Escape from capitalism? (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 13 February Krishnan Guru-Murthy interviewed Clara Mattei for Channel 4 News to discuss her book Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention which later circulated as a podcast.

In the interview Mattei argued that people are taught that capitalism is an economic system that arose spontaneously out of humans’ supposed natural propensity to barter, but in fact it is of relatively recent historical origin and was brought into being through violence and coercion. The state forced people off the land who, no longer able to meet their needs from directly working land, had no alternative but to work for wages.

Wage-labour, said Mattei, with workers creating more value than what they are paid as wages, is one of the two basic features of capitalism. The other is what she called ‘private investment’ for profit controlled by and for a privileged few; nothing is produced except in the expectation of ending up with more money than invested at the beginning. This means that ‘austerity’, in the sense of restricting how much people as wage-workers get to consume, is a structural feature of capitalism; it is not merely a policy pursued by some governments or the system not working properly but is the basis of the system. The logic of profit required that workers be denied direct access to what they need to live so obliging them to sell their ability to work for money to buy it; the money they are paid was never going to be enough to enable them to live without having to continue working for wages. Austerity, she concluded, was necessary for the system.

Good stuff. Questioned by Guru-Murthy, Mattei agreed that she was in the ‘Marxian tradition’ (she seemed to have deliberately used this adjective rather than Marxist, which is fair enough). What she particularly liked was Marx’s criticism of earlier writers who thought that capitalism was the natural economic system for humans; wage-labour and production for profit were parts of a system constructed by humans and so could be replaced by human action.

How, then, did she propose that people escape from capitalism? As well as being a professor of economics at Tulsa University in Oklahama, she is also the director of its ‘Forum for Real Economic Emancipation’. Here, she explained, she is running a pilot project to test on the ground an alternative. This involved encouraging people to take part in collective decision-making on economic matters, along the lines of ‘participatory budgeting’ practised in a number of cities in Brazil. Under this the local population are involved in deciding how money raised through local taxes should be spent. The implication is that in an alternative society to capitalism all economic decisions would be taken in this way, including in workplaces.

This brings out the ambiguity of the term she used to describe the second basic feature of capitalism, ‘private investment’. This could suggest that what is wrong with investment (as money used to initiate production) is not that it is money invested in production with a view to making more money but that it is controlled by a few at the top rather than democratically by all involved. What she seems to have in mind are factory councils as envisaged at one time by Gramsci (who she name-checks) and assemblies; these should decide democratically how the money obtained from sales should be allocated between individual workers, social amenities and new investment. In other words, a form of what has been called ‘market socialism’.

However, this wouldn’t be an escape from the logic of profit; it would mean that this logic would be applied by workers themselves rather than by their bosses as now. Escaping from capitalism has to mean escape from production for the market and the economic pressures this exerts on whoever actually takes the decisions at workplace level.

Adam Buick

Small is … small

From the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

LETS, or local exchange trading systems, boil down to being localised barter clubs each of which has its own purely digital or recorded currency or credit system. Participants keep their own individual accounts which are, in effect, a register of the credits they earn or spend depending on the goods or services exchanged.

An important difference between this and a conventional money system is that we are not talking about a quid pro quo exchange being effected between participants. In some ways it resembles or aligns with a model of generalised reciprocity which lies at the heart of a socialist society but there are important differences as well.

Timebanks, unlike LETS schemes, do not have their own local currencies as a metric for keeping tabs on transactions. The only metric used is time spent in making a labour contribution. Moreover, and again unlike LETS schemes, the way in which labour time is evaluated is strictly egalitarian. Thus, one hour of labour performed will equal one ‘time credit’, regardless of the type of service performed.

By contrast, in the case of LETS schemes, there is some scope for negotiation over the price of the service or good offered in terms of the local currency (and hence, also, the possibility of a degree of transactional inequality). This makes such an arrangement somewhat closer in certain respects to a conventional market economy than is true of Timebanks.

Both LETS schemes and Timebanks are examples of highly circumscribed, or localised, ‘exchange rings;’ by their very nature they cannot be implemented on the large-scale society-wide basis. What that means, in the case of both LETS schemes and Timebanks, is that they will be rather restricted with regard to the range of activities individuals can engage with these arrangements.

Since they basically involve face-to-face interactions, this suggests that the forms of activities this might entail would be more along the lines of some form of personal service such as repairing someone’s car or computer or tidying up their garden. Obviously, you could not really operate a modern railway system or a power station on the basis of a LETS-type arrangement.

However, this is not to detract from the value of such arrangements as a means of coping within existing capitalist society. There are also certain benefits to be gained in terms of fostering a kind of outlook more conducive to a post-capitalist society. In these cases, the emphasis is very much on forging relationships with other individuals and building local communities. Thus, the underlying logic is radically different from that pertaining to market transactions which are quid pro quo by nature and socially atomising in their consequences.

Workers’ co-ops

Most of the advocates of so-called ‘market socialism’ have seen its basis as the state ownership of the means of production. However, that particular version needs to be distinguished from earlier versions, such as ‘Proudhonian socialism’ or ‘mutualism’, that go back to the 19th century and which have enjoyed somewhat of a revival following the collapse of Russian state capitalism

These versions envisage a role for the market in ‘socialism’ but emphasise, instead of state ownership, various kinds of worker-owned institutions – such as co-operatives and credit unions – as the instruments through which such a system of ‘market socialism’ would operate.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to see quite how they connect with the basic ideas of socialism as a post-capitalist society. The classical or Marxian concept of socialism derived from the observable fact that the process of production was becoming increasingly socialised. There is nothing that is produced today that does not involve, directly or indirectly, the labour inputs of countless numbers of workers right across the world. Hence socialism – at least as it was traditionally conceived – entailed bringing the pattern of ownership of society´s productive resources into line with the character of modern production itself.

In other words, social ownership of the means of production is the logical expression of the social character of production. But social (or common) ownership also, of course, logically entails the complete exclusion of buying and selling since the latter implies private, or sectional, ownership of these means.

It does not matter that the members of a co-operative, say, might own it in common amongst themselves (and hence, to the exclusion of everyone else). It is still a form of sectional ownership. The relationship of such a co-operative to the world around it is, essentially, a capitalist one since it has to purchase its inputs and sell its outputs – not to mention, generate profits in order to effectively compete as well as compensate its workforce in the form of wages. These are all, needless to say, the tell-tale indicators of a capitalist mode of production.

In effect, what the exponents of this form of ‘market socialism’ advocate is the continuation of private, or sectional, ownership of the means of production as far as the wider world is concerned — even if one might grant that, internally, the set-up pertaining to a co-operative, say, may well be a lot more equitable compared to a conventional business and that working for such an institution may likewise be a lot more congenial.

There is also the point to consider that the scope for co-operatives is quite limited in the context of the pattern of capital ownership within the larger capitalist society and may even diminish should the increasing concentration of capital in the hands of a few giant corporations become more pronounced than it already is.

Robin Cox

Routine and complex labour (2007)

Book Review from the December 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

How to make opportunity equal: race and contributive justice. By Paul Gomberg. Blackwell, 2007.

The author of this slimmish book is a black American philosophy professor. He discusses race or racism on nearly every page, at one point making the extreme claim that “Race is class made visible and vicious.” But race is arguably not the main theme of the book. Gomberg believes that “we need to share labor, including the boring work most of us like to avoid, if everyone is to have an opportunity to develop all of their abilities.”

The good news is that the author knows something about socialism and appears to like the prospect: “Imagine a society without markets and their insistence on productive efficiency. Production may be oriented toward meeting needs, not producing whatever can be sold profitably to those with money.” And “We each benefit from the production of needed things because we each receive from the common stock.”

But the bad news is that other passages in the book reveal his confusion about what socialism means: “Market socialism does not abolish this norm [that each advances economically by their own efforts] but shifts the locus of responsibility from the individual to the worker-run firm.” And Gomberg writes about “large working-class socialist and communist parties” in Europe, parties that may be given those labels but actually support some form of capitalism.

Gomberg writes much about what he sees as the division between routine and complex labour, but leaves us unclear about what this distinction is and how it affects society. At one point he says the “division between the organization of labor tasks and the execution of those tasks is the division of society into a class society of laborers and those for whom they labor.” – in short, a society divided into workers and capitalists. But elsewhere he claims that “the division between complex and routine labor is primarily a division within the working class.”

This contradiction can be resolved only if we accept that within capitalism there are two kinds of distinction: between the owners and non-owners of capital and a distinction (perhaps better described as a gradation) between those who supply routine or complex labour, unskilled or skilled, at lower or higher rates of pay, giving orders to other workers or not doing so.

Gomberg’s front cover features a black worker sweeping the stairs. Socialists living in the capitalist world often have to do unpleasant work in oppressive conditions to get money to live. When work is done to meet the needs of people not capital there may be some horse-trading about who does what and for how long. But sociable volunteering, not monetary compulsion, will be the name of the game.

Stan Parker

Cooking the Books: Communism is socialism (2024)

The Cooking the Books Column from the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

To promote his book, Mute Compulsion, A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital, Søren Mau contributed a piece to the publisher’s blog last July in which he asked ‘What should the communism we fight for look like’?

He starts by defining communism (what we call ‘socialism’):

‘The fundamental condition of communism is that the basic conditions of the life of society are brought under democratic control. The state would be abolished, all private companies would be dissolved, and all privately owned means of production—land, buildings, machines, etc.—as well as the wealth of the upper class would be expropriated’.

Like land originally was, they would ‘belong to no one, and thus to everyone’.

He envisages this society being divided into a ‘public sector’ and a ‘private sector’, the latter being productive activities that people carry out in their free time after working in the public sector.

He argues: ‘Everything produced in the public sector would be distributed without the use of money. Housing, healthcare, medicine, education, childcare, public transportation, and meals in public cafeterias would be free of charge and available to all, without control’.

That sounds like socialism. But then: ‘Consumer goods associated with varying individual preferences … could be “purchased” with digital coupons’ which everyone would receive ‘each week to use for services and products available from public warehouses’.

But why? If enough of what people might want can be produced, why could these consumer goods also not be made ‘available to all, without control’? Does he share the popular prejudice that people would otherwise take more than they needed?

It is conceivable that in the very early days there might not be enough of everything to permit this and that some sharing-out system might have be devised (by those around at the time) for any goods in short supply, but this would only be a temporary, stop-gap measure. It wouldn’t need to be a permanent feature of a communist society; free access to consumer goods would be the norm. In any event, to set up and run a coupon system (which would have to include putting a coupon price on consumer goods) wouldn’t be the appropriate answer; in fact it would divert resources that could be used to overcome the problem.

Mau says that technically the coupons wouldn’t be money as they wouldn’t circulate. When, however, it comes to his ‘private sector’ he does envisage money as such:

‘Here, everyone would produce and trade as they wish, keeping within certain democratically determined limits (no production or exchange of humans, weapons, or hard drugs, for example). [They] would also be able to create institutions and technologies that could ease and regulate exchange—for example, creating some sort of money’.

Once again, why? No doubt in communist society people, after having contributed to production ‘according to their ability’, would produce some things in their ‘free time’. They might want to grow vegetables for instance but why would they want to sell them? Why would they not simply give them away without asking for anything in particular in return, as happens even now under capitalism? People would continue too to do things for each other but why would this need to involve money?

Mau seems to realise that he is on shaky ground here as he himself asks ‘But isn’t this private sector merely another form of capitalism?’ His answer is that it wouldn’t be since ‘land, housing, and labor power would never become commodities. Money would exist purely as a means of exchange and couldn’t be used to give certain people power over others’. It wouldn’t be capitalism, but it sounds suspiciously like that contradiction in terms known as ‘market socialism’.

Inadequate as Mau’s contribution is, it at least shows that the idea and implications of a communist (socialist) society are beginning to be discussed seriously as the alternative to capitalism.

How will capitalism end? (2023)

From the April 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

We discuss this with Steve Paxton, author of How Capitalism Ends. History, Ideology and Progress (Zero Books, 2023).

Steve Paxton’s book on Russia, Unlearning Marx. Why the Soviet Failure was a Triumph for Marx, published in 2021, stated that the development of technology under capitalism now allows the production of ‘the material abundance required by a free society’ but that the capitalist system by its very nature does not allow this to take place. His book, reviewed in the Socialist Standard in 2022, did not go so far as to propose any kind of detailed remedy for this but rather referred the reader to his upcoming book about ‘the end of capitalism and what comes next’. That book has now been published and the author has agreed to discuss it with the Socialist Standard.

Socialist Standard: Your book contains great analysis of class in terms of capitalist society being divided into two distinct classes, those who possess sufficient capital not to have to sell their energies to an employer and those – the vast majority – who aren’t in that position and have to seek paid employment to survive. It also presents a very detailed and effective demolition of arguments that insist on the inevitability of the market and deny that effective economic calculation would be possible in a non-monetary society. But to what extent do you see the end of capitalism, which is part of the title of your book, as leading to a non-monetary society, to a society without a market?

Steve Paxton: I don’t see a post-capitalist society as necessarily having no room for markets at all. Just as markets existed before capitalism, they may well exist after capitalism. The important thing is that there will be significant differences from the way markets operate under capitalism. In pre-capitalist societies, you couldn’t consider the markets in labour or commodities as free markets in the way that people do under capitalism. So in a post-capitalist future, we might still see markets, but they’re likely to be very different from those we experience under capitalism. The first thing we need to remember is that socialism makes an important distinction between ownership of the means of production and ownership of personal property. Impersonal property is incompatible with socialism, but nobody’s coming for your toothbrush or your bicycle. So I think there’s always room for some kind of market mechanism, the difference being the ownership pattern underlying that market mechanism. The problem with capitalism isn’t that people buy and sell things. It’s the position we start from, in which the only thing one group of people have to sell is their labour power, and they have to do that to survive. So, I guess it’s important to really define what we mean by capitalism. There are in fact competing ideas of what capitalism means. And that’s the case even within Marx. Sometimes he talks about it as a mode of production, and sometimes he talks about it as an economic structure. But I like to take Marx’s idea of capitalism as an economic structure, the sum of class relations, of production relations. It’s basically who owns what and what ownership means is what defines capitalism. So, under capitalism, the dominant production relation is that most people are proletarians, which means they own only their labour power. They’re free to sell that labour power to any capitalist, but because they own no productive forces, they’re actually unfree, in that they must sell that labour power just to survive. So, if that’s how we view capitalism, then markets in themselves are not intrinsically or inherently capitalist. Capitalism is defined by the concentration of ownership of productive resources in very few hands and the consequences that flow from that. It’s true that, once you have a market, you have the potential that some people are just better at buying and selling. But it also has to be said that most of the inequality of ownership under capitalism doesn’t come from the particular skills of entrepreneurs. It comes from people starting with a massive fortune in the first place and starting with lots of resources. So if you remove those things, then the ability to get rich from a market becomes much more limited. At the same time, there’s no hard and fast rule that everyone’s income must be equal.

SS: So how would you see a more equal society with money and a market working?

SP: Under socialism, you might have a situation where, for example, there’s basic income, and on top of that, maybe people that do particularly unpleasant work, particularly hard work, work that no one else wants to do, or maybe work that requires a particular set of skills, will be rewarded more. But these differences would, again, be differences in income, not wealth. And they would be very, very limited compared to today’s great inequalities. Providing income inequality, is structurally limited, it needn’t in itself be a bad thing. Then the person who chooses to work 20 hours a week rather than 40 shouldn’t mind not getting some of the benefits. That’s the choice that people can make under socialism. It’s not a choice they can make under capitalism. So I think that, while it’s possible that we might be able to work out a way to get by without markets at all, just the existence of markets doesn’t necessarily derail the socialist project.

SS: What would be your objections to a moneyless, wageless society as opposed to the kind of thing that you’ve described? After all, Marx did talk about socialism as the abolition of the wages system.

SP: I don’t really have an objection to it, but I think it’s also something that isn’t a necessary component of moving beyond capitalism. It might be something that we need to go through a few more stages before we arrive at. It might be that, once we’ve got rid of all the stuff that is actually the real problem with capitalism, then we realize that money wasn’t really the problem in the first place. When people talk about getting rid of money and using labour vouchers or tokens, that’s just money, isn’t it? That’s just calling money something else. Maybe we should have different currencies. So you get a basic income in one money that you can spend on basic necessities. And then, if you want to contribute more, particularly if you’re prepared to do an unpleasant job or work longer hours, then you get a different currency that you can spend on luxuries. Anyway, we need to focus on getting rid of the real problems of capitalism, which are the fact that a small number of people own all the productive resources and most people own no productive resources.

SS: Just to clarify that we definitely wouldn’t suggest labour vouchers or tokens as a replacement for money. What we suggest is a society of free access to all goods and services, where you wouldn’t need labour vouchers or tokens. When Marx talked about labour vouchers, he was talking about the possibility of using them at an earlier stage of productive development. We would argue that we are now well past that stage and that enough can be produced now to satisfy everyone’s needs the world over, if goods and services are produced and distributed rationally. But to move to something a little bit different, at one point in your book you refer to a socialist government, and you seem to be favourable to the kind of political position of the Labour Party under Corbyn. But can there be such a thing as a socialist government given that in, in Marxian terms, governments are the executive committee of the capitalist class, and therefore a socialist society should involve the abolition of government over people as we know it and its replacement by the cooperative administration of things?

Steve Paxton

SP: I do write from a Marxist point of view, but I tend not to describe myself as a Marxist because, when you do that, people expect you to defend everything Marx said or wrote. On the other hand, I think you can see Marx’s ideas as a coherent whole while not necessarily defending everything he had to say. But I’m not an anarchist and I guess I’m looking a bit more short-term. I’m looking at what our next horizons should be. There’s very short term, for example not having a Tory government, saving the NHS and things like that. And there’s very long term and the ideal society that might be moneyless and have no government. But there’s a big chunk there in between, which is what we should be aiming for. On governments, I do agree that they’re the committee of the ruling class. But that’s under capitalism. Governments under socialism don’t have to be of that kind; they can represent a different interest. They can represent the people rather than the ruling class. In terms of leadership style and some of his policy positions, Corbyn was closer to my position than any other Labour leader since I was in short trousers. Labour as it stands, after a hundred or something years, isn’t really representing the working people. We need a socialist party. I know you would say there is one, the Socialist Party of Great Britain. But we need a socialist party with mainstream political clout. We need socialist MPs, but those MPs who would describe themselves as socialist are unfortunately trapped inside the Labour Party. First of all, we need to get rid of the first past the post electoral system. But there’s also plenty to do outside Parliament in terms of trade unions and industrial relations and worker organization.

SS: What you seem to be saying is that, if we look too far into the future, that takes the focus away from what’s happening right now and the possibility of immediate improvements in workers’ conditions. The Socialist Party would tend to argue more or less the opposite. That is, if you focus on short-term reforms, slight changes to the system, any of which could be easily withdrawn anyway, then you take the focus away from the longer term from the possibility of a really equal society, which we could have if enough people wanted it and were prepared to work towards it. In other words, if you put off the demand for socialism, aren’t you putting off socialism and, in that light can’t reforms actually be the enemy of revolution?

SP: I’m not really advocating that we should focus on short-term gains. I’m saying that we shouldn’t reject and we shouldn’t criticize those who do focus on short-term gains. If they’re fighting for a better minimum wage, I’m not their enemy and they’re not mine. We’ve got plenty of enemies, without picking on people who want basically the same as us but are maybe less ambitious. So, while I think our focus should be on a transformation of society away from capitalism into socialism, I also think that we’re not going to get there in one fell swoop, and so the way has to be incremental, via small gains, but gains that make a transformative difference rather than those that just make capitalism a bit less unpalatable. There’s nothing that says that we must have some kind of sudden or dramatic change to get from capitalism to socialism. It’s most likely to happen by gradual and peaceful means. It’s where we end up that’s the most important thing, not how many steps it takes to get there. People are suffering under capitalism, so obviously the sooner the better, but also it needs to be something that’s sustainable. But we shouldn’t underestimate the positive role that the state could play. It’s happened before – with the NHS for example. No one took any violent action to seize any hospitals. The NHS was the obvious answer to people’s healthcare needs. So the state can offer a better alternative than the private sector. And that can apply to education and housing too.

SS: We’d absolutely agree with you that violent conflict couldn’t be on the agenda to achieve socialism, but in response to your incremental focus, how do you see democratic political action by a majority at the ballot box to bring in the kind of system of free access to goods and services that we advocate, even if you think that is a long way off? Given that we already live in a post-scarcity world, where we can produce everything we need, isn’t it just a question of planning so that it can be made available in a freely accessible way once a majority at the ballot box votes for representatives who are in favour of that?

SP: One problem is that we can’t have socialism when there is the number of socialists that we have now. We need to have more socialists. But the problem with that is that many of the people that see themselves as socialists spend all their time insulting the kind of people that are closest to us on the ideological spectrum and berating them for not yet being socialists. What we need to do is to actually convince them to be socialists. And then, as I’ve said before, an obstacle is the lack of proportional representation. If we had a democratic electoral system where everybody’s vote counted for the same amount, we could end up with a socialist party with, you know, maybe 20 or 30 MPs. And that would be enough to say we’re not coming into coalition with anyone unless we get these red lines. We want this minimum wage, for example. That doesn’t drive us past capitalism, but it moves us in the right direction. It’s a process of bringing people on a journey. Look at the huge amount the first post-war Labour government did, and then even in the sixties when Wilson got in, they pushed again. So many things were nationalized. But they made the mistake of not introducing a democratic electoral system. If they had, Thatcher would never have become Prime Minister and all these things that we gained in the post-war period wouldn’t have been wiped out over the last 30 or 40 years.

SS: We wouldn’t see proportional representation within capitalism as constituting any kind of step towards socialism. Some countries do of course already have proportional representation, but would you say that this has moved them any closer to socialism?

SP: Well, you could also look at somewhere like New Zealand, which has got proportional representation and is much better off for it. The Scandinavian countries too. The usual experience of proportional representation is that those countries that have it end up being more progressive and less in thrall to the interests of global capital. Of course, there are still capitalist governments in all of those countries, but they are generally less right-wing than the governments in places like Britain and America. Having said that, I agree that proportional representation doesn’t deliver anything on its own, but without it we’re not really going anywhere.

SS: You may have noticed that, in recent years, there’ve been lots of what you might broadly call anti-capitalist books published and some of these at least are arguing the same kind of things as the Socialist Party. They’re arguing that the only way to get rid of capitalism is to get rid of the market, money and the wages system. You yourself touch on this in your book, when you refer to Marx’s description of socialism as a society based on from each according to ability to each according to need. So do you think there’s a possibility that in the future you might move to this kind of position yourself, that, rather than arguing that things need to get a bit better gradually, you might join us in asking for the whole pie now?

SP: That is what I think we should be asking for, but, realistically, are we going to get it? There are two things we have to have: a vision of where we want to get to, and a vision of how we get there. I think you look a bit further into the future than I do. And I think that, if we can get rid of capitalism as I’ve defined it – the means of production owned by a tiny number of private individuals – then we’re moving towards some kind of system of common ownership. That’s my focus, and ultimately I think the marketless, moneyless society is one of the ways in which we protect that. But while it’s good that people should try to work out recipes for the future society, you have to acknowledge that, by the time we get there, some of those assumptions that those people are making aren’t going to be true anymore. I think it’s still a worthwhile project to try and envisage the kind of details of exactly how the future society would operate, as people like Michael Albert and Ben Burgis are doing. But I also think that we have to accept that, if you tried to do that in 1820, you’d have a horse pulling a cart instead of an engine. In other words we always have to adapt our ideas as we go along. But once we have the big change – that is in the ownership of the means of production – once that’s held in common, then we can look at all the other ideas – maybe to labour tokens or to a moneyless society with the market completely eradicated and free access. But those arguments weren’t really in the scope of my book.

SS: We don’t actually go in for, as Marx put it, ‘recipes for the cookshops of the future’ either, but we do try to outline a broad structure for the future society we advocate. So we’d agree that, when we get the society we’re aiming for, the particular level of development and technology reached at the time will determine the exact details of production, distribution and social organization. Does that seem reasonable to you?

SP: Yes. For example, we now have this situation where producing more copies of something doesn’t have an additional cost. If you’re going to buy more than one copy of my book on Kindle, it doesn’t cost anything. That server is running already. The electricity is being used, the storage space is there, the bandwidth is there. Whether one person or a thousand people buy it tomorrow, it doesn’t cost the printer, the publisher, the retailer any more. And that kind of thing didn’t really exist until very recently. Many of the things we would need would have zero marginal cost per unit sold. And that makes a massive difference in how an economy could work and why people choose one thing over another, a massive difference that, even 50 years ago, people could probably not have envisaged.

(Interview by Howard Moss.)

Czechoslovakia ten years ago (1978)

From the August 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Czechoslovakia, as its unwieldy name suggests, was one of the artificial “nation-States” set up after the First World War, containing within its borders not only people whose mother-tongue was Czech or Slovak but considerable minorities speaking Hungarian, Polish, German and Ukrainian. These last two minorities provided the excuse, before the war, for parts of Czechoslovakia to be annexed by Germany (since restored) and, after the war, for parts to be annexed by Russia (where they still are today).

A mere glance at the map of Europe shows why, for strategic reasons, Czechoslovakia could never hope to pursue an independent foreign policy for any length of time. One end of the country points into the middle of Germany, the other (even more prominently on pre-war maps) into Russia. The victorious powers in the First World War who had set up Czechoslovakia in 1919 agreed twenty years later, at Munich, that it should form part of the German sphere of influence. After the war, at Yalta, it was agreed that it should be transferred to the Russian sphere, where it has been since the Stalinist coup d’etat in 1948, a position which was dramatically re-asserted ten years ago this month when Russian tanks rolled into the streets of Prague.

The Russian re-invasion of Czechoslovakia was motivated mainly by strategic considerations, the fear that the political changes begun by the Dubcek government would get out of hand and lead to Czechoslovakia trying to break away from the Russian empire.

Dubcek had succeeded Novotny, a hard-line Stalinist, as the leader of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in January 1968 as part of a process in which the “liberals” in the Party triumphed over the “conservatives”. The sort of state capitalist regime which exists in Russia and East Europe is based on a State monopoly over the means of production, but where the State is itself monopolised by a privileged group who thus own and control the means of production just as much as the more traditional capitalist class of Western countries.

This state capitalist ruling class monopolises the means of production as a class, but within it there are various groups with their own sectional interests such as the military, Party and managerial bureaucracies. In the classic Stalinist model, power is firmly in the hands of the Party bureaucracy — people as often as not originally from working-class backgrounds, who are basically politicians without technical qualifications; they make policy and it is to them that the military and managerial bureaucracies are subordinated. But because factory managers and other technocrats are also generally obliged to be members of the Party, conflicts of sectional interest within the state capitalist ruling class express themselves as conflicts inside the Party.

In Czechoslovakia the election of Dubcek as Party leader, and the “Prague Spring” which followed with the relaxation of censorship and talk of “socialism ( = state capitalism) with a human face”, represented the victory of the managerial section of the ruling class over the more strictly party-political section. The overcentralized state capitalism of the Stalin era, in which all decisions were taken centrally by the Party bureaucracy and industrial managers had merely to execute them was beginning to become inefficient even in Russia itself and various experiments in decentralization and so-called “market socialism” (an absurd contradiction in terms since socialism necessarily involves the disappearance of the market) were made. It was the implementation of such measures that in Czechoslovakia gave the managerial bureaucracy a certain degree of independence and allowed them to mount a challenge against and eventually oust the Stalinist old guard.

The Dubcek period in Czechoslovakia, then, represented the coming to power of a different section of the capitalist ruling class: the managers as opposed to the politicians. Some people were quite frank that this was what it was all about. The present writer recalls a Czech tourist at one of our meetings in Hyde Park in the summer of 1968 who somewhat arrogantly declared that Dubcek represented the end of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” by which he meant the end of “stupid workers”, i.e. political leaders from a working-class background) giving orders to more educated managers and technocrats like his father.

The programme of the triumphant Dubcek wing of the Czechoslovak Communist Party was essentially an extension of “market socialism”. This would have involved a further relaxation of centralized planning and more competition between enterprises for sales and profits. Enterprises were to be given the right to hire and fire, so turning the “hidden unemployment” (over manning) associated with the old system into an open reserve army of labour. There was even talk of enterprises being allowed to raise money by issuing bonds which would be traded centrally on a revived stock exchange! Ota Šik, the theorist of all this, now recognises, in exile, that the old system was a form of State capitalism but fails to realise that his “market socialism” was even more recognisably a form of capitalism.

Together with this economic liberalisation was to go a political liberalisation. Censorship in the newspapers, on the radio and television and in the arts was relaxed; the powers of the police were reduced. Here, as opposed to the economic reforms, was something from which the working class might have benefited. For freedom of discussion is the ideal, even indispensable, condition for the development of socialist ideas since it is only out of a full and frank discussion of their experiences under capitalism that the working class can come to acquire the majority socialist understanding necessary before capitalism can be replaced by Socialism. In the spring of 1968 a small, tentative step was taken in Czechoslovakia in a direction which might have led to the limited political democracy such as exists in Western countries, with its relative freedom of speech, more than one political party, collective bargaining between trade unions and employers, etc.

It was precisely a fear that such a system might eventually lead strategically-important Czechoslovakia out of the Soviet bloc that led the Russian ruling class to decide to send its troops in to overthrow Dubcek and install the puppet regime under Husak which is still in power today. The Dubcek regime itself had never suggested leaving the Soviet bloc (they had learnt the lesson of Czechoslovakia’s brief history: that it can’t have an independent foreign policy but must be dominated either by Germany or by Russia), but, as far as the Russian ruling class were concerned, this was no guarantee as to what, with the advent of a measure of political democracy, some future Czech government might try to do.

Socialists are naturally concerned about whether or not political democracy exists under capitalism. For the existence of some political democracy, limited and distorted though it must be by the class structure of capitalism, is central to our case for the peaceful propagation of socialist ideas culminating in the peaceful establishment of Socialism by democratic political action based on majority socialist understanding.

The Dubcek regime represented a section of the state capitalist ruling class and would have proved to be just as anti-working class as the previous Stalinist governments of Czechoslovakia. So no tears needed to be shed for it. But this split in the ruling class was beginning to allow workers in Czechoslovakia (just as had happened in Western Europe in the 19th century) a certain freedom to manoeuvre, both on the political and industrial fields and the continuation of this process might have led to a situation in which the open propagation of socialist ideas in Czechoslovakia became possible.

Adam Buick

Letter: What are the means of production? (2021)

Letter to the Editors from the December 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors

The review of my book Socialism for Soloists (October) is — overall — informative and fair. It is correct that the socialism the book defends allows people the freedom to buy and sell stuff and to agree to work for others at a wage.

I don’t think it is correct to say that soloists are libertarians. Libertarians are wedded to an expansive idea of appropriation and are indifferent to the consequences of property accumulation (whether by ‘initial appropriation’ or by transactional exchanges). I would rather say that soloists are liberals in the John-Stuart-Mill sense: there are limits to what governments may justly do, and people are entitled to be free of unconsented-to restraints except where others would be wronged.

Of course, on my account, ‘market socialism’ is not an oxymoron. Capitalism is a system in which the means of production are privately owned, and those who are not capitalists are faced with the choice of accepting a wage, begging, or starving.

In a socialist society, the means of production are the joint property of everyone, but other things may or may not be privately owned. In a liberal socialist society, things other than the means of production may become private property —my bicycle, my penknife, my laptop, for example.

The review characterizes my definition of the means of production as ‘peculiar.’ I would rather say that it is a definition implicit in the socialist tradition (I attach a paper defending it). Socialists who object to the very idea of private property need not take care to define what the term means, but (as I argue in the paper) other socialists should.

Bill Edmundson

Reply:

We agree. Terms, especially in this context ‘the means of production’ need to be carefully defined. We have read your article on the subject (which was also the basis of one of the chapters in your book) and still say that a definition which excludes land and includes banks and online retailers is peculiar.

Land in the broad sense of natural resources is clearly an essential element in production. Production means humans transforming through their work materials that come from or originally came from nature into something they use (or ‘wealth’). Neither banking nor selling do this and so can’t be included in the category ‘means of production.’ Neither of them create any new wealth.

In your paper you criticise various definitions of the term which you characterise as Marxist. Marx himself, in his published works, was very careful to define the terms he used. In chapter 7 of Capital he examined ‘the labour process or the production of use-values’ and concluded:

‘If we examine the whole process from the point of view of its result, the product, it is plain that both the instruments and the subject of labour, are means of production, and that the labour itself is productive labour.’ (The ‘subject of labour’ being materials that originally came from nature and which humans using instruments fashion into ‘use-values’.)

This is why our Declaration of Principles (drawn up in 1904) defines socialism as ‘a system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community’.

It may seem redundant to refer to both ‘means’ and ‘instruments’ of production since instruments are also means of production, but it brings out that it is not only instruments that are to be commonly owned but also the subject of work, ie, natural resources.

This definition applies not just to capitalism but to any human society, including the earliest forms. An instrument of production is anything humans use to transform materials from nature into something they use and so, yes, does include simple tools.

Socialism doesn’t mean the common ownership of all instruments of production, not of people’s hand tools and garden implements (still less of their personal possessions), but only of those instruments that are, and have to be, socially (or, as you put it, severally) operated – large-scale plant and machinery, transport, energy, communications – and which are the means by which present-day society lives. What is to be commonly owned are those means which under capitalism function as ‘capital’, ie, are used not simply to produce more wealth but to produce more with a view to profit.

Socialism is not so much the common ownership of the socially operated means of production as their non-ownership; they won’t belong to anyone but will simply be there to be used. Common ownership is not the same as state ownership since the state is just as much a sectional (and so ‘private’) owner as a corporation. Common ownership precludes buying and selling as these are transactions between separate owners. In socialism not just the socially operated means of production but also what they are used to produce will be commonly owned; the only question then is how to distribute this, not how to sell it.

Your definition starts at the wrong end by deciding what should be commonly owned and then defining only these as ‘means of production’, excluding any which you consider should remain privately owned. That your definition still envisages the continuation of a capitalist economy, albeit in a rather unrealistic collectivised form, is shown by your inclusion of banks and online retailing as means of production. These can only be considered as necessary to production where there is production for the market even though they are not necessary for production as such. Also, they could only be state or co-operatively owned, neither of which is common ownership by and in the interest of the whole community.

Editors

Philosophy for reformists (2021)

Book Review from the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism for Soloists. By William Edmundson. (Polity. 2021)

This is an attempt to present a case for socialism – as a society without private ownership of means of production – on the basis of classic liberal-democratic political philosophy. Edmundson’s ‘soloists’ are individualists, what in the US are called ‘libertarians’, people who believe that individuals have natural rights that no government should override. He imagines them in a ‘state of nature’ (as this philosophical tradition does) and sets out to convince them that it would be logical for them to sign up to a ‘social contract’ which would exclude private ownership of means of production. His basic argument – which is valid – is that such private ownership is incompatible with political equality and democracy as it gives the owners more say in decision-making than non-owners.

However, he has a peculiar definition of ‘means of production’. Normally this means the materials (which will all have originally come from nature) and instruments (buildings and machinery) used to produce wealth. His definition is that they are production facilities that can neither be ‘commons’ to which everyone has free access nor be operated by separate individuals. Besides large-scale manufacturing plants this includes transport, utility and communications networks and also online sales platforms and banks.

So he ends up, if by a different route, advocating what the Labour Party used to years ago, namely, the public ownership of ‘the means of production, distribution and exchange’. He writes that ‘one common misconception about socialism is that it dispenses altogether with markets.’ This is wrong on two counts. It is not a misconception and, unfortunately, is not that common. His ideal society still involves the continuation of production for sale, working for wages, and unequal money incomes. The blurb on the back calls it ‘market socialism’ but that’s a contradiction in terms. In fact, it would still be capitalism.

Unlike many academic books, this one is easy to read and might perhaps be of some use to philosophy and politics students to refute some of the arguments in favour of private ownership that they will be taught.

Adam Buick

Blogger's Note:

The author of the book, Bill Edmundson, replied to the review of his book in the December 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Reformist essays (2021)

Book Review from the April 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard 

An Inheritance for Our Times. Principles and Politics of Democratic Socialism. Edited by Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J. Thompson. OR Books, 2020. 412pp.

This book announces itself as ‘a reader that includes essays in the form of both personal accounts and intellectual arguments from activists and theorists advocating a democratic socialist outlook’. The essays, 30 in number, are written mainly by American academics, but the language used by most is not overly academic making it a fairly readable collection and with a political range far wider than just the USA.

The editors’ introduction sets the scene trenchantly: ‘The mass-consumption society erected over the course of the twentieth century for the purpose of generating never-ending surplus for the few and political quiescence for the many has metastasised into a global form of life’. The society they are talking about here of course is capitalism and most of the contributions that follow are directed at proposing ways in which capitalism can be improved on or replaced by something better, usually referred to as socialism.

The trouble is, as we all know, there are many ‘versions’ of socialism and most of the contributors, however well intentioned, propose ‘socialisms’ that most Socialist Standard readers would not recognise as the society of common ownership and democratic organisation that the Socialist Party has put forward over the 117 years of its existence. What the essays mainly argue for is a variety of more or less radical re-shapings of capitalism but not its abolition with the establishment of a moneyless, marketless system of production and distribution based on ‘from each according to ability to each according to need’. So though framed in terms of, for example, the replacement of ‘production for profit with production for social need’, when looked at closely what is usually envisioned is a ‘fairer’, more ‘equal’ form of the money system.

So while in his essay ‘Essential Socialism’, Fernando Gasparin argues correctly that struggles over reforms are, in Rosa Luxemburg’s words, ‘a labour of Sisyphus’ and that ‘each reform successfully rolled up the hill can roll back down again’, this does not prevent him arguing that ‘socialism needs a constitutional provision providing for public democratic control of banks and financial institutions’. Nor is it uncommon in the collection to find references to socialism coexisting with the market, as in the chapter by David Schweickart entitled ‘Marxist Market Socialism’. In another chapter, ‘Socialism and the Democratisation of Finance’ by Fred Block, there is reference to ‘a democratised financial system’ as part of the ‘regulatory apparatus of socialism’. Most of the contributors find it difficult to envision the stateless society that socialism must be. For Lester Spence, for example, in his essay entitled ‘The Democratic Socialist Imaginary’, ‘democratic socialism’ is defined as ‘a state form that combines public ownership of the means of production with a form of government based on popular elections and popular means of creating government policy and state institutions’. Elsewhere the currently popular concept of a guaranteed basic income figures strongly, as do other ‘socialist’ ideas such as ‘worker cooperatives’ and the ‘model’ of Scandinavian social democracy.

On the positive side, there seems at least to be general agreement among contributors that what happened in Russia in 1917 and developed from that was a bogus, or at least distorted, version of socialism (‘state domination, a hierarchically organised command economy, ruthless industrialization, antidemocratic political institutions’, as one writer puts it) and that those groups on the Left who still see some virtue in Lenin’s Bolshevik takeover and put the failure of the Soviet system down to Stalin prevailing over Trotsky are also barking up the wrong tree. And in a number of these essays, the modern-day supporters of Lenin and Trotsky who still insist on the need for a vanguard party to lead workers to overthrow capitalism are given short shrift. In his chapter, ‘What is Socialism?’, Stephen Bronner explains how Leninist ‘democratic centralism’ can only lead to authoritarian rule by a minority. Smulewicz-Jucker (‘Democratic Socialism contra Populism’) sees Leninism as calling for ‘an elite party leadership to determine the working class’s true interests’.

A number of writers too remind us that Marx, regardless of how his writing has been used and abused over the last 150 years, did not see socialism (or communism, and we are reminded that the words were used interchangeably by Marx) as state ownership but as common ownership, entailing the abolition of the wages system and free access to all goods and services. Rohini Hensman, in her ‘Marx and Engels on Socialism’, correctly points out that in Marx’s concept of socialism ‘all class divisions will have been abolished… Products will not be sold as commodities, and there will be no money. Labour time will be minimised and free time will be maximised. Since capitalism is global, it follows that socialism would be global too’, and ‘Marx and Engels repeatedly make it clear that there will be no state in a socialist society’.

Support for this vision seems to be present in some of the essays in this collection. For example, Barbara Epstein, in ‘What Socialism Means’, states: ‘Socialism refers to the goal of an economically egalitarian society based on cooperation rather than on competition and the exploitation by some of the labour of others.’ Peter Hudis (’Democratic Socialism and the Transition to Genuine Democracy’) reminds us of Rosa Luxemburg’s dictum that ‘there is no socialism without democracy and no democracy without socialism’ and makes it clear that socialism needs ‘a global transformation’. Yet that writer, like others who seem to express support for this view of socialism, tend in the end to fall back on ‘in the meantime’ or (as one writer puts it) ‘incremental progress’ reformist prescriptions of one kind or another. This ‘in the meantime’ mentality (which is in fact a prescription for never getting to socialism) is well encapsulated by Hudis himself when he states: ‘Democratic socialism requires involving masses of people in a political project that fights for and secures needed reforms while focusing on the long-term need to transcend capitalism.’

In the midst of all this, however, the book does contain some strikingly pithy insights into the pathology of capitalism and also into the essential features of socialism. Examples are: Lester Spence’s description of schools as ‘spaces designed to inculcate market behaviour in parents, students, staff and administration’; Wilson Sherwin’s (‘Less Work For All! Reclaiming a Forgotten Socialist Aspiration’) characterisation of an increasingly brutal workplace as ‘hustle culture’; Steve Fraser’s standout piece in the collection (‘Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy’) where he states: ‘No matter what its form, capitalist democracy commodifies its world and first of all its human inhabitants. They live as vessels of labour power and as empty receptacles of the goods and services and delusions of consumer culture’; and finally Smulewicz-Zucker quoting Kautsky’s description of socialism as ‘the abolition of every kind of exploitation and oppression, be it directed against a class, a party, a sex, or a race’.

Howard Moss

Anarchist free-marketeer (2011)

Book Review from the July 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Property is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology. Ed. Iain McKay. AK Press. 2011

Proudhon came to fame in 1840 through a pamphlet What is Property? in which he declared that “property is theft”. Actually, this wasn’t as radical it might seem since what he was criticising was the private ownership of land. This was something which, later, supporters of capitalism such as JS Mill and Henry George also criticised and proposed to remedy by, respectively, land nationalisation and a single tax on rent. Proudhon didn’t even go that far; he advocated access for everyone to an equal amount of land.

Anarchists see him as their founding father as in this pamphlet he declared himself to be an “anarchist”, but by this he meant that he was opposed to government, even a democratically-constituted one, making rules about the production and distribution of wealth. He was (and remained till he died in 1865) a free marketeer, bitterly opposed to “communism” in the same terms and language as other free marketeers.

He has been called an “anarcho-capitalist” but this would be going too far as he was opposed to capitalism. “Anarchist free marketeer” would be fairer. His opposition to capitalism, however, was in the name of self-employed artisans who capitalism was reducing to working for wages for an employer. His proposed solution was that these should unite in “associations” (basically, cooperatives) which should exchange their products at their labour-time values. To this end he proposed a Bank of Exchange which would issue labour-money against products as well as providing interest-free loans to workers’ cooperatives it judged viable.

Iain McKay in his 50-page introduction puts a positive spin on this by stating that “Proudhon was an early advocate of what is now termed market socialism – an economy of competing co-operatives and self-employed workers”, adding “some incorrectly argue that market socialism is not socialist”. Some do indeed, but correctly. “Market socialism” is the economic equivalent of a square circle. But it gets worse. Proudhon envisaged his system coming into being gradually as the workers’ cooperatives, aided by free credit from his Bank of Exchange, conquered more and more sectors of the economy. He was opposed to strikes. In other words, he was a gradualist as well as a currency crank.

After being initially impressed by him (who he met and discussed with in Paris in 1844) Marx eventually realised that Proudhon, for all his insight that under the wages system the producers were exploited, was on the wrong track. When in 1846 Proudhon published his Système des contradictions économiques ou Philosophie de la misère, Marx wrote (in French) a reply La Misère de la philosophie, translated into English under the title The Poverty of Philosophy, the first public exposition of his views on economic matters.

Large extracts from Proudhon’s book are included in this anthology, with McKay’s sometimes tendentious footnotes. But McKay is on to a loser here. There is no way that Proudhon can be presented as a serious exponent either of the way capitalism works or even of the history of economic thought, certainly not when compared with Marx. Today, in fact, most anarchists accept Marx’s analysis of capitalism if not his politics.

Some anarchists might find this 800-page anthology useful. Those of them who are communists will discover, as they plough through his rambling writings, that Proudhon was a life-long and bitter opponent of “communism” and of the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”. If they still want to regard him as one of their founding fathers that’s their prerogative. For us he’s an anti-socialist.

Adam Buick

What is ‘millennial socialism’? (2019)

From the WSPUS website

Opinion polls suggest that the younger age groups in the United States – colloquially referred to as ‘millennials’¹– are much more open to socialist ideas than their elders. At least the taboo that used to surround the word ‘socialism’ is rapidly disappearing. The figures are quite striking. A poll conducted in April 2009 found that 33% of the 18–29 age group favored ‘socialism’ over ‘capitalism’ with slightly more (37%) still favoring ‘capitalism.’ By August 2018 a little over half (51%) of the new generation of 18–29 year-olds favored ‘socialism’ with 45% favoring ‘capitalism.’ An even more recent poll, conducted in January 2019, found that 51% of those aged 25-34 and 61% of the youngest cohort polled, aged 18-24 years, favored ‘socialism.’  

Three factors help explain this dramatic shift.

First, the millennials are the first generation no longer affected by the legacy of the Cold War. During the Cold War ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ were associated with a fearsome external threat. Advocating them marked you out as a traitor. For today’s young Americans the Cold War is ancient history.²

Second, the millennials are the first generation to grow up with the internet. They are less likely than their elders to rely on the corporate media for news and its interpretation. The internet exposes them to a broader range of ideas, including socialist ones. 

For example, efforts by the corporate media to discredit and ridicule warnings about climate change have had considerable success. Thus the proportion of respondents in Gallup polls who agree that ‘the seriousness of global warming has been exaggerated’ rose from 30% in 2006 to 33% in 2007, 35% in 2008, and 41% in 2009. However, this regressive shift was confined to people aged 30 years and over. The campaign to deny climate change did not affect the distribution of views in the 18–29 age group.   

Third, the millennials are the first young generation since the Great Depression of the 1930s who have no hope of maintaining, let alone improving on, their parents’ standard of living. Many are already laboring under a pile of student debt. They face a grim and uncertain future. 

A broader radicalization

The changing reaction to the word ‘socialism’ is part of a broader radicalization of public perceptions of American society. Polls show increasing proportions of respondents willing to acknowledge deep-seated injustice in the country’s political and judicial as well as economic system. Only half of those questioned in a July 2018 poll thought that elections in the United States are fair and open. A March 2014 poll found an almost even split between respondents who considered the judicial system ‘fair to most Americans’ and others who thought it ‘unfair to most Americans.’ (Only a third thought it ‘fair to poor Americans’ with a half disagreeing.) And fewer than a third now believe the myth that ‘it is still possible for just about anyone in America to work hard and get rich.’ 

But what do Americans in general and millennials in particular mean by ‘socialism’? 

Here the polls are much less helpful. I have found no studies of this question that single out millennials. That leaves us with the answers offered by pundits. First, however, it is worth looking at a paper by Gallup pollster Frank Newport entitled ‘The meaning of “socialism” to Americans today’ (posted October 4, 2018). 

Newport offered his respondents a choice of eight answers to the question What is your understanding of the term ‘socialism’? (They were allowed to formulate an answer of their own if they wished, but only a few took advantage of the opportunity.) He compares the results obtained in 2018 with the results of a similar poll conducted in 1949, at the start of the Cold War. Here are the main results:

• The definition of socialism as ‘state or government ownership or control of business,’ chosen by 1 in 3 respondents in 1949, was selected by only 1 in 6 in 2018. 
• A definition of socialism in terms of ‘equality’ (‘equal standing for everybody, all equal in rights, equal in distribution’) was preferred by 23% in 2018, up from 12% in 1949. 
• A ‘welfare-state’ definition of socialism focusing on free social services, universal healthcare, and other benefits was chosen by 2% in 1949 and 10% in 2018. 
• The proportion of ‘don’t knows’ was very high in both surveys. 

The most popular marker of ‘socialism,’ now chosen by almost a quarter of the respondents, is therefore equality of status and rights, including consumption rights. I regard this as good news, because although this is not adequate as a definition it does have something to do with socialism.  

Pundits agree that the majority of millennials are opposed to state ownership. Even a major government role in regulating the economy has the support of only 25–30%. Christopher Gage concludes from this that ‘millennial socialism’ is a myth (American Greatness, 2/22/2019). Jimmy Quinn does not go quite so far, but in an article entitled ‘Don’t assume millennials and Generation Z have given up on capitalism’ he argues that many millennials are open to the idea of tackling social problems by giving freer rein to market forces. For instance, many millennials support the movement for zoning deregulation as a means of increasing the housing supply and reducing rents.³ 

We in the World Socialist Movement (WSM) do not automatically equate opposition to state ownership with support of capitalism. That is because we do not define socialism as state ownership. State ownership can be and often is opposed from the vantage point of private ownership, but that is not the onlyvantage point from which it can be opposed. The WSM opposes both state and private ownership from the vantage point of common ownership, i.e., genuine socialism. 

It is useful to distinguish between ‘conservative’ and ‘radical’ versions of ‘millennial socialism.’ The conservative version accepts ownership by private companies and seeks only reforms of the ‘welfare-state’ variety, such as Medicare for All and free college tuition – a stance shared by many Americans who do not call themselves socialists (see, for instance, the dialog between Luigi Zingales and Kate Waldock in Chicago Booth Review, 2/28/19). By contrast, radical ‘millennial socialists,’ although they too oppose state ownership, want social change of a more far-reaching nature.

Older Left, Old/New Left, Newer Left

It is this radical variety that Ben Judah has in mind in his piece ‘What Is Millennial Socialism?’ in The American Interest (July 24, 2018). He draws three main contrasts between radical ‘millennial socialism’ and ‘the old 1970s Left’ – which back then was called the New Left to distinguish it from an even older Left.   

First, the 1970s Left – like that even older Left – appealed to ‘the working class’ in the narrow sense of manual workers, while the millennial Left appeals to ‘the 99%’ against ‘the 1%’ – terms borrowed from the Occupy Wall Street movement:

The fraying middle class was not the natural ally of the wealthy; it was not protected by the 1%. People who looked middle class, thought of themselves as middle class, and had ‘middle class jobs,’ but were in fact now drowning in mortgage debt, with their children saddled with vast college debt – these were also victims of the 1%.

Here the WSM has always been in sync with the view that Judah attributes to the ‘millennial socialists.’ We have always regarded those ‘people with middle class jobs’ as part of the working class.

Second, the 1970s Left still thought of ‘revolution’ in terms of violent insurrection by crowds led by charismatic leaders, while the millennial Left works for change by peaceful democratic means – through parliamentarian party politics. Here again the WSM is in sync with the ‘millennial socialists.’ Hopefully the Leninist/Bolshevik tradition of the vanguard party is fading at last.

Third, Judah joins the chorus of those who declare that the millennial Left is against ‘national state ownership’ and central planning. Its commitment to decentralization, he suggests, reflects the influence of anarchism. In his interpretation, however, the ‘millennial socialists’ are against private enterprise as well. Their goal is ‘a patchwork of social, collective, municipal, and union-run enterprises.’ As an example of this sort of thinking he cites the British Labour Party’s 2017 report Alternative Models of Ownership:

These are some of their alternatives: national profit-sharing schemes, community land trusts, municipal businesses, workers’ cooperatives like Legacoop in Italy or the Mondragon Group in Spain, employee stock ownership plans or a sovereign wealth fund to which FTSE-listed companies are required to issue a percentage of stock on incorporation. Millennial socialism is not trying to stop the market economy, but to change its players and rewrite its rules.

So it appears that joint-stock companies will continue to exist after all. And by omitting state ownership from the mix Judah distorts the position of the report’s authors, who do in fact include it in their economic model under the name of ‘national ownership.’  

Clearly the radical ‘millennial socialists’ have been deeply influenced by theories of ‘market socialism’ and workers’ self-management within capitalism. These are the main areas where we in the WSM are out of sync with the outlook that predominates among millennials. If we are to communicate effectively with radical millennials we need to acquire deeper understanding of these theories and broader knowledge of the practical experience associated with them.   

Notes

 [1] Millennials in the narrow sense are people who came to maturity around the turn of the century. Some observers identify those who have come to maturity in the last decade and are now aged 15 – 25 as a separate group, dubbed Generation Z (Z for Zero). I do not try to draw a distinction between the two groups and refer to them all as millennials.

 [2] About ten years ago I had the following exchange with a student at a local college. He told me that his sociology professor had announced to the class: ‘I’ll come straight out with this and hope you aren’t too shocked. I’m a socialist.’ ‘Well,’ I asked him, ‘were you and your friends shocked?’ ‘We weren’t quite sure what to make of it,’ he replied. ‘But no, none of us was shocked.’

 [3] This movement had its first success in December 2018 when the Minneapolis City Council voted to eliminate single-family zoning (National Review, May 2, 2019).

Stefan