Feb 29 2008
A new edition of Socialist Resistance Books best-selling titles , ‘Ecosocialism or Barbarism’, is about to be published. The number of pages is up, to 176, and the price is down, from 10 to 6 pounds. Click on the cover for a more detailed view. Go to Socialist Resistance books here.
Feb 29 2008
By Alan Thornett
The whole of the left should condemn the hysterical Thatcherite campaign against Ken Livingstone led by the Evening Standard and Channel 4. It is the war against the GLC all over again. As Seumas Milne said in the Guardian recently: “Just as in the time of the GLC, Livingstone is denounced for consorting with dangerous leftists and terrorist apologists”. The Channel 4 Dispatches programme was an hour of character assassination against Livingstone designed to obscure the politics of Tory right-wing buffoon and racist bigot Boris Johnson which are difficult to sell to a multi-cultural London where a third of the population are from ethic minorities. The hour-long programme poured out streams of empty allegations designed to promote the election campaign of Johnson.
The irony, however, is that whilst the attack on Livingstone reflects the days of the GLC, that is not the case with Livingstone himself. “Red Ken” is of no more than historical significance. Little of his politics today reflect his politics of those days. This is particularly the case when it comes to areas of administration over which he has direct control as Mayor of London. Where issues are outside his domain, however, where words rather than action are involved, he is often a lot more radical.
It is precisely over his actions, however, which he must be mainly judged. And there is the problem. His actions today regarding RMT picket lines, the privatisation of services, the City of London or the Metropolitan police are completely unacceptable. Such actions would have horrified the Livingstone of the GLA years. It is for these reasons that he is not supportable today as he would have been then.
This is the background to the current discussion as to whether the left should support Ken Livingstone for a third term in May. The discussion is made more acute by the success of the witch hunt against him which has allowed Boris Johnson to emerge as a serious contender. And the replacement of Livingstone by Johnson would be a setback for London and a boost for the Tories in their preparation for the general elections where similar methods will be used against new Labour.
In order to discuss this question sensibly, however, we have to sort out the distinct aspects of it especially differentiating the question of the vote from that of giving him political credibility and support. The first of these aspects is a tactical question, the second is not.
Fortunately the ballot for Mayor is by transferable vote, which makes this rather easy. With a transferable vote system the voter is able to cast first and second choice votes. The first can therefore be a political choice (the person you would most like to see elected) and the second can be used to stop the person you least want in the run-off between to two leading contenders. And since Livingstone is sure to be in the top two such an approach is fully applicable to this particular election. In fact giving Livingstone your first preference vote rather than your second would make no difference at all to the figures, you would still only be giving Livingstone one vote.
For example in the 2004 mayoral election Respect stood Lindsey German and called on its supporters to cast a second vote for Livingstone, and many of them did. The same should apply this time. If there is a credible left wing candidate put up against Livingstone we should vote for that candidate and cast a second vote for Livingstone. This would allow us to vote for a clear anti-neoliberal and pro-class struggle voice whilst supporting Livingstone against Johnson. We (as Socialist Resistance) would argue for this approach inside Respect Renewal and represent a minority view on it if unsuccessful.
So what is Livingstone’s political record over the past eight years?
The first thing to remember is that Livingstone rejoined new Labour and made his peace with Tony Blair, which weakened the left and strengthened new Labour. Since Brown took over he has been largely silent about him saying that he prefers to make his points in private rather than criticise him in public. Brown must be very happy indeed with that situation. In fact Livingstone is now wholeheartedly the New Labour candidate for Mayor of London. They regard their initial reluctance to have been a false alarm.
It’s true that Livingstone has opposed the war in Iraq and very consistently. He called on Londoners to attend the great February 2003 anti-war demonstration and he rejected calls that demonstrations should be banned when Bush visited London. But opposition to America’s war in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot, as some argue, be made the sole criterion of political support, otherwise it would lead to some very strange results.
There were (and are) many Liberal Democrats against the war. Douglas Hurd, foreign secretary under Margaret Thatcher, opposed the war, as did one of her chancellors Ken Clarke. The Chirac government in France opposed the war and its foreign minister (later Prime Minister) Dominique de Villepin made one of the most eloquent UN speeches against it. Vladimir Putin was against the war and still is. The same position, more or less, was taken by the Chinese regime in Beijing. The Iranian regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a regime guilty of countless anti-democratic crimes - is also a virulent critic of Bush and the war. In fact the opposition to the war has been widespread amongst a range of politicians and even included one of the two senators who got egg on their face attempting to grill George Galloway in a Congress subcommittee.
Of course no one is comparing Ken Livingstone to any of these figures, but it does demonstrate that the war cannot be the single or even the predominant criterion of judging political support. There has to be a wider judgement made on the basis of an all-round assessment of his policies and actions.
Livingstone has certainly done other things which we can support. His administration has worked on many progressive anti-racist initiatives. Livingstone warmly welcomed Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez to London, doing an “oil for expertise” deal with him. He has defended multi-culturalism extremely vigorously, he has welcomed migrants and defended asylum seekers. He defends Muslims against Islamophobia. Some of his actions on the environment have also been important. The Livingstone team did a lot to ensure the financing and success of the London European Social Forum in 2004. And of course there is his opposition to the war and fierce attacks on George Bush.
Against these positives, however, there are some completely unacceptable negatives. In particular Livingstone has systematically championed the police including over the Jean-Charles de Menezes shooting, where he has uncritically defended Met Commissioner Ian Blair. It is very difficult to argue that he has impeccable anti-racist credentials (as some do) when he supports the police over what was in the end a racist killing. He has acted vigorously on the wrong and reactionary idea that solving crime depends on recruiting a lot more police officers, something that has bumped up the “precept” (the proportion of the Council tax that is paid to the police).
He has collaborated with privatisation on the Tube and he and his staff in TfL have been responsible for one of the most expensive transport systems in the world. He and his staff have closely collaborated with property developers and Livingstone personally, along with his economics advisor John Ross, have become apostles and advocates of finance capital. It is not surprising therefore that he failed to support the firefighters’ pay demands. Livingstone was at the centre of the campaign to bring the Olympics to Britain, a decision that will markedly bump up London council tax mainly to the advantage of big business.. But it is not obvious that there are massive benefits for the poor and local workers generally.
Ideologically and politically, therefore, with the exception of the war, racism and Venezuela, there has been a complete collapse since the days of “Red Ken”.
Ken Livingstone’s role at the centre of London transport of course means he is in the position of an employer, so how has he dealt with the unions?
Appallingly badly, in fact. In June 2004 he attacked the RMT for striking over pay, he called the miserly offer “extremely generous” and said if he was an RMT member he would cross the picket line and break the strike. Even someone as non-militant as Dave Prentis, Unison general secretary, called these remarks “shameful”. In 2003, when tube driver Chris Barrett was spied on while off sick and sacked for allegedly feigning his illness. Livingstone said “I don’t know he got away with it for so long”, but did not apologise when Barrett won his case at an industrial tribunal. In 2007, speaking at the annual London Government Dinner at Mansion House, Livingstone told his distinguished audience that he had not the slightest intention of giving in to the RMT.
Ken Livingstone and the police
Ken Livingstone has systematically defended the police over the shooting of Jean-Charles de Menezes, arguing that they acted the way they thought appropriate at the time. When on November 2 2007 a court found the Met guilty of “corporate failings” over the shooting he immediately went on Radio 4 to denounce the findings as “disastrous” and say that it could make the fight against terrorism more difficult.
Let’s remember exactly what happened to de Menezes. He was not challenged before being shot. He was shot seven times in the head, each bullet fired at three second intervals. The shooting was a part of the “shoot to kill” policy of the Met at the time and it happened to de Menezes because of his swarthy appearance i.e. his “profiling” by the squad concerned. Any socialist or indeed anyone who defends basic human rights should expect the police not to shoot anyone without a very good reason for doing so, and to find the police at least guilty of negligence if they do. But not Ken Livingstone. He insisted that “The police acted to do what they believed necessary to protect the lives of the public. This tragedy has added another victim to the toll of deaths for which the terrorists bear responsibility.” Moreover he said, “At the end of the day, mistakes are always going to happen in wars or situations like this. The best you can do is try and make the potential for risk the minimum possible but there will be mistakes”. This is nothing more or less than a cover-up for the shoot to kill policy.
Livingstone vigorously opposed all calls for Ian Blair to resign as Met Commissioner, arguing that such demands were mainly those of the right-wing media led by the Daily Mail. It was true, of course, that the Mail and other right-wing papers called for Blair to resign. But it was also absolutely clear from the stand point of the defence of basic human rights and anti-racist policing that he indeed should resign. This was rightly the position of the whole of left, as well as of liberal opinion. It was also the position of the de Menezes family campaign itself which spoke to great acclaim at the founding conference of Respect Renewal last November. It is absolutely astounding that anyone claiming the remotest degree of left credentials could take any other position. It is bizarre to ignore such an issue is assessing what support Livingstone should receive.
Nor is it just the de Menezes shooting which was involved. At the time of the police raid in Forest Gate in June 2006, when a young Muslim man was shot and wounded by the police on the basis of the flimsiest of evidence, Livingstone also defended the police.
As part of his wider defence of Ian Blair Livingstone argued that there had been a reduction in the crime figure and that this was due to increased police numbers. He said in 2007 “One of my priorities on becoming mayor in 2000 was therefore to work with the government to increase police numbers again, in order to bear down on the rise in crime”.
No one other than an anarchist, would argue for the immediate abolition of the police. But it has never been the position of socialists that the answer to crime is more police. Crime, especially among young people, is closely associated with poverty and the massive growing inequality. Policing is not just about crime it’s about social control, and the class bias of the police is obvious. The most costly form of crime, the one that costs the public most by far, is corporate, white collar crime, especially tax evasion on a mammoth scale by the super-rich. Yet hardly any resources are devoted to it by the police, as compared with the policing of poor areas. All this is elementary from a socialist viewpoint, but outside the ambit of Livingstone’s approach.
The truth is that on the police Ken Livingstone has fallen straight into the discourse of the reactionary right, especially after having visited former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and having been impressed by his “zero tolerance” policing. Livingstone says, “Twenty-five years ago I was generally critical, but now I see a much transformed [police] force”. So it’s not Ken Livingstone but the police who have changed! If you believe that, you’ll believe just about anything.
Ken Livingstone and Transport
London has the second most expensive transport system of any city in the world, outdone only by Moscow where the system is in the hands of gangsters. It is 26% more expensive than New York, where incomes seem roughly the same as in London because of the decline of the dollar, but where real purchasing power is significantly higher and prices generally much lower.
Can the high price of transport in London be justified from a socialist point of view? It’s true that free transport has been extended from school children to 16 and 17-year old students and this is a pro-working class reform. It’s also true that over-60s go free and that Oyster cards users (more regular users) pay less than the nominal rate. But it’s still very expensive a typical commuter in Zone 3, 4 or 5 coming into London would still pay £35 a week in fares. And this is very different from the days of “Fares Fair” when Livingstone in the 1980s as leader of the GLC massively reduced Tube prices.
It can be argued that Livingstone has not had any option but to work in this way and squeeze the public through high prices. Private contractors have to be paid. The capital interest payments to financial institutions are more than £100m. So if the buses were to be improved, the money had to come from somewhere. But all that says is that if you work within the system, then you obey the rules of the system and you end up managing it, despite some marginal reforms. The idea that there is no alternative within the system is an argument that could be applied at national level as well; once this is accepted all socialist aspiration is lost.
In praise of finance capital
Ken Livingstone has been more and more open about his position of full support to finance capital, the driving force of neoliberal globalisation. The key to London is its success as a financial centre, he argues. In 2006 he warmly praised Margaret Thatcher’s 1986 decision to deregulate the City of London which had become “a lazy, old boys’ network”, enabling it to become “dynamic and world class” (and incidentally increasingly owned by Americans, which puts in question his claim that “London has overtaken New York” as a financial centre). In his April 2007 interview with Prospect magazine (with Tony Travers, Simon Parker and David Goodhart) Livingstone says that “I used to believe in a centralised state economy, but now I accept that there’s no rival to the market in terms of production and distribution”.
The theory that Livingstone and his financial advisor of 19 years John Ross have worked out is evidently this: making London a top centre of finance capital is the key to generating wealth in the city as a whole, and on the basis of this we can create employment and devise progressive and environment-friendly policies . This sounds a lot like the “trickle down” theory of wealth generation beloved of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
Many of its assumptions will be sorely tested in the next period as the devastating financial crisis leads to thousands of sackings in the City, but it also has to be asked who exactly does benefit from the City being a key focus of world finance. Clearly the main beneficiaries are the City traders and fund managers themselves, the owners of luxury and service industries and of course property developers.
In 2000 the Livingstone team’s enthusiasm for property developers astounded Green leader Darren Johnson. He told the Guardian about Livingstone: “I was surprised at how aggressively pro-developer he was. His economic adviser John Ross did a presentation talking about a coalition between the Greens and big business interests and the need to keep both on side. I thought it was a joke. Then I realised he was serious.”
It is less evident how many workers benefit directly from London’s role as a finance centre. For many millions the City’s influence has been crucial in pushing house prices through the roof, tying down a huge part of their income. But in any case, the role of de-regulated finance and globalisation, turning everything into a commodity and trying to turn every service into a financial asset, is not about being “dynamic” at the expense of “old boys’ networks”, it’s about pumping as much surplus income as possible out of the pockets of workers and the poor worldwide.
The role of the City and deregulated capitalism is part of the whole rotten operation worldwide that has also massively increased inequality within Britain and also drastically worsened the working conditions of millions. Even if you thought it was beneficial economically for a giant financial centre to be in London, it would surely be normal for a socialist to point out the nature of the beast. In his Prospect interview Livingstone does criticise multi-million pound City bonuses but when prompted only gives his assent to the most minimal of reforms, something like a tax of a tenth of one per cent on international trading, enough he thinks to “cure world poverty”. And after all, whatever you think personally, when it come to keeping City traders and property developers onside, you just don’t go about criticising them and demanding they be taxed to the hilt.
In his Prospect interview Livingstone says: “There isn’t a great ideological conflict any more. The business community, for example, has been almost depoliticised. One of the first people to lobby me when I became mayor was Judith Mayhew, from the City Corporation. She came and said, “We’ve all changed, it won’t be like the last time, there’s so much we can do together.” I didn’t believe a word of it, but it turned out to be true.”
So there you have it: work with the most progressive forces in capitalism in a framework where business has been depoliticised! This is the world through a self-delusion of huge proportions. The idea that business has become depoliticised is as inane as thinking that City financiers represent “progressive forces in capitalism”. Livingstone has changed on capitalism, just as he has changed on the police. Capitalism has also changed mainly for the worse.
Who will benefit from the Olympics?
Who really knows the final cost of the London Olympics? Probably no one, but it’s obvious there won’t be much change from £20bn. This will come from London and nation-wide taxpayers, but Londoners will pay twice once through Council Tax and once through income tax. Who will benefit? Mainly big business. While some British businesses will benefit, others won’t. Studies since 1980 have shown that the net benefits to tourism are minimal, as visits fall off in the couple of years before the events as people just postpone their visit to Olympic year. In reality the games are a massive marketing opportunity for transnational corporations like Nike, Omega, McDonalds and other major corporations. But it is not obvious that there are massive benefits for the poor and local workers generally.
According to a publication of Demos:
“The indirect impacts of processes of gentrification and price inflation can be severe. In Barcelona, for instance, the 1992 Games was partly responsible for massive increases in costs of living in the city. Between 1986 and 1992 the market price of housing grew by an average of 260% and this expansion continued through the 1990s with significant increases in social inequality. Likewise, in Sydney, rates of evictions and homelessness increased markedly in the neighbourhoods alongside the Olympic development. The consequence is that although development takes place in such cities it does not always lead to the development of its poorer urban neighbourhoods and communities. In fact, it can make things worse by creating blight, congestion and […] displacement.”
But isn’t there a plan in place to regenerate Hackney Wick and Stratford, two areas that certainly need it? In fact the Olympics British organisers are incredibly modest in their projection for regeneration which, with a few add-ons, comes down to:
That doesn’t sound like very good value for £20bn or even £10bn. East London certainly needs redevelopment so redevelop it! That does not need the Olympics. The truth is the Olympics is a giant business machine that gets governments to sucker local people into paying their overhead costs. Socialists shouldn’t support the Olympics coming to Britain or anywhere else. It’s a pity Ken Livingstone did.
28.1.08
Feb 23 2008
François Sabado: from International Viewpoint
Some elements of the international situation…
The international situation confirms an extension and a deepening of capitalist globalization. It is marked by the continuation of the offensive of the ruling classes against the living conditions of hundreds of millions of human beings, of workers, by the systematization of the liberal counter-reforms, the increasingly larger place occupied by the “financialisation” of the world economy, by an ecological crisis which calls into question vital equilibriums of the planet.
1a) This globalization is designing a new configuration of the world market, where competition is sharpening between US imperialism, still dominant but weakened, the European powers, and the emergence of new powers like China and India, whose shares of the world’s GDP are increasing regularly. If the United States and Europe are experiencing low growth rates, from 2 to 3 per cent, China and India are experiencing growth rates from 8 to 10 per cent, and other raw material producer countries (of oil in particular) such as Russia or Venezuela, between 6 and 8 per cent. These socio-economic changes prefigure new relationships of forces and new international tensions.
1b) This has consequences in the field of international politics, where the interests of a weakened North-American bourgeoisie and those of European powers which want to maintain their rank in this new world competition, make them converge in new systems of alliances, in particular with regard to China and Russia. That does not exclude, far from it, the aggressive search for new market shares for each bourgeoisie, but the bonds between the United States and the European Union are tending to be reinforced. The new relations between Sarkozy’s France and Bush’s United States are a good example of this inflection or change. Chirac was against the war in Iraq. Sarkozy is for. He is even in the front line in the confrontation with Iran. But more generally the envisaged return of France to NATO and the integration of the European military force within the Alliance shows clearly the type of reorganization that is underway.
1c) This accentuation of international competition, combined with an increasingly strong tendency to the constitution of a world market of the labour force, is leading governments and the employing class to create the political and socio-economic conditions for an increase in the rates of profit, the lengthening of working hours and the time of exploitation, the containment and even the further compression of the share of wages in the production of wealth.
1d) These policies have, in particular, a series of consequences in capitalist Europe, where the principal European bourgeoisies, to ensure their place in world competition, are frontally attacking the “European social model”, attacking in fact, the systems of social security, the social rights of workers, public services. This policy is concentrated in the new “European treaty” which takes up again the broad outline of the project of a European Constitution that was rejected in 2005 by the people of France and the Netherlands. It is reinforced by the integration into Europe of the Eastern European countries. An integration which is leading to the dismantling of a series of social gains and which consequently, exert a downward pressure on all the living and working conditions of the popular classes of these countries.
1e) The United States is on the eve of new elections (at the end of 2008), which can lead to inflections or modifications of American policy. Nevertheless over the recent long period, US imperialism has confirmed its policy of strategic politico-military redeployment. It is a question for it, in a situation where the American economy is increasingly dependent on world credit, on shares, debentures and Treasury bonds held by powers like China or Japan, of compensating for a certain weakening by an aggressive military policy, of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, of confrontation with Iran, and to a lesser degrees with Russia and China. This policy also comprises a policy of “recolonisation” of certain countries, with the aim of maintaining and even extending control over natural resources or strategic raw materials s like oil
And some contradictions…
The capitalist system largely dominates all the economic and social activity of the planet. The cost of this domination is constantly increasing, on both the social and ecological levels. It is permanently nourishes the internal and external contradictions of the system which is leading to class struggles social struggles in the broad sense, which express the refusal by the popular classes of the neo-liberal and capitalist order. There is a series of examples of these contradictions of the system:
2a) The crisis of the financial and banking system of the United States, of which the crisis of the “subprimes” (loans with variable interest rates which are ruining millions of Americans and making bankrupt a series of banks and financial organizations engaged in lending) confirms the fragility of the current economic expansion. That proves the “ultra-sensitivity” of North-American capitalism to the financialisation of the world economy. This crisis of the international financial system reinforces the structural weaknesses of present-day capitalist development, in particular the weakness of productive investments, by “making more expensive” and hardening the rates and conditions of loans. This crisis of investment has its repercussions on the rates of productivity, and in the final analysis on the growth rates in two of the bastions of the world economy: the United States and Europe. The present financial crisis is now having direct effects on the slowdown in economic activity in the USA and on the risk of transformation of this crisis into an economic recession. All these factors weigh on the room for manoeuvre that the ruling classes and the governments in these countries have to manage economic and social relations and can lead to systemic crises.
2b) Over the last few years the ecological crisis has taken on new dimensions. The consequences of global warming are beginning and are likely to cause, in the long term, new catastrophes - ecological, social, and human. Despite all the political and media efforts of governments to make compatible the functioning of the capitalist system, the ever more frenetic search for profit and ecology, a new consciousness is emerging that “lives are worth more than capitalist profits” and than the cost of the functioning of the system is increasingly calling into question the vital equilibriums of the planet. Revolutionaries must take up this question, decisive for the years to come, in order to denounce the destructive effects of capitalism on ecological problems, and to stress the importance of an economy durably controlled and planned according to social needs and not capitalist profit.
2c) These contradictions are expressed in an acute way in the failure which US imperialism has encountered in Iraq. The term “New Vietnam” is usually adopted by the American media to speak about the situation of the American army in the region. It is a true political stagnation and soldier whom knows The Bush administration is really bogged down there, from both a political and military point of view. All the propaganda about the objectives of stabilization or democratization of the region is in tatters. It is a traditional operation of aggression and re-colonisation of a country and a region. The rejection of the US occupation combined with the resistance of the Palestinian people against the Israeli policy of aggression and colonization constitutes one of the major factors of destabilization of the international imperialist system.
2d) the socio-economic consequences of capitalist globalization and its armed dimension cause new tensions and social, political and military confrontations. Under the pressure of the demands of the financial markets, and the pressure of imperialism, in particular American imperialism, and in a situation of absence, retreat or even structural crisis of the traditional workers’ movement and of bourgeois nationalism, social reactions can take the form of organizations, currents, clans or ethnic or religious groups or whose orientation is globally reactionary. This is what is developing around the situations in Pakistan and in Afghanistan. It is also the case with the tendencies towards the breaking up of a series of states in Africa.
2e) The fact that the USA is bogged down in the Middle East has international consequences, and in particular in Latin America. It is not a question of underestimating the pressure which “the empire” always exerts on a continent that it continues to regard as its back-yard. But it is necessary to underline the weakening of its capacities of intervention on the continent. On the military level, it is difficult for it to intervene in Iraq, Afghanistan and to prepare interventions in Latin America. The “Colombia Plan” is there. So are the military bases in Paraguay. Aid to the “golpist” (putschist) or “liberal-authoritarian” Right is always present.
The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA: in Spanish, ALCA) is a failure but bilateral treaties have been concluded between the United States and a series of countries of South America. In short, the United States does not ignore South America, but it is undeniable that there is a new relationship of forces between American imperialism and a series of countries of the Latin-American continent and not the least important ones, in particular two groups of countries. The first group consists of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Taking advantage of a phase economic development and of the ability of the governments in power - Lula in Brazil, Kirchner in Argentina, Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay - to channel, to control, to integrate their mass movements or, more exactly, whole sections of the leaderships of these mass movements, in particular the leaderships of the Workers’ Party (PT) and the United Workers’ Confederation (CUT) in Brazil and of political and trade-union Peronism in Argentina (even if Lula is situated to the right of Kirchner), the ruling classes of these countries have conquered new margins of manoeuvre to negotiate and impose a series of economic objectives on American imperialism.
They are pursuing, on their own account and in their manner, neo-liberal policies, accompanying them with a dimension “social aid”, and with their insertion in the world market, in particular by their agro-exporting policies and their specific relations with the international financial system. The second group of countries, which are today imposing a new experience of partial rupture with American imperialism, is led by Venezuela, followed by Bolivia and Ecuador, all of them supported by Cuba. These countries, each one with its specificity, are trying today to loosen the vice-like grip of the debt, to take back ownership and control over their natural resources, to ensure social programmes for food, health and education, to restore their national sovereignty against American and European (particularly Spanish) pressures.
3. Offensive and counter-offensive in Venezuela and in Bolivia
The victory of the “no” in the referendum of December 2, 2007 represents a turn in the political situation in Venezuela. Few people expected the victory of the “no”. It is a defeat for Chávez, even though the Bolivarian process continues. And it is a defeat for the progressive forces in Venezuela and in Latin America. Let us make no mistake about it, it is not - as certain sectarian currents explain it - “a defeat for Chávez… but a victory for the popular forces”! The victory of the “no” directly serves the forces of the Right, “golpist” or moderate. It enables them to recover, to reorganize and prepare the coming battles under better conditions. The victory of the “no” weakens Chávez in his relationship with American imperialism and even with the governments in power in Argentina and Brazil. The pressure to “moderate” Chávez, to lead him to a policy of dangerous compromises will be stronger… That is why, without any reservations or hesitations, we came out for the “yes” in the referendum, over and above the appreciation we might have had of such and such an article of the Constitution.
But we have to go over the reasons which led to the victory of the “no”. Globally, we share the explanations which the comrades of “Marea clasista y socialista give” [1] How could Chávez lose more than 3 million voters – which is not nothing - compared to the last electoral consultation? There was certainly the outburst of the media against the government, the campaigns of lies, the calumnies, in short all the weapons of the Venezuelan Right, but the Chavez leadership bears its own responsibility. This failure comes from deeper causes than the simple episode of the Constitution. It is necessary today to have a great debate on the reasons for the “no”, a debate which will help to define a policy for the coming weeks and months. We had pointed out that the modalities and certain articles of the Constitution would reinforce the “Bonapartist aspect” of the Chávez regime and that a new constitution would not lead to socialism without tackling the problems of redistribution of wealth and property… But in fact more substantial phenomena explain a certain distance of part of the Bolivarian people from their president. First of all, problems related to the vital needs of the population: food, purchasing power, jobs, working conditions… The problems of supply of basic foodstuffs weighed considerably in the balance.
More generally, if the problems of food, health and education have seen considerable progress, their financing being ensured by the oil revenues - which is all to the credit of the Bolivarian regime -, the economic and social structures of the country did not experience fundamental change. The inequalities remain. Financial revenues have increased by more than 40 per cent. The structures of property have not been modified. Improving the standard of living of the great majority of the population – workers the informal sector, peasants, civil servants - is the first task in order to deepen the process. And if that involves incursions by the state into economic life, into companies, into the circuits of supply and trade, into control of the banking system in the service of the workers, into property and land redistribution, there should be no hesitation, even if it implies a confrontation with the bourgeoisie and sectors of the state apparatus, even pro-governmental sectors.
The second fundamental reason for the distance taken by part of the people, is the reality – noted by a number of observers - of a process of bureaucratization of a governmental sector which uses power for its own ends instead of serving the government. So, here and there, phenomena of corruption were denounced. In the same way, we saw developing a policy of confrontation with social movements and trade unions, in particular on the part of the Ministry of Labour. All that alienated from the government a series of sectors, which have not however broken with the Bolivarian revolution. Today, it is necessary renew contact with these sectors, to remobilise them in order to deepen the process. So the second task is to deepen the mobilization and the democratization of the Bolivarian process.
More power to the people, more power to the organisms of the revolution, the popular assemblies in the neighbourhoods, the rank and-file trade-union representatives elected in the workplaces, the communes. It is necessary to broaden the process of co-management of enterprises, to ensure a unitary and democratic congress of the trade-union movement, of the UNT. The social and democratic content of the revolution is all the more important in that, although the process will always be confronted with a “putschist sector “, it will also be attacked by more political manoeuvres. It will be necessary for it to not only answer ” the whip of the counter-revolution which makes the revolution advance” – a famous sentence of Trotsky’s that Chávez regularly quotes - but also with “advances” and “dishonest proposals” which will aim at devitalizing the revolutionary process, at marginalizing in order to finally destroy it… The situation is thus likely to become complicated.
Chávez is at a crossroads: either he yields to the pressures to moderate the process… and he will lose the support of important sectors of his social and political base, or he advances, joins again with the most combative sectors, satisfies the fundamental popular demands and the Bolivarian revolutionary process will deepen. And that will have repercussions in the whole of Latin America.
The crisis is also accelerating in Bolivia, where the vote adopting the new constitution defended by Evo Morales and the large majority of the population, workers, peasants, Indians, is not recognized by the Right and by the “rich white classes” concentrated in Santa Cruz and the provinces of the West, where four regions have just proclaimed their autonomy. The revolutionaries are with the MAS of Evo Morales for the application of this constitution and the satisfaction of the vital needs of the poorest populations in Bolivia.
But the key country is Venezuela. If there was a defeat of the Bolivarian process, that would have immediate repercussions in Bolivia and Ecuador, not to mention Cuba. A global deterioration of the relationship of forces would favour in Cuba the partisans of a “Chinese way” – a combination of the maintenance in power of the Cuban Communist Party and the development of capitalism. But we are still far from that, the decisive stage is the relaunching of the Bolivarian process combined with the deepening of the Bolivian and Ecuadorian experiences.
4. And Europe…
The European situation is at the centre of the acceleration of neo-liberal policies. One of the key objectives of the ruling classes on an international scale and in Europe - at the moment when the pressures of the world market are pushing more and more towards the unification of the labour market, towards dragging wages downwards, towards the gradual dismantling of systems of social security, towards liquidating public services - is to finish with the “European social model”. The steamroller of neo-liberal policies advances regularly. But it also regularly provokes social resistance. The working class, and beyond that the majority of the population in Europe, is east deeply attached to a series of social rights. In France the ideologues of the Sarkozy government have openly declared it: it is necessary to destroy the programme of the National Council of the Resistance (CNR) of 1945 and all the social conquests which have been obtained since. Sarkozy declares that “he wants to reform more than Margaret Thatcher”… he has scored a series of points, in particular by applying his counter-reform of pensions and of the special pension systems (for railway workers, employees in the electricity and gas industries…) but he has not yet beaten the workers’ movement did not beat yet. The feeling of workers, in particular after the rail strikes, is not one of defeat. There has not been a major defeat of the workers’ movement in Europe like the one suffered by British miners in the 1980s, important struggles and major confrontations are still ahead of us… but three remarks are necessary
The struggles are defensive. They do not manage to block, far less to reverse the course of the counter-reforms. They appear in the form of explosions or partial struggles. They can destabilize the regimes in place… but that does not stop the process of counter-reform.
These struggles are unequal in Europe, depending on the country. The level of class struggle remains rather high in France - people speak about “the French exception” in Europe - and also in Italy, where at the end of 1990s and the beginning of the 2000 decade, there was a combination of one-day general strikes by the trade-union movement and a strong global justice and anti-war movement. Recently, there was an important strike of rail workers in Germany, even though it is a strike which did not receive solidarity from other trade unions and a large part of the trade-union left. In Spain and in Portugal the level of class struggle remains very low. In the countries of Northern Europe, in spite of quite strong attacks, the situation is under control of the governments and the leaderships of the trade-union movement; the level of struggle is rather low.
In the countries, where there is a certain level of struggle, it is necessary to underline a contradictory situation: there is a real unevenness between the level of struggle and the level of consciousness. There can be partial struggles or explosions but there is no organic growth of a wave of class struggles – of the global level of struggle, an increase in trade-union membership, workers’ parties, or class struggle or revolutionary political currents - as there was at the end of the 1960 and in the 1970s in Europe, particularly in Southern Europe. As a result, the struggles have difficulty in finding a political expression in class struggle terms.
5. Two choices on the left!
In the current international conjuncture, the left, the workers’ movement, the social movements are confronted with two main orientations in the face of capitalist globalisation: an orientation of adaptation to liberal capitalism and a line - ours - of resistance, struggle, anti-capitalist combat. We have, in France, a formula to speak about this situation: “There are two lefts”, we say. Of course, there are in reality several varieties of “left”, but we are really confronted with two fundamental choices: to accept or to refuse this capitalist globalization!
5.a) The great majority of the traditional leaderships of the workers’ movement - social democracy, ex- or post-Stalinism, Greens - or in certain developing countries bourgeois nationalism, have chosen the road of adaptation. This is the result of a whole process of integration into the institutions of state and the capitalist system. But this process of integration, in the current period of capitalist globalisation, is leading to qualitative changes, to structural changes of all these political formations. The demands of capitalist globalization are such that the room for manoeuvre to build social compromises between ruling classes and reformist movements has been considerably reduced. The big economic groups, the financial markets, the higher echelons of the state are summoning the reformist leaderships to accept the framework dictated by the search for maximum profits, by an increased financialisation of the world economy.
As a result, social democracy is being transformed into social-liberalism. From a social democracy which, faced with the class struggle, exchanged its support for the capitalist order against social improvements, we have moved to socialist parties which became ” reformist parties without reforms” and have now got to the point of being “parties of liberal counter-reforms”. In Europe, the European Union provides the framework of collaboration between Christian democracy and social democracy, in order to deploy the counter-reforms on pensions and retirement and the liquidation of the systems of social security and the public services. That does not exclude a skilful combination of programmes of assistance to the poorest layers - a system of minimum incomes, the programme of the “Family Grant” in Brazil… - and counter-reforms which attack the hard core of working-class rights and social conquests.
But it is on the political level that these choices are most manifest: the evolution of European social democracy towards “a third way” between the Right and the Left, in the call - now in Italy and France - to transform the historical socialist parties into democratic parties on the American model… This is also what we saw in Brazil, where the Workers’ Party (PT) followed in only about fifteen years the evolution over almost a century of historical social democracy: from a class party, the PT was transformed into a social-liberal party. Once again, this evolution does not exclude policies of social assistance, which provide a social base for these parties among certain sectors of the population. This is the case of Lula, in Brazil, who remains popular with his programme of the “Family Grant”.
This social-liberal evolution represents a general tendency. In a series of country the process is not completed. The ruling classes need, moreover, in a political system of alternating governments, “to be able to choose between the Right and the Left”. So these social-liberal formations are not bourgeois parties like the others. There remain differences between the Right and the Left, especially in the way they are perceived by popular sectors, but overall social democracy and its allies are everywhere going through this process of integration into capitalist globalization and of a movement “towards the right”.
5.b) At the other pole of the left, there are the forces which refuse capitalist globalization, which resist and defend an anti-capitalist orientation. Then of course, there are forces which refuse ultra-liberalism, which reject its excessive or outrageous aspects, hoping for a capitalism with a human face. There is also, in Latin America, the return to “neo-developmental” projects - bourgeois nationalist projects which hope to loosen the grip of imperialist domination. But in general what is missing with these forces is the ability and the will to really break with the whole neo-liberal logic – a logic which is inextricable from that of the capitalist system - and especially the determination to take on the ruling classes in order to respond to popular aspirations. This generally leads political formations - such as the PT or Peronism, each in its own way - which in opposition can claim to be anti-liberal, to adapt to liberal capitalism once they come to power. And it is there that there lies, so far, the major difference between on the one hand Lula, Kirchner and Tabaré Vázquez and, on the other Chávez, Morales, and Corréa: The first have adopted the neo-liberal logic, accompanying it by “social programmes” for the poorest layers. They are loyal partners of the financial markets. The group of the last three, contrary to the first group, have not hesitated to clash with the ruling classes and American imperialism in order to apply their programme of reforms, even if these reforms remain partial. But to break in a consistent way with liberalism, it is necessary to break with capitalism.
6. For new anti-capitalist parties…
This is the programme of the parties and the political formations which we want to build. An anti-capitalist action or transitional programme which defends immediate demands (wages, jobs, services, distribution of land, control over natural resources…), democratic demands (problems of popular and national sovereignty in countries dominated by imperialism) and transitional demands, which lead to the need for another kind of distribution of wealth and to putting in question the capitalist ownership of the economy.
The implementation of these programmes requires governments at the service of the working class, basing themselves on the mobilization and the self-activity of the popular classes.
This battle - and it is a central battle today - implies the rejection of any participation in or support for social-liberal governments which conduct the business of the state and the capitalist economy. You paid dearly for it in Brazil with the participation of Socialist Democracy [2] in the Lula government, but you should know that your painful experience was useful to us and that we learned all the lessons from the Brazilian experience in order to reject in France, in Italy, in Portugal, in Spain any support for or participation in social-liberal governments.
So the question of participation or not in this type of government had again become a cardinal question of the strategy of power in Europe and in the principal countries of Latin America.
These are the references which constitute the basis of the anti-capitalist parties which are being built – like the Bloco de Esquerda (Left Bloc) in Portugal, which you have known for several years - or which will be built in the coming months and years in Europe, more precisely to France and Italy, each with its specificity. In a certain fashion, they are the equivalents of your PSOL.
In France, you know that the LCR obtained good results in the last presidential election, with nearly 1.5 million votes. But the LCR has above all a spokesperson, Olivier Besancenot, who is a young postal worker, and who regularly takes the side of workers who are involved in a struggle or a strike, particularly in the most recent rail strike. That has brought him, for several months now, great popularity. The political space occupied by Olivier, the wave of sympathy which he arouses, largely exceeds even that of the LCR.
That comes after a series from events over the last twelve years, where there took place social resistance, political experience against the liberal counter-reforms, of the debates on the type of political alternative, which have created the conditions for building a new party.
This party will be an anti-capitalist party, feminist, ecologist and internationalist party. It will situate its combat in the revolutionary traditions of the workers’ movement. At the centre of the project, there are key political references: the class struggle, unity of action of the workers and their organizations, independence with respect to the central institutions of the capitalist state, socialist democracy. So, although this new party has anti-capitalist programmatic and strategic delimitations in a perspective of the conquest of power by the workers, it will leave open a whole series of questions about the type of revolution of the 21st century, its forms and its content.
But anchored in the class struggle, it will subordinate its electoral and institutional positions to the development of social mobilizations and the self-activity of the mass movement. The objective of this new party is to bring together militants and currents coming from various origins - Communists, Socialists, trade unionists, libertarians, revolutionaries - on the basis of a programme which is the “common understanding of events and tasks” and not on the basis of general ideological or historical references. Nor is our objective to bring together only revolutionaries, it is to try to build a new political representation of workers and youth, even if it is only partial and only represents a first step in an overall reorganization of the workers’ movement. So, while we will maintain the links of the LCR with the Fourth International, this new party will not be a “Trotskyist” party. It will try to amalgamate, as we said above, the best of all the revolutionary traditions.
In Italy, starting from different histories and experiences, a whole sector of Communist Refoundation has just broken with this party in order to launch the construction of a new anti-capitalist party. After a whole political period where the leadership of Communist Refoundation had applied a policy of rejection of neo-liberalism and of engaging in and driving forward the global justice movement – an orientation that we supported -, this party today supports and takes part in the government of Prodi (former president of the very liberal European Union).
By taking part in the Prodi government, Communist Refoundation has supported all the programmes of neo-liberal austerity, a reform of pensions, and especially the sending of Italian troops alongside US troops in Afghanistan. Under these conditions, the comrades of the Fourth International, but also of other currents, left trade unionists, organizers of the social centres and the anti-war movement, decided to engage a process of constitution of a new anti-capitalist party… So it is on the basis of a fight against the Right and the Italian employers, but also in breaking with the social-liberalism which has taken over Communist Refoundation in Italy of Italy, that we are taking part in the construction of a new party, represented today by the Sinistra Critica (Critical Left.) movement.
To conclude: we began the discussion on new anti-capitalist parties at the beginning of the 1990s, taking into account the end of a whole historical period - the short century which started with the war of 1914-1918 and ended in the collapse of the USSR in 1991 - and the beginning of a new historical period marked by capitalist globalization, the social-liberal evolution of the workers’ movement, the final decline of Stalinism, and by new waves of social resistances.
Today, on the basis of social resistance and political experiences, in particular of social-liberal governments in power, the contours of new anti-capitalist formations are starting to be confirmed.
The PSOL, the Bloco de Esquerda, Sinistra Critica, the new anti-capitalist party in France, that is the horizon for the coming months and years. It is a major challenge for revolutionaries.
We will need a lot of audacity and tactical flexibility to build broad anti-capitalist parties, based on the combativeness of workers and youth, on the political lessons drawn from recent experiences where various orientations – going from social-liberalism to ant-capitalism – have been confronted. But it is also necessary to know the limits within which we will build these parties. Because there is great unevenness between the political space that we occupy and the politico-organisational reality of our forces. Whether it is in France (between the popularity of Olivier Besancenot and the reality of the LCR) or in Brazil (between the popularity of Heloísa Helena and the reality of the PSOL), there are real differences between the popularity of our spokespersons and our organizations.
Of course Heloísa and Olivier base themselves on real phenomena - of combativeness and consciousness - in society, but if they occupy such a political space it is as much, if not more, the result of the “movement towards the right” of the traditional Left (PS or PT) which leaves broad spaces on the left, than the expression of a movement of organic growth of a rise in the class struggle. They occupy a space left vacant by the “movement to the right” of the reformist apparatuses.
Furthermore, this space is not automatically occupied by anti-capitalist forces. Thus in Germany, it is a left reformist party - Die Linke – the product of the fusion of the ex-Stalinists of the PDS and a left wing of social democracy with Oscar Lafontaine, which occupies this space and which plans to take part in a social-liberal governmental coalition with the SPD and the Greens. Because we are not confronted with a high level of struggle, an increase trade-union membership, an increase in the membership of the left parties of left or the emergence of trade-union or political “class struggle” currents.
We want to build anti-capitalist parties, but hundreds of sympathisers and militants are only coming towards us because we are the left that fights, that does not let anything go, that is really on the left. They are not coming towards us on positions that are anti-capitalist, and even less revolutionary. It is a new situation and it is necessary, of course, to take this phenomenon as something positive. But in a context where the level of activity of the masses is not at its highest, the electoral pressures, the pressure from the media, and in certain situations, the institutional pressures can be very strong. That must encourage us to stress what must be the centre of gravity of the parties that we want to build, that is the class struggle and their anti-capitalist and revolutionary character: by involvement in the ongoing struggles of the workers, by links with the social movements, by striking a balance between our electoral work and the decisive place of our social intervention, by the control of our elected representatives, by the political education of our members.
Once again, it is an enormous challenge for revolutionaries but it is the best way of answering the new historical period than we are living in…
François Sabado is a member of the Political Bureau of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR, French section of the Fourth International), and of the Executive Bureau of the Fourth International.
NOTES
[1] Marea Clasista y Socialista is a regroupment of militants of the revolutionary left, including trade-union leaders of the UNT and militants who, having begun building the Revolution and Socialism Party, decided to join the Unified Socialist Party launched on the initiative of Chávez. For their point of view, see “Lack of organization of honest and consistent sectors which underlie revolutionary process”, by Marea Clasista y Socialista, International Viewpoint 395, December 2007.
[2] Socialist Democracy (DS), a tendency forming part of the Workers’ Party in Brazil, regrouping the militants who identified with the Fourth International, took the decision to support the participation of one of its leaders, Miguel Rosseto, in the Lula government in the capacity of minister in charge of land reform. The policy followed by the Lula government quickly led to tensions within the left of the PT and in particular in the DS, one of whose leaders, Senator Heloísa Helena, was expelled from the PT by the leadership for having opposed the counter-reforms of this government. Heloísa Helena, along with the members of Parliament expelled from the PT and important sectors of the PT left (including a minority of the DS) then decided to build a new party, Socialism and Freedom Party. The “Enlace” current regroups within the PSOL, among others, the militants of the Fourth International who have broken with the DS, which remains pro-governmental. For the debate between the leadership of the Fourth International and the DS, see International Viewpoint 389, May 2007.
ISSN 1294-2495 International Viewpoint, produced under the auspices of the Fourth International
Feb 01 2008
Michael Lowy
The exponential growth of attacks on the environment and the increasing threat of the breakdown of the ecological balance point towards a catastrophic scenario that puts in danger the survival itself of the human species. We are facing a crisis of civilization that demands radical change.
If capitalism can’t be reformed to subordinate profit to human survival, what alternative is there but to move to some sort of nationally and globally planed economy? Problems like climate change require the ’visible hand’ of direct planning… Our corporate capitalist leaders can’t help themselves, have no choice but systematically make wrong, irrational and ultimately - given the technology they command - globally suicidal decisions about the economy and the environment. So then, what other choice do we have than to consider a true socialist alternative?
Richard Smith
Ecosocialism is an attempt to provide a radical civilizational alternative, based on the basic arguments of the ecological movement, and of the Marxist critique of political economy. It opposes what Marx called the capitalist destructive progress [1] an economic policy founded on non-monetary and extra-economic criteria : the social needs and the ecological equilibrium. This dialectical synthesis, attempted by a broad spectrum of authors, from James O’Connor to Joel Kovel and John Bellamy Foster, and from André Gorz (in his early writings) to Elmar Altvater, is at the same time a critique of “market ecology”, which does not challenge the capitalist system, and of “productivist socialism”, which ignores the issue of natural limits.
According to James O’Connor, the aim of ecological socialism is a new society based on ecological rationality, democratic control, social equality, and the predominance of use-value over exchange-value. [2] I would add that this aims require: a) collective ownership of the means of production, - “collective” here meaning public, cooperative or communitarian property; b) democratic planning that makes it possible for society to define the goals of investment and production, and c) a new technological structure of the productive forces. In other terms : a revolutionary social and economic transformation. [3]
For ecosocialists, the problem with the main currents of political ecology, represented by most Green Parties, is that they do not seem to take into account the intrinsic contradiction between the capitalist dynamics of unlimited expansion of capital and accumulation of profits, and the preservation of the environment. Hence a critique of productivism, which is often relevant, but does not lead beyond an ecologically-reformed “market economy”. The result has been that many Green Parties have become the ecological alibi of center-of-left social-liberal governments. [4]
As Richard Smith recently observed : “the logic of insatiable growth is built into the nature of the system, the requirements of capitalist production. (…) Each corporation, acting rationally from the standpoint of the owners and employees seeking to maximize their own self-interest, makes individually rational capitalist decisions. But the result is that in the aggregate, these individual rational decisions are massively irrational, indeed ultimately catastrophic, and they are driving us down the road to collective suicide”. [5]
On the other hand, the problem with the dominant trends of the left during the 20th century - social-democracy and the Soviet-inspired communist movement - is their acceptance of the really existing pattern of productive forces. While the first limited themselves to a reformed - at best keynesian – version of the capitalist system, the second ones developed a collectivist - or state-capitalist – form of productivism. In both cases, environmental issues remained out of sight, or were marginalised.
Marx and Engels themselves were not unaware of the environmental-destructive consequences of the capitalist mode of production : there are several passages in Capital and other writings that point to this understanding. [6] Moreover, they believed that the aim of socialism is not to produce more and more commodities, but to give human beings free time to fully develop their potentialities. In so far, they have little in common with “productivism”, i.e. with the idea that the unlimited expansion of production is an aim in itself.
However, there are some passages in their writings who seem to suggest that socialism will permit the development of productive forces beyond the limits imposed on them by the capitalist system. According to this approach, the socialist transformation concerns only the capitalist relations of production, which have become an obstacle - “chains” is the term often used - to the free development of the existing productive forces; socialism would mean above all the social appropriation of these productive capacities, putting them at the service of the workers. To quote a passage from Anti-Dühring, a canonical work for many generations of Marxists : in socialism “society takes possession openly and without detours of the productive forces that have become too large” for the existing system. [7]
The experience of the Soviet Union illustrates the problems that result from a collectivist appropriation of the capitalist productive apparatus : since the beginning, the thesis of the socialization of the existing productive forces predominated. It is true that during the first years after the October Revolution an ecological current was able to develop, and certain (limited) protectionist measures were taken by the Soviet authorities. However, with the process of Stalinist bureaucratization, the productivist tendencies, both in industry and agriculture, were imposed with totalitarian methods, while the ecologists were marginalised or eliminated. The catastrophe of Tchernobyl is an extreme example of the disastrous consequences of this imitation the Western productive technologies. A change in the forms of property which is not followed by democratic management and a reorganization of the productive system can only lead to a dead end.
A critique of the productivist ideology of “progress” and of the idea of a “socialist” exploitation of Nature appeared already in the writings of some dissident marxists of the 1930’s, such as Walter Benjamin. But it is mainly ecosocialism which has developed, during the last few decades, a challenge to the thesis of the neutrality of productive forces, which was predominant in the main tendencies of the left during the 20th century : social-democracy and the Soviet communism.
Marxists could take their inspiration from Marx’ remarks on the Paris Commune : workers cannot take possession of the capitalist state apparatus and put it to function at their service. They have to “break it” and replace it by a radically different, democratic and non-statist form of political power. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to the productive apparatus : by its nature, its structure, it is not neutral, but at the service of capital accumulation and the unlimited expansion of the market. It is in contradiction with the needs of environment-protection and with the health of the population. One must therefore “revolutionize” it, in a process of radical transformation. This may mean, for certain branches of production, to discontinue them : for instance, nuclear plants, certain methods of mass/industrial fishing (responsible for the extermination of several species in the seas), the destructive logging of tropical forests, etc (the list is very long !). In any case, the productive forces, and not only the relations of production, have to be deeply changed - to begin with, by a revolution in the energy-system, with the replacement of the present sources -essentially fossil - responsible for the pollution and poisoning of the environment, by renewable ones : water, wind, sun.
Of course, many scientific and technological achievements of modernity are precious, but the whole productive system must be transformed, and this can be done only by ecosocialist methods, i.e. through a democratic planning of the economy which takes into account the preservation of the ecological equilibrium.
The issue of energy is decisive for this process of civilizational change. Fossil energies (oil, coal) are responsible for much of the planet’s pollution, as well as for the disastrous climate change; nuclear energy is a false alternative, not only because of the danger of new Chernobyl, but also because nobody knows what to do with the thousands of tons of radioactive waist - toxic for hundreds, thousands and in some case millions of years - and the gigantic masses of contaminated obsolete plants.
Solar energy, which did never arise much interest in capitalist societies, not being “profitable” nor “competitive”, would become the object of intensive research and development, and play a key role in the building of an alternative energetic system. Entire sectors of the productive system are to be suppressed, or restructured, new ones have to be developed, under the necessary condition of full employment for all the labour force, in equal conditions of work and wage. This condition is essential, not only because it is a requirement of social justice, but in order to assure the workers support for the process of structural transformation of the productive forces. This process is impossible without public control over the means of production, and planning, i.e. public decisions on investment and technological change, which must be taken away from the banks and capitalist enterprises in order to serve society’s common good.
To quote again Richard Smith : “If capitalism can’t be reformed to subordinate profit to human survival, what alternative is there but to move to some sort of nationally and globally planned economy ? Problems like climate change require the ‘visible hand’ of direct planning. (…) Our capitalist corporate leaders can’t help themselves, have no choice but to systematically make wrong, irrational and ultimately - given the technology they command - globally suicidal decisions about the economy and the environment. So then, what other choice do we have than to consider a true ecosocialist alternative?” [8]
In Capital vol. III Marx defined socialism as a society where ”the associated producers rationally organize their exchange (Stoffwechsel) with nature”. Only the producers? In Capital vol. I, there is a broader approach: socialism is conceived as “an association of free human beings (Menschen) which works with common (gemeinschaftlichen) means of production “. [9] This second reading is much more appropriate: the rational organization of production and consumption has to be the work not only of the “producers”, but also of the consumers; in fact, of the whole society, with its productive and “non-productive” population, which includes students, youth, housewives, pensioned people, etc.
The whole society in this sense, and not a small oligarchy of property-owners - nor an elite of techno-bureaucrats - will be able to choose, democratically, which productive lines are to be privileged, and how much resources are to be invested in education, health or culture. [10] The prices of goods themselves would not be left to the “laws of offer and demand” but, to some extent, determined according to social and political options, as well as ecological criteria, leading to taxes on certain products, and subsidized prices for others. Ideally, as the transition to socialism moves forward, more and more products and services would be distributed free of charge, according to the will of the citizens.
Far from being “despotic” in itself, planning is the exercise, by a whole society, of its freedom: freedom of decision, and liberation from the alienated and reified “economic laws” of the capitalist system, which determined the individuals’ life and death, and enclosed them in an economic “iron cage” (Max Weber). Planning and the reduction of labour time are the two decisive steps of humanity towards what Marx called “the kingdom of freedom”. A significant increase of free time is in fact a condition for the democratic participation of the working people in the democratic discussion and management of economy and of society.
Partisans of the free market point to the failure of Soviet Planning to reject, out of hand, any idea of an organized economy. Without entering the discussion on the achievements and miseries of the Soviet experience, it was obviously a form of dictatorship over the needs - to use the expression of György Markus and his friends from the Budapest School – a non-democratic and authoritarian system that monopolized all decisions in the hands of a small oligarchy of techno-bureaucrats. It is not planning itself which led to dictatorship, but the other way round: the growing limitations to democracy in the Soviet State, and, after Lenin’s death, the establishment of a totalitarian bureaucratic power, led to an increasingly undemocratic and authoritarian system of planning. If socialism is defined as the control, by the workers and the population in general, of the process of production, the Soviet Union under Stalin and his successors was a far cry from it.
The failure of the USSR illustrates the limits and contradictions of bureaucratic planning, which is inevitably inefficient and arbitrary: it cannot be used as an argument against democratic planning. [11] The socialist conception of planning is nothing else as the radical democratization of economy: if political decisions are not to be left for a small elite of rulers, why should not the same principle apply to economic ones? I’m leaving aside the issue of the specific proportion between planning and market mechanisms : during the first stages of a new society, markets will certainly keep an important place, but as the transition to socialism advances, planning would become more and more predominant, as against the laws of exchange-value. [12]
Friedrich Engels already insisted that a socialist society “will have to establish a plan of production taking into account the means of production, especially including the labour force. There will be, in last instance, the useful effects of various use-objects, compared between themselves and in relation to the quantity of labour necessary for their production, that will determine the plan”. [13] While in capitalism the use-value is only a means - often a trick - at the service of exchange-value and profit - which explains, by the way, why so many products in the present society are substantially useless - in a planned socialist economy the use-value is the only criteria for the production of goods and services, with far reaching economic, social and ecological consequences. As Joel Kovel observed: “The enhancement of use-values and the corresponding restructuring of needs becomes now the social regulator of technology rather than, as under capital, the conversion of time into surplus value and money”. [14]
In a rationally organised production, the plan concerns the main economic options, not the administration of local restaurants, groceries and bakeries, small shops, artisan enterprises or services. It is important to emphasize that planning is not contradictory with workers self-management of their productive units: while the decision to transform an auto-plant into one producing buses and trams is taken by society as a whole, through the plan, the internal organization and functioning of the plant is to be democratically managed by its own workers. There has been much discussion on the “centralised” or “decentralised” character of planning, but it could be argued that the real issue is democratic control of the plan, on all its levels, local, regional, national, continental and, hopefully, international : ecological issues such as global warming are planetary and can be dealt with only on a global scale. One could call this proposition global democratic planning; it is quite the opposite of what is usually described as “central planning”, since the economic and social decisions are not taken by any “center”, but democratically decided by the concerned population.
Of course, there will inevitably be tensions and contradictions between self-managed establishments or local democratic administrations, and broader groups of “concerned people”. Mechanisms of negotiation can help to solve much of such conflicts, but ultimately those directly concerned, if they are the majority, have the right to impose their views. To give an imaginary example: a self-administered factory decides to evacuate its toxic waste in a river. The population of a whole region is in danger of being polluted: it can therefore, after a democratic debate, decide that production in this unit must be discontinued, until a satisfactory solution is found for the waste control. Hopefully, in an eco-socialist society, the factory workers themselves will have enough ecological consciousness to avoid taking decisions which are dangerous to the environment and to the health of the local population… This does not mean, however, that the issues concerning the internal management of the factory, or school, or neighbourhood, or hospital, or town, are not to be taken into their hands by the local workers or inhabitants.
Socialist planning is therefore grounded on a democratic and pluralist debate, on all the levels where decisions are to be taken: different propositions are submitted to the concerned people, in the form of parties, platforms, or any other political movements, and delegates are accordingly elected. However, representative democracy must be completed - and corrected - by direct democracy, where people directly choose - at the local, national and, later, global level - between major options: should public transportation be free? Should the owners of private cars pay special taxes to subsidize public transportation? Should sun-produced energy be subsidized, in order to compete with fossil energy? Should the weekly work hours be reduced to 30, 25 or less, even if this means a reduction of production? The democratic nature of planning is not contradictory with the existence of experts, but their role is not to decide, but to present their views - often different, if not contradictory - to the population, and let it choose the best solution. As Ernest Mandel wrote: “Governments, parties, planning boards, scientists, technocrats or whoever can make suggestions, put forward proposals, try to influence people. (…) But under a multi-party system, such proposals will never be unanimous: people will have the choice between coherent alternatives. And the right and power to decide should be in the hands of the majority of producers/consumers/citizens, not of anybody else. What is paternalistic or despotic about that?” [15]
What guarantee is that the people will make the correct ecological choices, even at the price of giving up some of its habits of consumption? There is no such “guarantee”, other than the wager on the rationality of democratic decisions, once the power of commodity fetishism is broken. Of course, errors will be committed by the popular choices, but who believes that the experts do not make errors themselves? One cannot imagine the establishment of such a new society without the majority of the population having achieved, by their struggles, their self-education, and their social experience, a high level of socialist/ecological consciousness, and this makes it reasonable to suppose that errors - including decisions which are inconsistent with environmental needs - will be corrected. [16] In any case, are not the proposed alternatives - the blind market or an ecological dictatorship of “experts” - much more dangerous than the democratic process, with all its contradictions?
It is true that planning requires the existence of executive/technical bodies, in charge of putting into practice what has been decided, but if they are under permanent democratic control from below, they are not necessarily more authoritarian than, say, the administration of the post-office services. The experience of participative budgets in Brazil, at a local and even provincial level, is, in spite of its obvious limitations, an interesting example of such direct democratic practices. Of course, one cannot expect the majority of the people to spend all their free time in self-management or participatory meetings; as Ernest Mandel commented, “self-administration does not entail the disappearance of delegation, it combines decision-making by the citizens with stricter control of delegates by their respective electorate”. [17]
There is no room here for a detailed discussion of other conceptions of planning, such as “market socialism”, social ecology (Murray Bookchin), etc. Just a few words about Michael Albert “participatory economy” (parecon), which has been the object of some debate in the Global Justice movement. This conception has some common features with the one here proposed - eco-socialist planning – such as: opposition to the capitalist market and to bureaucratic planning, a reliance on worker’s self organisation, anti-authoritarianism. There are however some serious shortcomings in this proposition, which seems to ignore ecology, and assimilates “socialism” to the bureaucratic/centralized Soviet model.
Michael Albert idea of participatory planning is based on a complex institutional construction: “The participants in participatory planning are the workers’ councils and federations, the consumers’ councils and federations, and various Iteration Facilitation Boards (IFBs). Conceptually, the planning procedure is quite simple. An IFB announces what we call “indicative prices” for all goods, resources, categories of labour, and capital. Consumers’ councils and federations respond with consumption proposals taking the indicative prices of final goods and services as estimates of the social cost of providing them. Workers councils and federations respond with production proposals listing the outputs they would make available and the inputs they would need to produce them, again, taking the indicative prices as estimates of the social benefits of outputs and true opportunity costs of inputs. An IFB then calculates the excess demand or supply for each good and adjusts the indicative price for the good up, or down, in light of the excess demand or supply, and in accord with socially agreed algorithms. Using the new indicative prices, consumers and workers councils and federations revise and resubmit their proposals. (…) In place of rule over workers by capitalists or by coordinators, parecon is an economy in which workers and consumers together cooperatively determine their economic options and benefit from them in ways fostering equity, solidarity, diversity, and self-management. “[18]
The main problem with this conception - which, by the way, is not “quite simple” but extremely elaborate and sometimes quite obscure – is that it seems to reduce “planning” to a sort of negotiation between producers and consumers on the issue of prices, inputs and outputs, supply and demand. For instance, the branch worker’s council of the car producing industry would meet with the council of consumers to discuss prices and to adapt supply to demand. What this leaves out is precisely what constitutes the main issue of ecosocialist planning: a reorganization of the transport system, radically reducing the place of the private car. Since ecosocialism requires entire branches of industry to disappear - nuclear plants, for instance - and the massive investment in small or almost non-existent branches (e.g. solar energy) how can this be dealt by “cooperative negotiations” between the existing units of production and consumer councils on “inputs” and “indicative prices” ?
Albert’s model mirrors the existing technological and productive structure, and is too “economistic” to take into account global, socio-political, and socio-ecological interests of the population, the interests of the individuals, as citizens and as human beings, which cannot be reduced to their economic interests as producers and consumers. He leaves out not only the State as an institution - a respectable option - but politics as the confrontation, at the level of global societies, of different economic, social, political, ecological, cultural and civilizational options.
The passage from capitalist “destructive progress” to socialism is an historical process, a permanent revolutionary transformation of society, culture and mentalities - and politics in the sense just defined cannot be but central to this process. It is important to emphasize that such a process cannot begin without a revolutionary transformation of social and political structures, and the active support, by the vast majority of the population, of an ecosocialist program. The development of socialist consciousness and ecological awareness is a process, where the decisive factor is peoples own collective experience of struggle, from local and partial confrontations to the radical change of society.
This transition would lead not only to a new mode of production and an egalitarian and democratic society, but also to an alternative mode of life, a new ecosocialist civilization, beyond the reign of money, beyond consumption habits artificially produced by advertising, and beyond the unlimited production of commodities that are useless and/or harmful to the environment.
Some ecologists believe that the only alternative to productivism is to stop growth altogether, or to replace it by negative growth - what the French call décroissance - and drastically reduce the excessively high level of consumption of the population by cutting by half the expenditure of energy, by renouncing to individual houses, to central heating, to washing machines, etc. Since these and similar measures of draconian austerity risk being quite unpopular, some of them play with the idea of a sort of “ecological dictatorship”. [19]
Against such pessimistic views, socialist optimists believe that technical progress and the use of renewable sources of energy will permit an unlimited growth and abundance, so that each can receive “according to his needs”.
It seems to me that these two schools share a purely quantitative conception of - positive or negative - “growth”, or of the development of productive forces. There is a third position, which seems to me more appropriate: a qualitative transformation of development. This means putting an end to the monstrous waste of resources by capitalism, based on the production, in a large scale, of useless and/or harmful products: the armaments industry is a good example, but a great part of the “goods” produced in capitalism - with their inbuilt obsolescence - have no other usefulness but to generate profit for the great corporations. The issue is not “excessive consumption” in abstract, but the prevalent type of consumption, based as it is on conspicuous appropriation, massive waste, mercantile alienation, obsessive accumulation of goods, and the compulsive acquisition of pseudo-novelties imposed by “fashion”. A new society would orient production towards the satisfaction of authentic needs, beginning with those which could be described as “biblical” - water, food, clothing, housing - but including also the basic services: health, education, transport, culture.
Obviously, the countries of the South, were these needs are very far from being satisfied, will need a much higher level of “development” - building railroads, hospitals, sewage systems, and other infra-structures - than the advanced industrial ones. But there is no reason why this cannot be accomplished with a productive system that is environment-friendly and based on renewable energies. These countries will need to grow great amounts of food to nourish their hungry population, but this can be much better achieved - as the peasant movements organised world-wide in the Via Campesina network have been arguing for years - by a peasant biological agriculture based of family-units, cooperatives or collectivist farms, rather than by the destructive and anti-social methods of industrialised agro-business, based on the intensive use of pesticides, chemicals and GMOs.
Instead of the present monstrous debt-system, and the imperialist exploitations of the resources of the South by the industrial/capitalist countries, there would be a flow of technical and economic help from the North to the South, without the need - as some Puritan and ascetic ecologists seem to believe - for the population in Europe or North America to “reduce their standard of living” : they will only get rid of the obsessive consumption, induced by the capitalist system, of useless commodities that do not correspond to any real need, while redefining the meaning of standard of living to connote a way of life that is actually richer, while consuming less.
How to distinguish the authentic from the artificial, false and makeshift needs? The last ones are induced by mental manipulation, i.e. advertisement. The advertisement system has invaded all spheres of human life in modern capitalist societies: not only nourishment and clothing, but sports, culture, religion and politics are shaped according to its rules. It has invaded our streets, mail boxes, TV-screens, newspapers, landscapes, in a permanent, aggressive and insidious way, and it decisively contributes to habits of conspicuous and compulsive consumption. Moreover, it wastes an astronomic amount of oil, electricity, labour time, paper, chemicals, and other raw materials - all paid by the consumers – in a branch of “production” which is not only useless, from a human viewpoint, but directly in contradiction with real social needs.
While advertisement is an indispensable dimension of the capitalist market economy, it would have no place in a society in transition to socialism, where it would be replaced by information on goods and services provided by consumer associations. The criteria for distinguishing an authentic from an artificial need, is its persistence after the suppression of advertisement (Coca Cola!). Of course, during some years, old habits of consumption would persist, and nobody has the right to tell the people what their needs are. The change in the patterns of consumption is a historical process, as well as an educational challenge.
Some commodities, such as the individual car, raise more complex problems. Private cars are a public nuisance, killing and maiming hundreds of thousand people yearly on world scale, polluting the air in the great towns - with dire consequences for the health of children and older people - and significantly contributing to the climate change. However, they correspond to a real need, by transporting people to their work, home or leisure. Local experiences in some European towns with ecologically minded administrations show that it is possible - and approved by the majority of the population - to progressively limit the part of the individual automobile in circulation, to the advantage of buses and trams. In a process of transition to ecosocialism, where public transportation - above or underground - would be vastly extended and free of charge for the users, and where foot-walkers and bicycle-riders will have protected lanes, the private car would have a much smaller role as in bourgeois society, where it has become a fetish commodity - promoted by insistent and aggressive advertisement - a prestige symbol, an identity sign - in the US, the drivers license is the recognized ID – and the center of personal, social or erotic life. [20]
It will be much easier, in the transition to a new society, to drastically reduce the transportation of goods by trucks - responsible for terrible accidents, and high levels of pollution - replacing it by the train, or by what the French call ferroutage (trucks transported in trains from one town to the other): only the absurd logic of capitalist “competitiveness” explains the dangerous growth of the truck-system.
Yes, will answer the pessimists, but individuals are moved by infinite aspirations and desires, that have to be controlled, checked, contained and if necessary repressed, and this may need some limitations on democracy. Now, ecosocialism is based on a wager, which was already Marx’s : the predominance, in a society without classes and liberated of capitalist alienation, of “being” over “having”, i.e. of free time for the personal accomplishment by cultural, sportive, playful, scientific, erotic, artistic and political activities, rather than the desire for an infinite possession of products. Compulsive acquisitiveness is induced by the commodity fetishism inherent in the capitalist system, by the dominant ideology and by advertisement: nothing proves that it is part of an “eternal human nature”, as the reactionary discourse wants us to believe.
As Ernest Mandel emphasized: “The continual accumulation of more and more goods (with declining “marginal utility”) is by no means a universal and even predominant feature of human behaviour. The development of talents and inclinations for their own sake; the protection of health and life; care for children; the development of rich social relations (…) all these become major motivations once basic material needs have been satisfied”. [21]
As we have insisted, this does not mean that conflicts will not arise, particularly during the transitional process, between the requirements of the environment protection and the social needs, between the ecological imperatives and the necessity of developing basic infra-structures, particularly in the poor countries, between popular consumer habits and the scarcity of resources. A class-less society is not a society without contradictions and conflicts! These are inevitable: it will be the task of democratic planning, in an ecosocialist perspective, liberated from the imperatives of capital and profit-making, to solve them, by a pluralist and open discussion, leading to decision-making by society itself. Such a grass-roots and participative democracy is the only way, not to avoid errors, but to permit the self-correction, by the social collectivity, of its own mistakes.
Is this Utopia? In its etymological sense - “something that exists nowhere” - certainly. But are not utopias, i.e. visions of an alternative future, wish-images of a different society, a necessary feature of any movement that wants to challenge the established order? As Daniel Singer explained in his literary and political testament, Whose Millennium? , in a powerful chapter entitled “Realistic Utopia”, “if the establishment now looks so solid, despite the circumstances, and if the labour movement or the broader left are so crippled, so paralyzed, it is because of the failure to offer a radical alternative. (…) The basic principle of the game is that you question neither the fundamentals of the argument nor the foundations of society. Only a global alternative, breaking with these rules of resignation and surrender, can give the movement of emancipation genuine scope”. [22]
The socialist and ecological utopia is only an objective possibility, not the inevitable result of the contradictions of capitalism, or of the “iron laws of history”. One cannot predict the future, except in conditional terms: in the absence of an ecosocialist transformation, of a radical change in the civilizational paradigm, the logic of capitalism will lead the planet to dramatic ecological disasters, threatening the health and the life of billions of human beings, and perhaps even the survival of our species. * * *
To dream, and to struggle, for a green socialism, or, according to some, a solar communism, does not mean that one does not fight for concrete and urgent reforms. Without any illusions on a “clean capitalism”, one must try to win time, and to impose, on the powers that be, some elementary changes : the banning of the HCFCs that are destroying the ozone layer, a general moratorium on genetically modified organisms, a drastic reduction in the emission of the greenhouse gases, the development of public transportation, the taxation of polluting cars, the progressive replacement of trucks by trains, a severe regulation of the fishing industry, as well as of the use of pesticides and chemicals in the agro-industrial production. These, and similar issues, are at the heart of the agenda of the Global Justice movement, and the World Social Forums, a decisive new development which has permitted, since Seattle in 1999, the convergence of social and environmental movements in a common struggle against the system.
These urgent eco-social demands can lead to a process of radicalisation, on the condition that one does not accept to limit one’s aims according to the requirements of “the [capitalist] market” or of “competitivity”. According to the logic of what Marxists call “a transitional program”, each small victory, each partial advance can immediately lead to a higher demand, to a more radical aim. Such struggles around concrete issues are important, not only because partial victories are welcome in themselves, but also because they contribute to raise ecological and socialist consciousness, and because they promote activity and self-organisation from below: both are decisive and necessary pre-conditions for a radical, i.e. revolutionary, transformation of the world.
Local experiences such as car-free areas in several European towns, organic agricultural cooperatives launched by the Brazilian peasant movement (MST), or the participative budget in Porto Alegre and, for a few years, in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul (under PT Governor Olivio Dutra), are limited, but interesting examples of social/ecological change. By permitting to local assemblies to decide the priorities of the budget, Porto Alegre was - until the left lost the 2002 municipal election - perhaps the most attractive experience of “planning from bellow”, in spite of its limitations. [23]
There have also been a few progressive measures taken by some national governments, but on the whole the experience of Left-Center or “Left/Green” coalitions in Europe or Latin America has been rather disappointing, remaining firmly inside the limits of a social-liberal policy of adaptation to capitalist globalisation.
There will be no radical transformation unless the forces committed to a radical socialist and ecological programme become hegemonic, in the Gramscian sense of the word. Time is working for change, because the global situation of the environment is becoming worse and worse, and the threats closer and closer. But time is running out, because in some years - no one can say how much - the damage may be irreversible.
There is no reason for optimism: the entrenched ruling elites of the system are incredibly powerful, and the forces of radical opposition are still small. But they are the only hope that the catastrophic course of capitalist “growth” will be halted. Walter Benjamin defined revolutions as being not the locomotive of history, but the humanity reaching for the emergency breaks of the train, before it goes down the abyss… [24]
Notes
1. Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 1, Berlin: Dietz Verlag, pp. 529-530.For a remarkable analysis of the destructive logic of capital, see Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature. The End of Capitalism or the End of the World ?, New York,; Zed Books, 2002.
2. James O’Connor, Natural Causes. Essays in Ecological Marxism, New York: The Guilford Press, 1998, pp. 278, 331.
3. John Bellamy Foster uses the concept of “ecological revolution”, but he argues that “a global ecological revolution worthy of the name can only occur as part of a larger social - and I would insist, socialist - revolution. Such a revolution (…) would demand, as Marx insisted, that the associated producers rationally regulate the human metabolic relation with nature. (…) It must take its inspiration from William Morris, one of the most original and ecological followers of Karl Marx, from Gandhi, and from other radical, revolutionary and materialist figures, including Marx himself, stretching as far back as Epicurus”. (“Organizing Ecological Revolution”, Monthly Review, 57.5, October 2005, pp. 9-10).
4. For an ecosocialist critique of the “actually existing ecopolitics” - Green economics, Deep ecology, Bioregionalism, etc - see the above mentioned book by Joel Kovel, Enemy of Nature ch. 7.
5. Richard Smith, “The Engine of Eco Collapse”, Capitalism, Nature and Socialism, vol. 16, n° 4, december 2005, p;p. 31, 33.
6. See John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology. Materialism and Nature, New York, Monthly Review Press, 2000.
7. F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, Paris, Ed. Sociales, 1950, p. 318.
8. R.Smith, Ibid. p. 35.
9. K.Marx, Das Kapital, Berlin, Dietz Verlag,, 1968, vol. III, p. 828, vol. I, p. 92. One can find similar problems in contemporary Marxism; for instance, Ernest Mandel argued for a “democratically-centralist planning under a national congress of worker’s councils made up in its large majority of real workers”. ( “Economics of Transition Period”, in 50 Years of World Revolution, Pathfinder Press, 1971, p. 286). In later writings, he refers rather to “producers/consumers”.
10. Ernest Mandel defined planning in the following terms : “ An economy governed by a plan implies…that society’s relatively scarce resources are not apportioned blindly (“behind the backs of the producer-consumer”) by the play of the law of value but that they are consciously allocated according to previously established priorities. In a transitional economy were socialist democracy prevails, the mass of the working people) democratically determine this choice of priorities”. (“Economics of Transition Period”, p. 282).
11. “From the point of view of the mass of workers, sacrifices imposed by bureaucratic arbitrariness are neither more nor less ‘acceptable’ than sacrifices imposed by the blind mechanisms of the market. These represent only two different forms of the same alienation.” (“Economics of Transition Period”, p. 285). We are often going to quote from the writings of Ernest Mandel, because he is the most articulate socialist theoretician of democratic planning. But it should be said that until the late 1980’s he did not include the ecological issue aa a central aspect of his economic arguments.
12. In his remarkable recent book on socialism the Argentinian Marxist economist Claudio Katz emphasized that democratic planning, supervised from bellow by the majority of the population, “is not identical with absolute centralisation, total statisation, war communism or command economy. The transition requires the primacy of planning over the market, but not the suppression of the market variables. The combination between both instances should be adapted to each situation and each country.”. However, “the aim of the socialist process is not to keep an unchanged equilibrium between the plan and the market, but to promote a progressive loss of the market positions”. (C.Katz, El porvenir del Socialismo, Buenos Aires, Herramienta/Imago Mundi, 2004, pp. 47-48.
13. Anti-Dühring, p. 349.
14. Joel Kovel, Enemy of Nature, p. 215.
15. E.Mandel, Power and Money, p. 209.
16. Ernest Mandel observed : “We do not believe that the ‘majority is always right’ (…). Everybody does make mistakes. This will certainly be true of the majority of citizens, of the majority of the producers, and of the majority of the consumers alike. But there will be one basic difference between them and their predecessors. In any system of unequal power (…) those who make the wrong decisions about the allocation of resources are rarely those who pay for the consequences of their mistakes (…). Provided there exists real political democracy, r eal cultural choice and information, it is hard to believe that the majority would prefer to see their woods die (…) or their hospitals understaffed, rather than rapidly to correct their mistaken allocations”. (“In defense of socialist planning”, New Left Review, n° 159, October 1986, p. 31.)
17. E.Mandel, Power and Money, p. 204.
18. Michael Albert, Participatory Econopmics. Life After Capitalism, London, Verso, 2003, ch. 9.
19. Ernest Mandel was sceptical of rapid changes in consumer habitts , such as the private car : “If, in spite of every environmental and other argument, they [the producers and consumers] wanted to maintain the dominance of the private motor car and to continue polluting their cities, that would be their right. Changes in long-standing consumer orientations are generally slow - there can be few who believe that workers in the United States would abandon their attachment to the automobile the day after a socialist revolution”. (“In defense of socialist planning”, p. 30). While Mandel is right in insisting that changes in consumption patterns are not to be imposed, he seriously underestimates the impact that a system of extensive and free of charge public transports would have, as well as the assentiment of the majority of the citizens - already today, in several great European cities - for measures restricting automobile circulation.
20. Ernest Mandel, Power and Money. A Marxist Theory of Bureaucracy, London, Verso, 1992, p. 206.
21. D. Singer, Whose Millenium ? Theirs or Ours ? New York, Monthly Review Press, 1999, pp. 259-260.
22. See S. Baierle, “The Porto Alegre Thermidor”, in Socialist Register 2003.
23. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Vomume I/3, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980, p. 1232.
* This texte has been published, under a somehow reduced form, by “the Socialist Register 2007”. Some corrections introduced by the editors are not included here.