An excerpt from Michael Yates's new book

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

If it is not appropriate to lay out a blueprint for a new society, we
can at least do two things. First, we can delineate some important
principles which should guide us in our struggle for an alternative to
capitalism. And second, we can address some important questions that are
bound to arise as we move forward.

Various authors have put forward principles which, in the words of Leo
Panitch and Sam Gindin, will provide a "motivating vision." As we
struggle, we should push our movements toward an embrace of equality,
democracy, the reintegration of work, and ecological balance.

It should be clear from this book that most of the world's people will
have little or no chance to develop their full human capacities as long
as there exists such significant wealth and income inequalities. A
market system simply reinforces the inequalities that already exist, and
the neoliberalism of the past thirty years has made inequality much
worse. Therefore, if we want to build a society in which people are free
and able to develop their capacities, we must unashamedly and
forthrightly insist on equality. There is no convincing reason why each
of us should not receive an aliquot part of the world's resources. Of
course, there may be reasons why a particular person might deserve a bit
more at a particular point in time (a sick person requires more health
care than a healthy one), but in general, equality should be our goal.

Once we make equality a primary goal, many things become clear. First,
there can be no justification for all of the many kinds of not directly
economic inequality that exist. Equality means that women must be the
equals of men, ethnic and racial minorities the equals of majorities,
gays the equals of straights, and so forth. We do not mean that a new
society cannot tolerate differences; indeed, differences ought to be
celebrated. But inequality is not the same as difference; the former is
pernicious, the latter is not.

Second, equality implies that many people in the rich countries will no
longer be able to pursue unbridled consumption. Individual consumption
in the rich countries and among the elites in the poor countries will
have to be reduced. Neoclassical economists like Brad DeLong of the
University of California at Berkeley have suggested that the world is
already "slouching toward utopia." He argues that nearly a billion
people in the world are approaching the standard of living of the U.S.
middle class, and by implication, slowly but surely, over the fabled
"long run," the rest of the world will get to this standard of living as
well. Such a view is untenable. It misses three key points. First, the
well-being of a minority of persons (even a billion people is well under
20 percent of the world's population. What about the rest? It is simply
not believable, given the human misery we have documented in this book,
that DeLong's utopian views will be confirmed.) is fundamentally
dependent on the lack of well-being of everyone else. That is, I enjoy a
decent standard of living because at the base of the world's economies
are large layers of terribly poor and exploited workers. This is simply
the way capitalism works. Second, the world could not stand the resource
and environmental strain of a U.S. middle class lifestyle. For example,
there are way too many cars in the rich countries. Can we imagine what
the environmental cost would be if every Chinese and Indian household
had as many cars as households comparable to the DeLong's have now?
Third, DeLong suggests that it is technological change which accounts
for the rise of a large worldwide middle class. However, there is little
direct correlation between the advance of technology and living
standards. What is necessary for people's living standards to improve is
that they organize collectively to appropriate part of the growing
surplus technological change makes possible to themselves. Surely the
plight of working people around the world today, who often labor in
relatively high-tech workplaces but remain destitute, puts the lie to
DeLong's arguments.

A third consequence of the demand for equality is that a lot of
consumption will have to be satisfied collectively. Transportation,
child care, housing, and much more will have to be collectively
provided, so that can have equal amounts of it or whatever special
amounts they need in excess of the average. An egalitarian world will
not be able to tolerate a proliferation of so many privately-owned goods
and services.

The third point implies that we will not be able to rely on markets and
competitive behavior if we want to create a just and equitable society.
Markets and acquisitive behavior simply recreate what we already have.
And when they are applied to what is a relatively egalitarian society,
as is the case today in China, what we see is the return of capitalism
and its attendant inequality and unfairness.

____________________________________________________________________

A Particularly Pernicious Argument

Neoclassical economists like Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman never tire of
singing the praises of capitalism. According to them, at some point in
the future we will all be middle class. And to take some of the wind
from the sails of those of us who point out that gross wealth and income
inequality show no sign of disappearing, they state that the
circumstances of the poor, at least in the rich countries (and,
according to Krugman and DeLong,, the same is true for "lower
middle-class households in relatively poor countries") is not so bad
after all. Most poor people today in a country such as the United States
have access to consumer goods that even well-off persons could only
dream of one hundred years ago.

I doubt that Krugman and DeLong know much about the lives of poor
persons even in rich countries. If they did, they would know that the
television set owned by the poor family from Pittsburgh referred to in
Chapter Two does not make them better off than an upper middle-class
family in late nineteenth century England, a family which did to have a
television of many other modern conveniences but did have house servants
to do the most onerous work. And Krugman gives the game away when he
says, "On sheer material grounds one would almost surely prefer to be
poor today than upper middle class a century ago [a contention for which
he provides no evidence, surely because there is none]. Social status is
another matter--but let's reserve that topic for another day." Yes,
indeed, it is another matter, but neither Krugman nor DeLong will ever
talk about it. What is more, how can it plausibly be argued that the
upper-middle classes of rich countries did not confer benefits upon
their children that made these children and their children the main
beneficiaries of modern technological change. Today's poor are not going
to be able to do this.

A much better question to ask is whether or not the poor of a century
ago, especially the billions in today's poor countries were better off a
hundred years ago than they were before capitalism invaded their lives.
Here, the answer is unequivocally "no." Centuries of capitalist conquest
and imperialism rendered most of the world's people incapable even of
feeding themselves, something they could do in, say, 1491, the year
before Columbus' infamous voyage. Given what we now know about the
technological achievements of so-called "primitive" peoples, it is clear
that had the Europeans not come along, most of the world's people might
very probably have experienced steadily rising standards of living. So,
in effect, what the DeLong/Krugman argument really amounts to is this:
first, capitalism brings economic and social ruin and death to hundreds
of millions of persons; then after a long downward spiral, struggle
among some of capitalism's victims brings a modicum of material comfort
to a minority of the world's people; and this proves that we are awash
in progress in this best of all possible worlds.

_____________________________________________________________

In our struggles, we must strive for maximum democracy. Of course, we
will need to debate what democracy means, but the top-down revolutionary
parties of the past provide no blueprint for the future. As Panitch and
Gindin put it, "The whole point of a socialist project conceived in
terms of developing individual and collective capacities is to make the
deepening and extension of democracy viable. This entails the most
serious commitment to conceiving and trying to establish the types of
representation and administration that contribute to breaking down the
organizationally reinforced distinctions between managers and workers,
politicians and citizens, leaders and led, and to overcoming the
barriers that separate what we are from what we might become."

An important principle which should underlie any revolutionary movement
is the reintegration of human labor. As long as most people perform work
unworthy of what human beings can do, it is foolish to talk about human
liberation. It must be recognized that the detailed division of labor is
not a technological necessity and must be eliminated as rapidly as
humanly possible. This will mean burdensome work will have to be
mechanized, or if that isn't possible, shared out on an equitable basis.
This will not be easy for many people to accept, including leftist
intellectuals, but it must be done. If we cannot all become skilled
workers, then we cannot become fully human.

Last but hardly least, we must dedicate ourselves to reintegrating
ourselves with our natural environment. The evidence grows more glaring
every day that capitalism is condemning us to an unsustainable natural
world. If we condemn capitalism for nothing else, we can damn it for its
creation of hundreds of ghastly and polluted megalopolises, for its
defilement of our rivers, seas, and forests, for the rampant destruction
of species, and for its corruption of our food supply.

Let us conclude this book by making some observations on three things we
will have to do to achieve a society founded upon the above principles.
First, any new society worthy of the name will have to embrace
comprehensive economic planning. Markets rely upon self-interest to make
them function, and self-interest is inimical to collective well-being
and equality. We know enough from the experiences of the former
socialist economies and, indeed, from the daily operations of large
corporations, to understand that planning is possible. We have the
technology to plan effectively. And we can use the history of the Soviet
Union and its satellites to make sure that our comprehensive planning is
done democratically. We may choose to have as much local control of
production and distribution as is possible, but we cannot choose to
allow the anarchic market to make fundamental production and
distribution decisions.

Second, to realize our dreams, it is difficult to see how we can forever
refuse to attempt to build a worker-based political party. There is no
reason why a political party cannot be built which is both broad-based
and democratic. If we do not have a party, how will we coordinate our
attack on capitalism? How will we build bridges among the many
progressive movements working today? How will we forge a consensus on
principles, strategies, and tactics? How will we combat all of the may
divisive aspects of our present lives?

Finally, capitalism is probably the most resilient and hegemonic system
of production and distribution ever devised, and its supersession by an
egalitarian mode of production is going to take a long time and will
involve a variety or tactics. We have to be willing to organize
patiently, educate patiently, suffer setbacks patiently, and realize
that we will be long dead before capitalism is transcended. Our example
here will show future generations that we practiced the selflessness
that will be the foundation of the new society. We will also have to be
willing to accept that different people in different circumstances will
devise a variety of strategies and tactics to emerge victorious. For
example, we cannot condemn the FARC and the Nepalese Maoists because
they are engaged in violent warfare and employ means of which we might
not approve. In a world in which privilege is routinely defended with
violence and in which any serious dissent is routinely met with
violence, it is hard to imagine that a lot of blood will have to be shed
to give birth to a new world.


--

Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org



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