyday of industrial capitalism by offering a means to consolidate small producers and take advantage of economies of scale, shared risk, and common gain.

At the advent of the industrial era, cooperatives were one of many competing solutions offered to ameliorate the plight of the emerging proletariat. Social engineers like Robert Owen experimented with cooperative enterprises and communities.

In the era of mass socialist parties and socialist construction, cooperatives were considered as intermediate steps to make the transition from feudal agrarian production towards socialist relations of production.

Under the capitalist mode of production, co-ops have filled both employment and consumption niches deferred by large scale capitalist production. Economic activities offering insufficient profitability or growth have become targets for cooperative enterprise.

In theory, cooperatives may offer advantages to both workers and consumers. Workers are thought to benefit because the profits that are expropriated by non-workers in the capitalist mode of production are shared by the workforce in a cooperative enterprise (less the present and anticipated operating expenses and investments, of course). Many argue as well that the working conditions are necessarily improved since workplace decisions are arrived at democratically absent the lash associated with the profit-mania of alienated ownership (though little attention is paid to the consequences for productivity and competitiveness against capitalist enterprises).

Consumers are said to benefit when they collectively appropriate the retail functions normally assumed by privately owned, profit-driven outlets. Benefit comes, on this view, by purchasing from wholesale suppliers, collectively meeting the labor requirements of distribution, and enjoying the cost-savings from avoiding a product markup (little attention is paid to limitations on participation dictated by class, race, or gender; the wholesale quantity discounts enjoyed by capitalist chains are also conveniently overlooked).

A case can also be made for the cooperator's dedication to quality, safety, and health- promotion.

In reality, cooperatives in the US are largely indistinguishable from small businesses. Like small private businesses, they employ few people and rely heavily upon “sweat equity” for capitalization. Like other small businesses, US cooperatives operate on the periphery of the US economy, apart from the huge monopoly capitalist firms in manufacturing, service, and finance.

Cooperatives as a Political Program

Since the demise of the Soviet Union and Eastern European socialism, many on the US Left have rummaged for a new approach to the inequalities and injustices that accompany capitalism. Where more than a decade of anti-Communist purges had wrung nearly all vestiges of socialist sympathy from the US psyche, the fall of the ludicrously-named “Iron Curtain” found Leftists further distancing themselves from Marxian socialism. Hastily interning the idea of socialism, they reached for other answers.

It is unclear whether this retreat was actually a search for a different anti-capitalist path or, in reality, grasping an opportunity to say farewell to socialism.

In recent years, several Leftists, “neo-Marxists”, or fallen Marxists have advocated cooperatives as an anti-capitalist program. Leading advocates include the Dollars and Sense collective centered around the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, GEO (Grassroots Economic Organizing), Professor Gar Alperovitz, Labor Notes, United Steel Workers of America, and media Marxist-du-jour, Professor Richard Wolff. Some are organizing around the idea of a “New Economy” or a “Solidarity Economy”, with cooperative enterprises as a centerpiece.

Now coops are not foreign to Marxist theory. After World War I, the Italian government sought to transfer ownership of unused land from big estates, latifondi, on to peasants, especially veterans. As much as 800,000 hectares were thus passed on to poor peasants. Through this process and land seizures, the number of smallholders increased dramatically. Socialists and Communists urged the consolidation of these holdings into collectives, agricultural cooperatives. Certainly more than 150,000 hectares ended up in cooperatives. In those circumstances, the rationale was to increase the productivity, to save the costs, to enhance the efficiency of peasant agriculture in order to compete with the large private estates. Cooperatives were not seen as an alternative to socialism, but a rational step away from near feudal production relations toward socialism, a transitional stage.

Likewise, in the early years of the Soviet Union, Communists sought to improve small-scale peasant production by organizing the countryside into collective farms, producers' cooperatives. They saw cooperative arrangements as rationalizing production and, therefore, freeing millions from the tedium and grind of subsistence farming and integrating them into industrial production. Through mechanization and division of labor, they expected efficiency and productivity to grow dramatically, speeding development and paving the way for socialism.

Again, cooperative enterprises counted as an intermediary for moving towards socialist relations of production. Thus, Marxists see the organization of cooperatives as a historically useful bridge between rural backwardness and socialism.

But modern day proponents of cooperatives see them differently.

“The 'evolutionary reconstructive' approach is a form of change different not only from traditional reform, but different, too, from traditional theories of 'revolution'” says Gar Alperovitz of cooperatives and other elements of the “Solidarity Economy” (America beyond Capitalism, Dollars and Sense, Nov/Dec, 2011). Like most proponents, Alperovitz sees cooperatives as pioneering a “third way” between liberal reformism and socialist revolution. However, a minority of advocates (Bowman and Stone, “How Coops can Change the World”, D&S, Sept/Oct, 1998, for example) see cooperatives as the “best first step towards that goal [of a planned, democratic world economy]. They suggest that the correct road is through “spreading workplace democracy” and on to socialism.

Whether postured as a “third way” or a step towards socialism, it is difficult to get a clear picture of the extent and success of the cooperative movement; it is equally challenging to gather a sense of how it is suppose to function in a capitalist economy.

As for numbers, Alperovitz (“America beyond Capitalism”, D&S, Nov/Dec, 2011) muddies the waters by citing the numbers of “community development corporations” and “non-profits” (Alperovitz, 2011) as somehow strengthening the case for cooperatives. The fact that community development corporations have wrested control of neighborhoods from old-guard community and neighborhood groups and embraced developers and gentrification causes him no distress. Of course “non-profits” count as an even more dubious expression of a solidarity economy. In a city like Pittsburgh, PA, mega-non-profits remove 40% of the assessed property from the tax rolls. These non-profits not only evade taxes, but divide enormous “surpluses” among super-salaried executives. They beggar funding from tax shelter trusts and endowment funds, completing the circle of wink-and-a-nod tax evasion. Of course there are, as well, thousands of “non-profits” that pursue noble goals and operate on a shoestring.

Alperovitz alludes to credit unions as perhaps sharing the spirit of cooperation without noting the steady evolution of these once “third way” institutions towards a capitalist business model. Insurance companies also share this evolution, but they are too far down this path of transition to capitalist enterprise to be credibly cited by Alperovitz.

Alperovitz leaves us with “...11,000 other businesses that are owned in whole or part by their employees.” In this slippery total of whole or partial worker ownership are included ESOPs-- Employee Stock Ownership Programs, a touted solution to the plant closing surge that ripped through the Midwest in the 1980s. Alperovitz pressed vigorously for ESOPs in the steel industry in the 1980s as he does cooperatives today. When asked to sum up their track record, one sympathetic consultant, when pressed, said: “I don't think its been a real good record of success. Some have actually failed...” (Mike Locker, “Democracy in Steel?”, D&S, Sept/Oct, 1998). But we get no firm number for cooperatives in the US.

Another advocacy group for cooperatives gave a more candid picture of the cooperative movement in the Sept/Oct, 1998 issue of Dollars and Sense (“ESOPS and Coops”). A study by the Southern Appalachian Cooperative Organization claimed that there were 154 worker-owned cooperatives employing 6,545 members in the US. In sixty percent of the 154, all workers were owners. Median annual sales were $500,000 and 75 percent had 50 or fewer workers. Twenty-nine percent of the coops were retail, twenty-eight percent were small manufacturing, and twenty-three per cent food related businesses.

Interestingly, the same article claims that there were approximately 11,000 ESOPs in 1988 (source: National Center of Employee Ownership). If we take Alperovitz's 2011 claim seriously, there has been little growth in the ensuing thirteen years of “...businesses that are owned in whole or part by their employees...”.

From this profile, we can conclude that cooperatives in the US are essentially small businesses accounting for a tiny portion of the tens of millions of firms employing less than 50 employees. As such, they compete against the small service sector and niche manufacturing businesses that operate on the periphery of monopoly capitalism. Insofar as they pose a threat to capitalism, they only threaten the other small-scale and family owned businesses that struggle against the tide of price cutting, media marketing, and heavy promotion generated by monopoly chains and low-wage production. They share the lack of capital and leverage with their private sector counterparts. Cooperatives swim against the tide of monopolization and acquisition that have virtually destroyed the mom and pop store and the neighborhood business.

Some of the more clear-headed advocates acknowledge this reality. Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone concede the point: “...Marx argued in 1864 that capitalists' political power would counteract any gains that coops might make. This has proven true! When capitalists have felt threatened by cooperatives, they have conducted economic war against coops by smear campaigns, supplier boycotts, sabotage, and, especially, denying credit to them.” (Bowman and Stone, D&S, Sept/Oct, 1998).

Mondragon

Until recently, cooperators and their advocates had one very large arrow in their quiver.

When pressed on the apparent weakness of cooperatives as an anti-capitalist strategy, they would counter loudly: “Mondragon!”.

This large-scale network of over 100 cooperative enterprises based in Spain seemed to defy the criticisms of the cooperative alternative. With 80,000 or more worker-owners, billions of Euros in assets and 14 billion Euros in revenue last year, Mondragon was the shining star of the cooperative movement, the lodestone for the advocates of the global cooperative program.

But then in October, appliance maker Fagor Electrodomesticos, one of Mondragon's key cooperatives, closed with over a billion dollars of debt and putting 5500 people out of work. Worker-employees lost their savings invested in the firm. Mondragon's largest cooperative, the supermarket group Eroski, also owes creditors 2.5 billion Euros. Because the network is so interlocked, these setbacks pose long term threats to the entire system. As one worker, Juan Antonio Talledo, is quoted in The Wall Street Journal (“Recession Frays Ties at Spain's Co-ops”, December 26, 2013): “This is our Lehman moment.”

It is indeed a “Lehman moment”. And like the Lehman Bros banking meltdown in September of 2008, it makes a Lehman-like point. Large scale enterprises, even of the size of Mondragon and organized on a cooperative basis, are susceptible to the high winds of global capitalist crisis. Cooperative organization offers no immunity to the systemic problems that face all enterprises in a capitalist environment. That is why a cooperative solution cannot constitute a viable alternative to capitalism. That is why an island of worker-ownership surrounded by a violent sea of capitalism is unsustainable.

The failures at Mondragon have sent advocates to the wood shed (see www.geonewsletter.org). Leading theoretical light, Gar Alperovitz, has written in response to the Mondragon blues: “Mondragón's primary emphasis has been on effective and efficient competition. But what do you do when you are up against a global economic recession, on the one hand, or radical cost challenges from Chinese and other low-cost producers, on the other?”

What do you do? Shouldn't someone have thought of that before they offered a road map towards a “third way”? Are “global economic recessions” uncommon? Is low cost production new? And blaming the Chinese is simply unprincipled scapegoating.

Alperovitz goes on: “The question of interest, however - and especially to the degree we begin to face the question of what to do about larger industry - is whether trusting in open market competition is a sufficient answer to the problem of longer-term systemic design.” Clear away the verbal foliage and Alperovitz is admitting that he never anticipated that open market competition would snag Mondragon. Did he think that Fagor sold appliances outside of the market? Did he think that Mondragon somehow got a free pass in global competition?

Of course the big losers are the workers who have lost their jobs and savings. It would be mistaken to blame the earnest organizers or idealistic cooperators who sincerely sought to make a better, more socially just workplace. They gambled on a project and lost. Of course social justice should not be a gamble.

The same sympathy cannot be shown for those continuing to tout cooperatives as an alternative to capitalism. If you want to open small businesses (organized as cooperatives), be my guest! But please don't tell me and others that it's somehow a path beyond capitalism.

Comrades and friends: It's impossible to be anti-capitalist without being pro-socialist!

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com