A Rip Van Winkle Experience
When you have lived more than six decades, it is possible to have a Rip Van Winkle experience. Life may have assigned an aspect of the social universe you once followed closely to the bare horizon of your awareness, where it may have lurked for decades, and then events occur that make you again pay attention to it. When you do, it may seem that, like the fabled Van Winkle, you have been asleep and things, though not entirely different from what you once knew well, have substantially changed.

The “Death” of Socialism?
Not long ago socialism, especially in its Marxist varieties, was widely declared dead. Yet the economic debacles of capitalism in 2008-2009 have stimulated new interest in socialism and non-Stalinist Marxism. Many who in the 1960′s and 1970′s took socialism seriously turned away from such “passé” perspectives in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Perhaps they were convinced by the setbacks and reversals endured in the Latin American Revolution, in the Soviet bloc countries, and the turn of “People’s” China to capitalism that the best people could hope to achieve in their lifetimes would be a “progressive” holding action. Perhaps we might, through single-issue united fronts, non-governmental organizations devoted to social justice, and focused electoral interventions, set limits on sweatshop exploitation of labor, improve health care, halt the degradation of the environment, and win formal and enforceable approval of women’s and gay rights.

Reemergence?
Such people may not be ready to reconsider socialism. But it is worth noting that while attention has focused elsewhere (recently with the vocal right attacking Barack Obama, of all people, for being a socialist), socialism has been evolving, learning from tragic experience and from positive developments in other countries, and sometimes from self-criticism. It may be preparing a reemergence onto the political stage.

Less Rigidity?
One change I detect is the withering away of some of the arrogance and rigidity that sometimes characterized the old independent left. In the sixties the mindset of the self-consciously revolutionary left was subject to pressures deriving from (even while it opposed) the “advanced capitalist” system in countries like the U.S. and the elites, on the one hand, in the mainstream trade union movement and, on other other, in the Soviet and Chinese “socialist” bureaucracies. The “third world” revolution at times provided a source of inspiration for north-hemisphere radicalism, but it suffered great defeats (Che Guevara’s end in Bolivia, the overthrow of Allende in Chile), catastrophic mutations (Khmer Rouge in Cambodia), or distortions due to blockades and dependency on Moscow (the long-surviving Cuban Revolution itself).

We can begin to observe in today’s revolutionary left a new sense of the possibility of alliances between currents that used to be radically opposed, sometimes over issues that today seem minor; and a new sense that their still small groups, in spite of the rich intellectual heritage that they may represent, must no longer describe themselves as if they were the sole possible nucleus of the basic changes that are needed, but, to cite one example, each may provide a “perspective” that hopes to contribute to those changes and to the organized form that it may eventually require. Two pieces of evidence for this are: (1) The self-redescription by what appears to be the largest of the international Trotskyist (“Fourth International”) tendencies as a “perspective”; and (2) the warm remarks by Alex Callinicos, leading British socialist associated with the International Socialism tendency, toward that “Fourth International” tendency, at a memorial meeting for the recently deceased French public intellectual and Marxist strategist, Daniel Bensaid. Increasingly prominent is the realization that growing numbers, especially but not exclusively in the global south, are turning toward revolutionary socialism as an alternative to religious fundamentalism and the enthusiastic or half-hearted embrace of capitalism.

Renewed Understanding of Marx
A second aspect is the discovery, or rediscovery, of the depth of intellectual resources in the writings of Karl Marx himself. Recent studies of Marx’s writings have called into question the widespread view, inspired by the behavior of Social Democratic parties that were Marxist in origin, and by the experience of the Soviet Union from the late 1920′s on, that Marxism is insensitive to the ecological consequences of capitalism or the Soviet rush to industrialize, and, more deeply, that given its labor theory of value, Marxism is unable to acknowledge the central role played by the richness of nature in the creation of human wealth.

John Bellamy Foster

This turns out to be seriously mistaken, as shown in careful studies published by Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster, such as Marx’s Ecology, The Vulnerable Planet, and The Ecological Revolution. Monthly Review, founded by Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy in 1949, is an independent socialist periodical that has never affiliated with an activist organization, wagering that this better situates it to perform depth studies and analyses that will be of use to radicals without falling prey to the distortions sometimes emanating from more engaged organizations, which often associate too closely with “socialist” movements that have obtained a foothold in political power or labor bureaucracies.

A New Appreciation of Capital
In the 1960′s, it was possible to see oneself as a Marxist, and take the side of the oppressed in the class struggle, rooting for revolutions in the third world and hoping for one in the advanced capitalist countries, without much close study of the details of Marx’s critical assessment of capitalism and political economy (the latter was his term for the economists of his time who generally downplayed the internally conflictual tendencies of the dominant system). Even then, to be sure, many Marxists read a couple short books by Marx, Wage Labor and Capital, and Value, Price, and Profit. A deeper appreciation of Marx’s studies of capitalism reminds us of pressures inherent in capitalism as a system that exploits workers (in the technical Marxian sense) and over the long run pushes toward the ever greater exploitation of labor (in the global south as well as north).

Establishment economists emphasize market exchange, the sphere of circulation. In contrast, Marx, in his first volume of Capital, the only volume published in his lifetime, insisted on imaginatively following the worker into the factory after he had agreed to work for the capitalist in return for a wage. Marx thought in a new, critical way about the productive process and how, in return for wages equivalent to the value of a part day’s labor, the capitalist extracted several hours of surplus labor from the worker. In recent years, geographer David Harvey has developed a masterful series of lectures making this volume of Capital accessible for the new generation of activist critics of capitalism. He has just published an important and quite readable Companion to Marx’s Capital based on those lectures.

David Harvey

But that is not all. The inner dynamic of capitalism (the “laws” contingent on its existence as a system) appears to be also the source of most if not all of the major problems faced by the planet today. A better understanding of Marx’s analysis of capitalism, going beyond the first volume of Capital, has produced a growing recognition on the socialist left of the “organic connection” or tight interconnection between the deep structure of capitalism, on the one hand, and the apparently separate issues of anti-immigrant hostility in North America and in Europe, the more general attack on labor rights, wasteful consumerism, and the environmental depredations of extractive industries (fossil fuels, precious metal mining, and the like) on communities and the environment. Consumerism, for instance, results from capital’s “compulsion” to sell its products in order to “realize” its profits (regardless of whether human beings really need those products); and ecological disasters rightly linked to extractive industries (like BP’s Deepwater Horizon) are less driven by human need for resources than by capital’s “need” for relatively inexpensive inputs to enable consumerism and expand profits.

Ecology and Socialism
As a result, an increasingly conscious connection is being drawn by socialists between ecological issues and capitalism. Apart from Foster’s books mentioned above, I cite two more examples. Haymarket Press, associated with the International Socialist tendency in the United States, has published Chris Williams’ fine book Ecology and Socialism, which has some of the theoretical depth of Foster’s books but is better oriented for the education of activists. Another piece of evidence is the emergence of socialist groups consciously self-described as ecosocialist; for instance, the declaration by the Trotskyist tendency mentioned above, that has now chosen to consider itself ecosocialist. Eco-socialism has received a recent boost from Latin America with the recent global conference against climate change held in Cochabamba, Bolivia, last Spring.

Numerical Growth
A final point in my likely incomplete survey of “not your father’s socialism” is the end of decline and modest but significant growth in the number of activist groups committed to a socialist perspective. I have not systematically gathered evidence for this hypothesis, but it seems to be supported by interest in left publications, confirmed by a friend who runs a bookstore in the Detroit area, by David Harvey’s recognition of a growing audience for his work, and the judgment of the Fourth International that there has been a significant revival in recent years of interest and engagement in the struggle for system change.

Reading between the lines of the organizational report of another international tendency, the (also Trotskyist) International Marxist Tendency, at its recent world congress in Italy, seems to have also seen an uptick in their brand of radical socialist activism. My limited knowledge of the (formerly?) Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party led by Bob Avakian, which has been active, to judge from internet sources, on the antiwar front and in protests against the catastrophe in the Gulf associated with BP’s Deepwater Horizon, has prevented me from speculating about their recent fortunes.


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