Harry Targ
MAY DAY BRINGS THOUGHTS OF SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVES: And
Thoughts about Moving Ahead
(Originally posted on
May 1, 2009)
Pete Seeger - "L'Internationale"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v85NWc0RIKc
Sketching Today’s Global Political Economy
During the latest phase of monopoly and finance capital (1945- to the present)
enormous changes occurred in the global political economy. First, the United
States emerged as a superpower and in an effort to crush the threat of
socialism around the world committed itself to constructing a “permanent war
economy.” This permanent war economy would create the military capacity to
destroy alternatives to global capitalism, stimulate and maintain a high growth
manufacturing economy, justify an anti-communist crusade to crush the left in
the United States, and co-opt and/or repress working class demands for change.
In addition, the permanent war economy would occasion the perpetuation of
racism and patriarchy in public and private life.
As the years passed corporate rates of profit began to decline as a result of
rising competition among capitalist states, over-production and
under-consumption, an increasing fiscal crisis of the capitalist state, and
rising prices of core natural resources (particularly oil). With a growing
crisis, global corporate and finance capital shifted from investments in
production of goods and services to financial speculation. Thus capitalist
investment steadily shifted to financialization, or the investment in
paper-stocks, bonds, private equity and hedge funds and other forms of
speculative investment. Financial speculation was encouraged by state tax
policies, “free trade” agreements, an expanded international system of
indebtedness, and increased reliance on consumer debt.
Multinational corporations which continued to produce goods and services sought
to overcome declining profit rates. This, they concluded, could only be
achieved by reducing the costs of labor. To overcome the demand for higher real
wages, health and other benefits, and worker rights, manufacturing facilities
were moved from core capitalist states to poor countries where lower wages were
paid. Thus, in wealthier countries millions of relatively high paying jobs were
lost while production of goods increasingly moved to sweatshops in poor
countries. Wealthy capitalist states experienced deindustrialization.
Finally, assisted by technological advances, from computers to new forms of
shipping, financial speculation and deindustrialization fueled the full
flowering of globalization, or the radically increased patterns of cross border
interactions-economic, political, and cultural. Globalization began to
transform the world into one integrated global political economy. (The current
tariff war launched by President Trump does not change the core reality of
global capitalism).
In short, we may speak of a four-fold set of parallel political and economic
developments that have occurred since the end of World War II, in which the
United States has played a leading role: creating a permanent war economy, financialization, deindustrialization,
and globalization.
Should We Be Thinking About Socialism
Today?
A rich and vital set of
images of a socialist future comes down to us from the utopians, anarchists,
and Marxists, the martyrs of the first May Day, and the variety of experiments
with socialism attempted in Asia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Africa, and
the Caribbean. Extracting from the multiple reasons why individuals and
movements chose socialism one reason stands out; that is, that capitalism
historically is and has been a cruel and inhumane system, a system borne and
fueled by slavery, genocide, super exploitation of workers, tactics of division
based on race and gender, and an almost total disregard for the natural
environment that sustains life. Building a permanent war economy,
financialization, deindustrialization, and globalization are merely extensions
of the cruel and heartless pursuit of profit which has been the fundamental
driving force of the capitalist mode of production.
Drawing on the history and the images of a better future coupled with the
brutality of the capitalist era, we might conceive of a 21st century socialist
future that has four main dimensions.
First, we need to create institutions that are created and staffed by the
working classes and serve the interests of the working classes. While scholars
and activists may disagree about what “class” means in today’s complicated
world, it is clear that the vast majority of humankind do not own or control
the means of production, nor do they usually have an instrumental place in
political institutions. Therefore, socialism involves, in the Marxist sense,
the creation of a workers’ state and since most of us are workers (more than 90
percent of the US population for example), a state must be established that
represents and serves the interests of the many, not the few.
Second, our vision of socialism is a society in which the working classes fully
participate in the institutions that shape their lives and in the creation of
the policies that these institutions develop to serve the needs of all the
people.
Third, socialism also implies the creation of public policies that sustain
life. Socialism in this sense is about good jobs, incomes that provide for
human needs, access to health care for all, adequate housing and
transportation, a livable environment, and an end to discrimination and war.
Fourth, socialism is also about the creation of institutions and policies that
maximize human potential. A socialist society provides the intellectual tools
to stimulate creativity, celebrate diversity, and facilitate writing poetry,
singing and dancing, basking in nature’s glow, and living, working, and loving
with others in humanly sustainable communities.
Today we remain terribly far from any of these dimensions of socialism. But
paradoxically, humankind at this point in time has the technological tools to
build a mass movement to create a socialist future. We can communicate
instantaneously with peoples all over the world. We can access information
about the world that challenges the narrow ruling class media frames about the
human condition. We have in the face of brutal war, environmental devastation,
enduring racism, super exploitation of workers everywhere mass movements of
workers, women, people of color, indigenous people, and youth who are demanding
changes. Increasingly public discourse is based upon the realization that our
future will bring either extinction or survival. Socialism, although it is not
labeled as such, represents human survival.
Where do we who believe that socialism offers the best hope for survival stand
at this critical juncture? We are weak. Many of us are older. Some of us have
remained mired in old formulas about change. Nevertheless, we can make a
contribution to building a socialist future. In fact we have a critical role to
play.
We must articulate systematic understandings of the global political economy
and where it came from: permanent war, financialization, deindustrialization,
and globalization. We need to articulate what impacts these processes have had
on class, race, gender, and the environment. In other words, we need to
convince activists that almost all things wrong with the world are connected
and are intimately tied to the development of capitalism as the dominant mode
of production.
We need to take our place in political struggles that demand an expanded role
for workers in political institutions. We need to insist that the working
classes participate in all political decisions.
We need to work on campaigns that could sustain life: jobs, living wages,
single payer health care, climate change etc. Our contribution can include
making connections between the variety of single issues, insisting that
participants in mass movements take cognizance of and work on the other single
issues that constitute the mosaic of problems that require transformation. We must
remember that in the end the basic policies that sustain life require building
socialism. Most struggles, such as those to achieve living wages or a single
payer health care system for example, plant the seeds for building a broader
socialist society. We can incorporate our socialist vision in our debates about
single issues: if we demand a living wage, why not talk about equality for
example?
We need to rearticulate our belief that human beings have a vast potential for
good, for creativity, and given a just society, we all could move away from
classism, racism, and sexism. We could pursue our talents and interests in the
context of a sharing and cooperative society.
By working for institutional incorporation (empowerment) and life-sustaining
and enhancing policies we will be planting the seeds for a socialist society.
“In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the
old.
For the union makes us strong”
From “Solidarity Forever,” Ralph Chaplin lyrics, 1915.
