[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] If We Are in the Death Spiral of Capitalism,

Tue Mar 24 05:55:59 MDT 2009

Can We Start Using the "S" Word?

by Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher, Jr

The Nation

AlterNet (March 06 2009)

Note for New York City Residents: This Friday, The Nation Institute,
Nation Books, and AlterNet are co-hosting a panel discussion, "Meltdown:
The Economic Collapse and a People's Plan for Recovery", with an
all-star cast that includes Joseph Stiglitz, Barbara Ehrenreich, Bill
Fletcher, Jr, Jeff Madrick, Christopher Hayes. Some of them should be
consulting for the Obama administration in place of Tim Geithner, Larry
Summers et al instead of offering us their thoughts for free at 8 pm
this Friday at 2 West 64th Street in New York City at The New York
Society for Ethical Culture. Doors open at 7:15, first come, first served.

If you haven't heard socialists doing much crowing over the fall of
capitalism, it isn't just because there aren't enough of us to make an
audible crowing sound. We, as much as anyone on Wall Street in, say,
2006, appreciate the resilience of American capitalism - its ability to
regroup and find fresh avenues for growth, as it did after the
depressions of 1877, 1893 and the 1930s. In fact, The Communist
Manifesto can be read not only as an indictment of capitalism but as a
breathless paean to its dynamism. And we all know the joke about the
Marxist economist who successfully predicted eleven out of the last
three recessions.

But this time the patient may not get up from the table, no matter how
many times the electroshock paddles of "stimulus" are applied. We seem
to have entered the death spiral where rising unemployment leads to
reduced consumption and hence to greater unemployment. Any schadenfreude
we might be tempted to feel as executives lose their corporate jets and
the erstwhile Masters of the Universe wipe egg from their faces is
quickly dashed by the ever more vivid suffering around us. Food pantries
and shelters can no longer keep up with the demand; millions face old
age without pensions and with their savings gutted; we personally are
consumed with anxiety about the future that awaits our children and
grandchildren.

Besides, it wasn't supposed to happen this way. There was supposed to be
a revolution, remember? The socialist idea, prediction, faith or
whatever was that capitalism would fall when people got tired of trying
to live on the crumbs that fall from the chins of the rich and rose up
in some fashion - preferably inclusively, democratically and
nonviolently - and seized the wealth for themselves. Such a seizure
would have looked nothing like "nationalization" as currently discussed,
in which public wealth flows into the private sector with little or no
change in the elites that control it or in the way the control is
exercised. Our expectation as socialists was that the huge amount of
organizing required for revolutionary change would create an
infrastructure for governance, built out of - among other puzzle pieces
- unions, community organizations, advocacy groups and new organizations
of the unemployed and nouveau poor.

It was also supposed to be a simple matter for the masses to take over
or "seize" the physical infrastructure of industrial capitalism - the
"means of production" - and start putting it to work for the common
good. But much of the means of production has fled overseas - to China,
for example, that bastion of authoritarian capitalism. When we look
around our increasingly shuttered landscape and survey the ruins of
finance capitalism, we see bank upon bank, realty and mortgage
companies, title companies, insurance companies, credit-rating agencies
and call centers, but not enough enterprises making anything we could
actually use, like food or pharmaceuticals. In recent years, capitalism
has become increasingly and almost mystically abstract. Outside
manufacturing and the service sector, fewer and fewer people could
explain to their children what they did for a living. The brightest
students went into finance, not physics. The biggest urban buildings
housed cubicles and computer screens, not assembly lines, laboratories,
studios or classrooms. Even our flagship industry, manufacturing autos,
would require major retooling to make something we could use - not more
cars, let alone more SUVs, but more windmills, buses and trains.

What is most galling, from a socialist perspective, is the dawning
notion that capitalism may be leaving us with less than it found on this
planet, about 400 years ago, when the capitalist mode of production
began to take off. Marx imagined that industrial capitalism had
potentially solved the age-old problem of scarcity and that there was
plenty to go around if only it was equitably distributed. But industrial
capitalism - with some help from industrial communism - has brought
about a level of environmental destruction that threatens our species
along with countless others. The climate is warming, the oil supply is
peaking, the deserts are advancing and the seas are rising and contain
fewer and fewer fish for us to eat. You don't have to be a freaky
doomster to see that extinction may be what's next on the agenda.

In this situation, with both long-term biological and day-to-day
economic survival in doubt, the only relevant question is: do we have a
plan, people? Can we see our way out of this and into a just,
democratic, sustainable (add your own favorite adjectives) future?

Let's just put it right out on the table: we don't. At least we don't
have some blueprint on how to organize society ready to whip out of our
pockets. Lest this sound negligent on our part, we should explain that
socialism was an idea about how to rearrange ownership and distribution
and, to an extent, governance. It assumed that there was a lot worth
owning and distributing; it did not imagine having to come up with an
entirely new and environmentally sustainable way of life. Furthermore,
the history of socialism has been disfigured by too many cadres who had
a perfect plan, if only they could win the next debate, carry out a coup
or get enough people to fall into line behind them.

But we do understand - and this is one of the things that make us
"socialists" - that the absence of a plan, or at least some sort of
deliberative process for figuring out what to do, is no longer an
option. The great promise of capitalism, as first suggested by Adam
Smith and recently enshrined in "market fundamentalism", was that we
didn't have to figure anything out, because the market would take care
of everything for us. Instead of promoting self-reliance, this version
of free enterprise fostered passivity in the face of that inscrutable
deity, the Market. Deregulate, let wages fall to their "natural" level,
turn what remains of government into an endless source of bounty for
contractors - whee! Well, that hasn't worked, and the core idea of
socialism still stands: that people can get together and figure out how
to solve their problems, or at least a lot of their problems,
collectively. That we - not the market or the capitalists or some elite
group of uber-planners - have to control our own destiny.

We admit: we don't even have a plan for the deliberative process that we
know has to replace the anarchic madness of capitalism. Yes, we have
some notion of how it should work, based on our experiences with the
civil rights movement, the women's movement and the labor movement, as
well as with countless cooperative enterprises. This notion centers on
what we still call "participatory democracy", in which all voices are
heard and all people equally respected. But we have no precise models of
participatory democracy on the scale that is currently called for,
involving hundreds of millions, and potentially billions, of
participants at a time.

What might this look like? There are some intriguing models to study,
like the Brazilian Workers Party's famous experiments in developing a
participatory budget in Porto Alegre. Z Magazine founder Michael Albert
developed a detailed approach to mass-based planning that he calls
participatory economics, or "parecon", and one of us (Fletcher, in his
book Solidarity Divided, written with Fernando Gapasin) has proposed a
locally based network of people's assemblies. But all this is
experimental, and we realize that any system for mass democratic
planning will be messy. It will stumble; it will be wrong sometimes; and
there will be a lot of running back to the drawing board.

But as socialists we know the spirit in which this great project of
collective salvation must be undertaken, and that spirit is solidarity.
An antique notion until very recently, it flickered into life again in
the symbolism and energy of the Obama campaign. The Yes We Can! chant
was the slogan of the United Farm Workers movement and went on to be
adopted by various unions and community-based organizations to emphasize
what large numbers of people can accomplish through collective action.
Even Obama's relatively anodyne calls for a new commitment to
volunteerism and community service seem to have inspired a spirit of
"giving back". If the idea of democratic planning, of controlling our
destiny, is the intellectual content of socialism, then solidarity is
its emotional energy source - the moral understanding and the searing
conviction that, however overwhelming the challenges, we are in this
together.

Solidarity, though, is an empty sentiment without organization - ways of
thinking and working together, and of connecting the social movements
that are battling injustice every day. We see a tremendous opportunity
in the bleak fact that millions of Americans have been rendered
redundant by the capitalist economy and are free to dedicate their
considerable talents to creating a more just and sustainable
alternative. But if we are serious about collective survival in the face
of our multiple crises, we have to build organizations, including
explicitly socialist ones, that can mobilize this talent, develop
leadership and advance local struggles. And we have to be serious,
because the capitalist elites who have run things so far have forfeited
all trust or even respect, and we - progressives of all stripes - are
now the only grown-ups around.

_____

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of This Land Is Their
Land: Reports From a Divided Nation (2008).

Bill Fletcher Jr originated the call for founding "Progressives for
Obama". He is the executive editor of Black Commentator, and founder of
the Center for Labor Renewal

http://www.alternet.org/story/130365/

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