Socialism for Today. By David M. Kotz. Polity, 2025. xii +192pp.
This is an intriguing book. With the subtitle Escaping the Cruelties of Capitalism and chapters on such topics as ‘Reform of Capitalism’, ‘Lessons from the Past for a Socialist Future’ and ‘From Capitalism to Socialism’, we are promised an enticing read. And perhaps all the more so that its author, though a seasoned academic, tells us it is aimed at a general audience and so tries to avoid technical analysis.
It is hard not to identify with his description of the capitalist society we live in, clear and straightforward as it is. His introduction sums up briefly but highly effectively some of the key ills associated with capitalism (eg, inequality, insecurity, poverty, homelessness, racial prejudice, war), while highlighting the paradox that, while capitalism has brought ‘economic and social advances’, it is at the same time ‘the underlying source of the severe problems encountered by the majority’. His three ‘defining features’ of capitalism – a market economy, wage and salary work and pursuit of profit – also neatly sum up the system we live under. He goes on then to aptly encapsulate the way it works as ‘an economic system in which the wealthy owners of enterprises hire free wage workers to produce products and compete to sell them in the market, with the aim of gaining the maximum possible profit’. And in this system, ‘the labor of the working class is the direct source of the flow of wealth that accrues to the capitalist class and that relationship of exploitation gives rise to a class struggle pitting labor against capital’.
However, while presenting a clear analysis of what capitalism is and how it works overall, David Kotz is not an absolutist, in the sense that he recognises that the particular forms it takes in certain countries and under certain political regimes may make life more or less comfortable or uncomfortable for workers. So, for example, he sees the kind of ‘social democratic’ capitalism practised in various Scandinavian countries as less oppressive than places where dog-eat-dog ‘neo-liberalism’ holds sway and certainly than countries where highly authoritarian regimes rule over the system, such as Russia and China. This does not however prevent him from advocating in all these places a complete change of system which he calls socialism.
What does he mean by socialism? He describes it as a society of ‘democratic participatory planning’ with ‘an economy designed to meet the needs and wants of the population’. He stresses the need for active participation by that population in decision-making while not attempting to lay down a blueprint of how that may work, since – and this seems eminently sensible – at any point of the development of any social system there will be a variety of views on how thing should operate according to the nature of that development and the availability of means available, and so it is likely there will be ‘a decision-making process based on negotiation and compromise’. The difference from what happens now, he makes clear, is that planning and decisions about how we organise our lives will not depend on profit-making or vested interests.
So far so good, but as this book progresses, some significant differences do emerge between certain key aspects of the author’s view of socialism and that of the Socialist Standard. The Socialist Party has, since its foundation in 1904, defined socialism as a marketless, moneyless, stateless, world-wide society of common ownership, economic equality and free access to all goods and services based on the principle of from each according to ability to each according to need. But Kotz isn’t really with us on a good deal of this. For him socialism continues to have money and separate states and some people get more (if not much more) of that money than others depending on the work they do. And there would be ‘public banks’. So given that goods are still bought and sold with money, that is not a free access society. And given that states still exist, there are still governments and leaders, even if democratically elected or appointed. ‘Public ownership and economic planning, along with a democratic state’ is how he describes it.
He does not seem to have considered the possibility of a moneyless, free access society, which has remained alive as a strand of socialist thought since the nineteenth century and could be easily translated into practice given the potential abundance and production and distribution techniques offered by modern technology. He does present an argument for not advocating a single worldwide society, which is that it could not possibly all happen across the world at the same time and therefore each country will have to take its own path to it when it is ready – and indeed in the meantime there would likely be a situation where both socialist and capitalist countries exist side by side from one country to another (‘a mixture of capitalist and socialist systems’, as he puts it).
He does concede that ultimately there could be world socialism but even then he envisages it as ‘a world of socialist states’. One wonders how effective such an argument is in a world where already the means of communication are such that the spread of ideas across the world happens more or less instantly. So once the idea of socialism takes serious hold in some countries – which so far of course does not seem close to happening – is it imaginable that such a revolutionary and humanly beneficial idea will not spread like wildfire across the globe and very rapidly a complete free access society will be able to be established. And what need then will there be for the author’s ultimate vision of ‘a world of socialist states’?
Finally, on the question of how we get from capitalism to socialism which is the subject of the book’s last chapter, we are told – and this is its least satisfactory aspect – that, since it will take a long time, we should not hesitate to try and improve the conditions under capitalism by advocating and campaigning for reforms of various kinds which will at least make life more comfortable for workers in the meantime. To be precise: ‘The socialist movement should engage in reform struggles while promoting the need for moving beyond capitalism.’ Yes, what we have here is the familiar old and discredited ‘in the meantime’ argument – the one that imagines that, if you can spend time trying to bring about what amounts to minor changes in capitalism, this somehow brings us nearer to socialism, whereas in reality its main effect is to distract attention from the fundamental task of superseding capitalism completely.
So, unfortunately, a book that starts with a bang promising a clear vision of a new society it calls socialism to replace the problem-ridden system of capitalism we have now and a clear way through to that society ends with something of a whimper advocating the very reformism it has earlier seemed to reject.
Howard Moss
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