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Theory September 4, 2020 Alex Demirovi

History teaches us nothing, so said Social Democratic Party (SPD) leader Andrea Nahles, to justify discontinuing the SPDs Historical Commission. Long ago, Rosa Luxemburg took the opposite position: history is the only true teacher (GW 4: 480). Perhaps history really doesnt teach us how we should act immediately in our current situation. This is true in general, and also in very specific circumstances. Were we not convinced that the tradition of critical fascist analysis would give us the concepts to resist developments in capitalist society that tend toward an erosion of democracy, toward authoritarian and exceptional state forms which drastically worsen the prospects of emancipation? Didnt we believe that, equipped with this knowledge, with all our historical interrogations, we would be better able to resist and defeat right-wing forces? It appears not to be the case.

But history teaches us something much more fundamental, namely that our present moment is the present of a history. In this present, the struggles and the missed opportunities of the past are condensed in a special way. It is not a question of what might have been, but of concrete decisions, of victories and defeats, of real alternatives. It also teaches us that once decisions have been made, they actually result in long-term developments.

The different attempts made to realize socialism, many of which proved to be wrong or senseless, which failed or were defeated, are all a part of our presents history. Because of these previous attempts, many things associated with the name socialism are now considered historically obsolete, out-dated, or discredited. There are several reasons why this is the case. Socialism was associated with practices that contradicted and discredited socialisms emancipatory ambitions. In many cases it is doubtful that those who acted and spoke in the name of socialist objectives were pursuing anything more than the selfish interests of individual functionaries.

Yet it would be a false consolation to think that an idea that was good in itself was merely abused. Indeed, the ideas and concepts of socialism are the subject of discussion and conflict. Understood in this way, there is no definition of socialism which is valid a priori; rather there are a range of suggestions for how to define it. In many cases, the term encompassed particular social groups who (for a time rightly) believed that they embodied the general will, but who did not understand that the concept of socialism in whose name they were acting was a compromise that enjoyed the support of many people only due to the circumstances prevailing at that moment. They wanted to cling to this moment and this claim to universality, and enforce stability. Unable to adapt to the changes in the social constellation, they denounced different ways of life, perspectives, or contradictions as deviations, or pathologized their critics. In this way, socialism was not an open, free, social organization of collective life, but rather remained limited to certain social groups and their life situations (certain groups of industrial workers, special modes of production, for example large industrial factories in urban regions, and related forms of work organization), which claimed to be universal.

According to this claim, socialism is the only social form through which contradictions are consciously lived and worked out. This is why Karl Korsch was able to say that socialist society needs to be more skilled at processing contradictions, or in other words, that socialism is actually more complex than the capitalist form of social organization. This is because it no longer denies the contradictions and consigns them to anonymous social processes, such as the conflict between consumers and producers over products and product quantities, over working hours or shares in the overall productive output, or over ecological consequences. In this context, Marxs unique contribution to the socialist tradition was to take the objective existence of contradictions seriously, to articulate and analyse them, but without moralizing, sugar-coating, or erasing them through the states claims to universality, or to suppress them by administrative means.

If there are differences and contradictions between the claims to universality and the various social groups, their interests, and needs, then there is a need for forms which can mediate contradictions and tensions between the universal and the particular. Democracy is the process through which this happens. It is a regulated process in which individuals debate about what can be considered universal in a specific situation. Negotiations about universal interests impact the direction in which society as a whole develops. This can involve all aspects of society, including its products, its work processes, educational and qualification processes, forms of housing and town planning, nutrition, and gendered and familial divisions of labour.

Whether due to a lack of effort or other reasons, state socialisms failed to democratically regulate these processes of reconciling universal interests with the diverse interests of particular groups. Although the socialist states saw themselves as democratic peoples republics, hardly any democratic processes of mediating between different interest groups were initiated. Though they often held onto the political form of parliaments and parties, the internal logic of these forms was blocked in order to maintain the Communist or Socialist parties monopoly on power, so that universal interests were not defined through open discussion, but rather by the most powerful working-class party. The workers did not make decisions on matters that affected them. There were no experiments with other forms of democratic coordination (such as those discussed throughout the history of the socialist movement) which would have enabled the workers and the members of society to participate in defining claims to universality.

The bourgeois class can allow its internal differences to find expression by distributing power among several competing parties and political institutions. The left has so far contributed little to the development of a conception of the limitation of political power, or what Michel Foucault called a socialist art of government or governmentality. This is certainly one aspect that has contributed to its defeat. For when it comes to gathering together many different groups and interests under one concept of universality, then it is also necessary that all those involved are able to remove themselves from this alliance without being subjected to negative consequences. They must be able to anticipate this and expect to be able to present a modified, perhaps even different concept of the universal.

It is a very curious thing when people say that socialism has been discredited. Socialism occupies one of the deepest layers of modern society itself. A modern society based on capitalist methods of production would not exist without socialism. This society cannot be separated into an objective reality on the one side and different ideologies and political tendencies on the other, which would include not only liberalism and conservatism but also socialism, which, after it has destroyed its reputation, can then simply be cast aside. Even if there may have been socialisms before modern socialism just as there was class rule and the appropriation of the surplus product by those who did not produce it it was only constituted in modern capitalist society through a series of disputes. It is an aspect of the real movement of this society, not a value or norm that might be added externally to a given reality. Socialism is the name given to those internal tendencies in capitalist society that are necessary to solve the large problems of social development.

These large problems are historically new in this form, because humanity only comes to observe and understand itself as a collective actor under capitalism. People can analyse the exploitation of nature and the disturbance of the Earths metabolism. For example, they know all about fish numbers, oil reserves, the extent of rainforests or whale populations. They are able to understand that economic crises that lead to unemployment, hunger, or migration are not due to unexpected natural processes like a bad harvest, but are caused by humanity itself; they understand that inequality is the result of disparities in education and skills. Humanity is aware of genocides, the global trafficking of human beings, the approximate number of slaves and sexual violence. Each of these major problems calls for concrete solutions: not merely for incremental improvements here and there, but for the problems in each case individually to be surpassed. We need to reach a point where we no longer need to search for solutions, because the problems have simply become superfluous, since they ultimately no longer occur.

Why lump all these efforts together under one single name, the name of socialism? For historical reasons so as not to obstruct access to all the experiences and attempts made at emancipation; so as not to remain naive in the face of all the decisions that have led to the present and which have all contributed to making life better and worse at the same time. But also because socialism refers to a specific moment in modern history. It is the keystone of the whole that holds everything together, since it is constitutively at the beginning of the constellation of the modern, capitalist way of life: wage labour, which makes it possible to produce the historically unique form of social wealth in a specific way money, commodities, means of production, company shares, assets, real estate.

The wage form is the social form which makes it possible to reproduce all other forms of exploitation and domination. It is impossible to change capitalist relations without also changing these forms; in other words, without overcoming wage labour, which refers to the fact that human labour-power is a commodity that must be moulded for the labour market and must strive to find someone who has a need for this commodity at market prices. This entails all the risks for individuals, including being left without work and income, earning too little, or ruining our own ability to work and being unable to actually enjoy our lives.

If socialism appears to be discredited today, then we must count this as a defeat. In light of this, the question arises as to why anyone is happy that this is the case. Because the failure of socialism means the failure of the project of the Enlightenment itself. Understood in this way, it is a matter of people finding the courage to free themselves from their self-inflicted immaturity, that is, from conditions that they create through their own actions and that confront them again and again with the same problems at ever higher levels. Everything progresses except the whole is how Theodor Adorno describes this circumstance. In fact, there is something malicious to criticisms of socialism, since they often misjudge socialisms historical significance.

One of socialisms decisive characteristics is its claim to rationality. The contradictions that permeate society can be openly expressed and, by consciously addressing them, can be avoided, overcome, or transformed into differences and otherness. On the basis of this claim to rationality, all mistakes, all contradictions, all dysfunctions that arise during a transformation of the way of life of a society can be attributed to socialism. Yet this transformation is confronted with extreme forms of nonsynchronism: with regards to peoples level of knowledge and education, their needs, regional developments, the state of production and services, ecological destruction, as well as the production of new, rational cycles of production and consumption. The temporal horizon of socialist transformation is more expansive than that of capitalist processes: this applies both to the past and to the distant future.

The socialist project bears responsibility and must be held accountable for what it tried and what failed in its name. The same does not apply to capitalism. Admittedly, social criticism (particularly that of a left-wing and socialist stripe) attempts to attribute many of our societys problems to capitalism. But these efforts struggle to gain traction; and this is not because there are a host of intellectuals fighting against such an attribution, who work to prevent the formation of such an empty signifier in which violence, wars, and genocides, the destruction of human lives, exploitation, ecological catastrophes, the sexist and racist denigration of human beings is symbolically condensed into the ultimate, morally debased antagonist. Rather the defenders of capitalism point to the complexity of our society, which makes it difficult to attribute these social evils to any one cause.

Nobody seems responsible for the melting of the glaciers and polar ice caps, or if they are, we all are. When it comes to explaining the causes, everything seems to dissolve into a plethora of details: fossil fuels and related industries, agriculture, the automobile industry, container ships, and cruise liners. It all seems fragmented, unplanned, random, uncoordinated the trans-intentional result of many different chains of action for which there is no primary cause. Anyone who tries to identify causes and protagonists, however, is portrayed as lacking nuance or even influenced by conspiracy theories. But the processes are internally interlinked, coordinated, complement each other, and form a constellation. Yet the capitalist reproduction process appears to be an anonymous systemic process for which everyone and no one, and perhaps even the majority the subalterns bear responsibility.

In the socialist tradition, Marx managed to address this perspective most seriously. Despite the fact that via liberal ideas of equality and freedom, of autonomy and the will to justice, a moral criticism of owners of capital is quite plausible and had often been proposed, Marx emphasized that it was mistaken to attempt to morally reproach individual entrepreneurs, capital owners, or politicians. For it is precisely the immorality of social processes that provides the impetus for demanding a transformation of the overall context that is consciously shaped by all. With his remarks, Marx was also able to make it clear that anonymity is not so anonymous after all, since different degrees of freedom already exist in bourgeois, capitalist society.

The bourgeois class is far more capable of determining capitalist relations, of maintaining itself as a social group amidst these relations which it is always reshaping, and of maintaining and changing the relations in its favour than is possible for people who do not possess capital and do not have access to bourgeois consensus-building events such as the World Economic Forum, who are not able to determine public opinion through their media and their cultural industry, who are not included in political decision-making processes, but who are above all objects of administration and useful instruments for the enrichment of fewer and fewer. It is a characteristic of developed modern domination that the wealth of the rich and the power of the powerful appear to be the incidental result of the implementation of practical necessities that supposedly serve the good of all. Only complex conceptual abstractions and statistical studies shed light on the systematic relationships.

Is it even possible for socialism to be defeated and to fail? In her final text, written after the January uprising in 1919 and shortly before her assassination, Rosa Luxemburg answers this question in the negative. The whole path of socialism will be littered with defeats, writes Luxemburg (GS 4: 536f). It is necessary to reflect further on this claim. Strangely enough, for Luxemburg it is not a tragic circumstance, where an unrelenting logic necessarily leads to a hopeless situation. The course of history is driven by its negative side. Defeat is everything that does not contribute to a change in conditions in the sense of a change in the mode of production.

Accordingly, victory is by no means the triumphant victory in a battle, as is sometimes imagined, but the process of implementing a free organization of cooperation, the elements of which are always already present. In this respect, a historical failure is always a moment in an ongoing evolution of understanding and of shaping social relations. This enables the freedom of others, an increase in individualization, where the free development of each person is enabled by the freedom of all, thus creating a dynamic of a continual evolution of freedom, rather than the kind of zero-sum game of freedom that liberalism imagines, under which the freedom of one person can only come at the expense of other people. Such a socialist idea of freedom is only conceivable on the basis of cooperation. For only in cooperation that is, under conditions of a sophisticated division of labour can individuals achieve more and greater things than would ever be possible by themselves alone.

This article first published on the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung website.

Alex Demirovi has taught at various universities, including TU Berlin and Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. He is Senior Fellow of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, editor of the magazine LuXemburg and chairman of the scientific advisory board of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

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Socialism and Accountability - The Bullet - Socialist Project

Evansville Courier & Press Published 10:53 p.m. CT Sept. 3, 2020

I publicly express gratitude to Sen. Mike Braun.Letters and phone calls with Sen. Braun and his staff have opened my eyes. I clearly seethat Sen. Braun and President Trump are spot on correct that the U.S. Postal Service is socialistic, and must be defunded to stop socialism in its tracks. Sen. Braun convinced me of this. Andhistory backs him up.

Reading tells me the U.S. Post Office was created by that pernicious socialist agitator Ben Franklin. Enough said, off with its funding. Sen. Braun has also convinced me that Social Security and Medicare are socialist programs that must be defunded, because they cut into business profits and morally weaken recipientsby making them dependent on government.

Social Security and Medicare, both pure socialism, both werefoisted on America by Democratic presidents, FDR and LBJ, both of whom were openly Democratic Socialists. I'm with Braun and Trump. Social Security and Medicare are socialist evils, off with their funding.Payroll tax deferment is a good first step in killing Social Security and Medicare.

Butwe must listen to President Trump, and permanently eliminate payroll taxin order starve out these two socialist blights. I salute Sen. Braun for the courage to support this defunding. We can't achieve President Trump's vision of a socialism-free America, if we continue to wallow in the open socialism of the U.S. Post Office, Social Security pensions and Medicare, now, can we? Trump 2020!

- Ron Nesler

Letter to the editor(Photo: File)

Read or Share this story: https://www.courierpress.com/story/opinion/2020/09/03/letter-rid-u-s-these-socialist-programs/5713018002/

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Letter: Rid the U.S. of these socialist programs - Courier & Press

READER and veteran SNP activist Hamish MacQueen was mildly criticised by two readers (September 1) for mildly criticising Carolyn Leckies fine article on the NHS. Actually, he merely added an addendum, by saying that the welfare state was more or less instigated by Lord Beveridge, a Liberal, and not a socialist. Whether Bevan or Viscount Earl Atlee or any Labourite was or is a socialist is a different debate and a matter of political opinion. We have had six Labour governments but never had socialism.

What happened to Keir Hardies ILP membership card demanding home rule, abolition of the House of Lords, etc? Ramsay Mac was a great republican socialist in opposition. When he became the PM of a Unionist coalition, he actually said the ladies would be kissing his hand in the morning and Labour have been kissing Anglo-capitalist, monarchist and imperialist warmongers backsides ever since.

READ MORE:Carolyn Leckie: The bold ideas we need to make the Yes movement unstoppable

Sir Winston Churchill, who was no socialist, delivered free milk as a Liberal Home Secretary. This was mainly to enable the British soldier to compete with the German soldier, who was taller, fitter and better educated. He stood on a home rule ticket in Dundee, to be beaten by a temperance home ruler.

England did not receive universal education till the late 1870s due to Church of England dominance. The English Queen is still head of the C of E, making her a god. Scotland had free education since the Reformation. Ireland was not allowed any kind of working-class education, leading to the illegal growth of hedgerow priests. The Liberals split over home rule and all the yoon parties still unite against Scotlands slightest interests or Scottish democracy.

The first welfare state in an industrial society was introduced by the anti-socialist Iron Chancellor of a united Germany, Lord Bismarck in the 1870s. He imprisoned, exiled and executed thousands of socialists. German socialist Car Liebknecht faced the firing squad singing, a mans man for a that. The Chancellors reforms were intended to make Germany a super race. By the Second World War, the GB wartime national coalition also realised that the British sojer was still behind the German super sojer in fitness and education and agreed on a comprehensive, cradle to the grave welfare state, with minor differences. Lord Beveridge resigned in disgust at Lord Viscount Earl Atlees failure to go far enough and Labour has been attacking the welfare state ever since.

One of the criticising readers also mentioned the Highland Free Health Service during the war and Tom Johnston, of Dover House, also hailed as the best Prime Minister Scotland never had. In fact, he was hailed as the precursor of harnessing Scotlands abundance of water to create the hydroelectric schemes. It was due to Winston Churchills desire to create plutonium for the atom bomb that was really responsible.

Tom Johnston was an ILP Scottish Republican who later reversed his position. He was also a millionaire publisher and pulped and withdrew his own excellent books on Our Noble Families and Histories of the Scottish Working Classes.

Hamish MacQueen, who served in Word World Two, is old enough to remember all this from personal experience. As someone who is about ten years younger, I am he was old enough to have fought against Lords Wilson and Callaghans anti-socialist austerity cuts and pay freezes, as a shop steward fighting their pay freezes through unofficial strikes.

They closed the Pilkington Fibreglass factory in Possil, where I worked, after a six-week anti-pay-freeze strike, whilst round the corner in the GKN nut and bolt factory in Mitre Street, Lord Martin of Springburn was also a shop steward, engaged in defending Labour and keeping his workers in.

Carolyn Leckie was a fine MSP who fought Lord McConnells class traitors in the devolved Scottish Parliament, so no criticism of her or the two National readers is intended.

Donald AndersonGlasgow

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We've had six Labour governments but never had socialism - The National

In another column, Ivison quoted one senior government official describing Trudeaus plan as a structural change in the way government in this country operates, and another saying, it is literally frightening. I am very worried about my kids future and their capacity to service that level of debt.

The CBC, likewise, has reported that the Liberals are planning to spend money on a scale that we havent seen before.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

Canadians should be incredibly wary of these news reports. Trudeau wants to remake our economy and reimagine our very country. Hes willing to spend any amount of money, to pursue any plans that any bureaucrat or Liberal official can think of.

The truth of the matter is, we already are spending money on a scale we havent seen before. At last count, our deficit for this fiscal year (which were only halfway through) is 10 times larger than it was last year. Our federal debt has surpassed $1 trillion for the first time in our history, and some are projecting that the 2020 deficit will tack on another half-trillion the equivalent of the total federal debt just one decade ago.

In 2015, Trudeau ran on a platform of modest deficits to finance infrastructure spending and an eventual return to balanced budgets.

Instead of his proposed $25 billion in new debt, Trudeaus deficits spiralled and he plunged the federal government into the red by more than $80 billion between 2015 and 2019.

Rather than being held accountable for his broken promises, during the 2019 election, Trudeaus campaign focused on demonizing Conservatives and, with the media on his side, Trudeau squeezed by with a minority government, which he took as a mandate to justify more of the same.

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MALCOLM: If Trudeau's proposing socialism, the people must be allowed to vote on it - Toronto Sun

John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon.

This article is a revised and extended version of a talk presented on July 12, 2020, to the concluding session (of the Main Forum) of the Seventh South-South Forum on Sustainability: Climate Change, Global Crises, and Community Regeneration. The Conference/Webinar was organized by Lau Kin Chi and Sit Tsui through Lingnan University in Hong Kong.

Any serious treatment of the renewal of socialism today must begin with capitalisms creative destruction of the bases of all social existence. Since the late 1980s, the world has been engulfed in an epoch of catastrophe capitalism, defined as the accumulation of imminent catastrophe on every side due to the unintended consequences of the juggernaut of capital.1 Catastrophe capitalism in this sense is manifested today in the convergence of (1) the planetary ecological crisis, (2) the global epidemiological crisis, and (3) the unending world economic crisis.2 Added to this are the main features of todays empire of chaos, including the extreme system of imperialist exploitation unleashed by global commodity chains; the demise of the relatively stable liberal-democratic state with the rise of neoliberalism and neofascism; and the emergence of a new age of global hegemonic instability accompanied by increased dangers of unlimited war.3

The climate crisis represents what the world scientific consensus refers to as a no analogue situation, such that if net carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion do not reach zero in the next few decades, it will threaten the very existence of industrial civilization and ultimately human survival.4 Nevertheless, the existential crisis is not limited to climate change, but extends to the crossing of other planetary boundaries that together define the global ecological rift in the Earth System as a safe place for humanity. These include: (1) ocean acidification; (2) species extinction (and loss of genetic diversity); (3) destruction of forest ecosystems; (4) loss of fresh water; (5) disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles; (6) the rapid spread of toxic agents (including radionuclides); and (7) the uncontrolled proliferation of genetically modified organisms.5

This rupturing of planetary boundaries is intrinsic to the system of capital accumulation that recognizes no insurmountable barriers to its unlimited, exponential quantitative advance. Hence, there is no exit from the current capitalist destruction of the overall social and natural conditions of existence that does not require exiting capitalism itself. What is essential is the creation of what Istvn Mszros in Beyond Capital called a new system of social metabolic reproduction.6 This points to socialism as the heir apparent to capitalism in the twenty-first century, but conceived in ways that critically challenge the theory and practice of socialism as it existed in the twentieth century.

In the United States, key sectors of monopoly-finance capital have now succeeded in mobilizing elements of the primarily white lower-middle class in the form of a nationalist, racist, misogynist ideology. The result is a nascent neofascist political-class formation, capitalizing on the long history of structural racism arising out of the legacies of slavery, settler colonialism, and global militarism/imperialism. This burgeoning neofascisms relation to the already existing neoliberal political formation is that of enemy brothers characterized by a fierce jockeying for power coupled with a common repression of the working class.7 It is these conditions that have formed the basis of the rise of the New York real-estate mogul and billionaire Donald Trump as the leader of the so-called radical right, leading to the imposition of right-wing policies and a new authoritarian capitalist regime.8 Even if the neoliberal faction of the ruling class wins out in the coming presidential election, ousting Trump and replacing him with Joe Biden, a neoliberal-neofascist alliance, reflecting the internal necessity of the capitalist class, will likely continue to form the basis of state power under monopoly-finance capital.

Appearing simultaneously with this new reactionary political formation in the United States is a resurgent movement for socialism, based in the working-class majority and dissident intellectuals. The demise of U.S. hegemony within the world economy, accelerated by the globalization of production, has undermined the former, imperial-based labor aristocracy among certain privileged sections of the working class, leading to a resurgence of socialism.9 Confronted with what Michael D. Yates has called the Great Inequality, the mass of the population in the United States, particularly youth, are faced with rapidly diminishing prospects, finding themselves in a state of uncertainty and often despair, marked by a dramatic increase in deaths of despair.10 They are increasingly alienated from a capitalist system that offers them no hope and are attracted to socialism as the only genuine alternative.11 Although the U.S. situation is unique, similar objective forces propelling a resurgence of socialist movements are occurring elsewhere in the system, primarily in the Global South, in an era of continuing economic stagnation, financialization, and universal ecological decline.

But if socialism is seemingly on the rise again in the context of the structural crisis of capital and increased class polarization, the question is: What kind of socialism? In what ways does socialism for the twenty-first century differ from socialism of the twentieth century? Much of what is being referred to as socialism in the United States and elsewhere is of the social-democratic variety, seeking an alliance with left-liberals and thus the existing order, in a vain attempt to make capitalism work better through the promotion of social regulation and social welfare in direct opposition to neoliberalism, but at a time when neoliberalism is itself giving way to neofascism.12 Such movements are bound to fail at the outset in the present historical context, inevitably betraying the hopes that they unleashed, since focused on mere electoral democracy. Fortunately, we are also seeing the growth today of a genuine socialism, evident in extra-electoral struggle, heightened mass action, and the call to go beyond the parameters of the present system so as to reconstitute society as whole.

The general unrest latent at the base of U.S. society was manifested in the uprisings in late May and June of this year, which took the form, practically unheard of in U.S. history since the U.S. Civil War, of massive solidarity protests with millions of people in the streets, and with the white working class, and white youth in particular, crossing the color line en masse in response to the police lynching of George Floyd for no other crime than being a Black man.13 This event, coming in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the related economic depression, led to the June days of rage in the United States.

But while the movement toward socialism, now taking hold even in the United States at the barbaric heart of the system, is gaining ground as a result of objective forces, it lacks an adequate subjective basis.14 A major obstacle in formulating strategic goals of socialism in the world today has to do with twentieth-century socialisms abandonment of its own ideals as originally articulated in Karl Marxs vision of communism. To understand this problem, it is necessary to go beyond recent left attempts to address the meaning of communism on a philosophical basis, a question that has led in the last decade to abstract treatments of The Communist Idea, The Communist Hypothesis, and The Communist Horizon by Alain Badiou and others.15 Rather, a more concrete historically based starting point is necessary, focusing directly on the two-phase theory of socialist/communist development that emerged out of Marxs Critique of the Gotha Programme and V. I. Lenins The State and Revolution. Paul M. Sweezys article Communism as an Ideal, published more than half a century ago in Monthly Review in October 1963, is now a classic text in this regard.16

In The Critique of the Gotha Programmewritten in opposition to the economistic and laborist notions of the branch of German Social Democracy influenced by Ferdinand LassalleMarx designated two historical phases in the struggle to create a society of associated producers. The first phase was initiated by the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, reflecting the class-war experience of the Paris Commune and representing a period of workers democracy, but one that still carried the defects of capitalist class society. In this initial phase, not only would a break with capitalist private property take place, but also a break with the capitalist state as the political command structure of capitalism.17 As a measure of the limited nature of socialist transition in this stage, production and distribution would inevitably take the form of to each according to ones labor, perpetuating conditions of inequality even while creating the conditions for their transcendence. In contrast, in the later phase, the principle governing society would shift to from each according to ones ability, to each according to ones need and the elimination of the wage system.18 Likewise, while the initial phase of socialism/communism would require the formation of a new political command structure in the revolutionary period, the goal in the higher phase was the withering away of the state as a separate apparatus standing above and in antagonistic relation to society, to be replaced with a form of political organization that Frederick Engels referred to as community, associated with a communally based form of production.19

In the later, higher phase of the transition of socialism/communism, not only would property be collectively owned and controlled, but the constitutive cells of society would be reconstituted on a communal basis and production would be in the hands of the associated producers. In these conditions, Marx stated, labor will have become not a mere means of life but itselfthe prime necessity of life.20 Production would be directed at use values rather than exchange values, in line with a society in which the free development of each would be the condition for the free development of all. The abolition of capitalist class society and the creation of a society of associated producers would lead to the end of class exploitation, along with the elimination of the divisions between mental and manual labor and between town and country. The monogamous, patriarchal family based on the domestic enslavement of women would also be surmounted.21 Fundamental to Marxs picture of the higher phase of the society of associated producers was a new social metabolism of humanity and the earth. In his most general statement on the material conditions governing the new society, he wrote: Freedom, in this sphere [the realm of natural necessity], can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism of nature in a rational wayaccomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy in the process of promoting conditions of sustainable human development.22

Writing in The State and Revolution and elsewhere, Lenin deftly captured Marxs arguments on the lower and higher phases, depicting these as the first and second phases of communism. Lenin went on to emphasize what he called the scientific distinction between socialism and communism, whereby what is usually called socialism was termed by Marx the first, or lower phase of communist society, whereas the term communism, meaning complete communism, was most appropriately used for the higher phase.23 Although Lenin closely aligned this distinction with Marxs analysis, in later official Marxism this came to be rigidified in terms of two entirely separate stages, with the so-called communist stage so removed from the stage of socialism that it became utopianized, no longer seen as part of a continuous or ongoing struggle. Based on a wooden conception of the socialist stage and the intermediary principle of distribution to each according to ones labor, Joseph Stalin carried out an ideological war against the ideal of real equality, which he characterized as a reactionary, petty-bourgeois absurdity worthy of a primitive sect of ascetics but not of a socialist society organized on Marxist lines. This same stance was to persist in the Soviet Union in one way or another all the way to Mikhail Gorbachev.24

Hence, as explained by Michael Lebowitz in The Socialist Imperative, rather than a continuous struggle to go beyond what Marx called the defects inherited from capitalist society, the standard interpretation of Marxism in the half-century from the late 1930s to the late 80s introduced a division of post-capitalist society into two distinct stages, determined economistically by the level of development of the productive forces. Fundamental changes in social relations emphasized by Marx as the very essence of the socialist path were abandoned in the process of living with and adapting to the defects carried over from capitalist society. Instead, Marx had insisted on a project aimed at building the community of associated producers from the outset as part of an ongoing, if necessarily uneven, process of socialist construction.25

This abandonment of the socialist ideal associated with Marxs higher phase of communism was wrapped up in a complex way with changing material (and class) conditions and eventually the demise of Soviet-type societies, which tended to stagnate once they ceased to be revolutionary and even resurrected class forms, heralding their eventual collapse as the new class or nomenklatura abandoned the system. As Sweezy argued in 1971, state ownership and planning are not enough to define a viable socialism, one immune to the threat of retrogression and capable of moving forward on the second leg of the movement to communism. Something more was needed: the continuous struggle to create a society of equals.26

For Marx, the movement toward a society of associated producers was the very essence of the socialist path embedded in communist consciousness.27 Yet, once socialism came to be defined in more restrictive, economistic terms, particularly in the Soviet Union from the late 1930s onward, in which substantial inequality was defended, post-revolutionary society lost the vital connection to the dual struggle for freedom and necessity, and hence became disconnected from the long-term goals of socialism from which it had formerly derived its meaning and coherence.

Based on this experience, it is evident that the only way to build socialism in the twenty-first century is to embrace precisely those aspects of the socialist/communist ideal that allow a theory and practice radical enough to address the urgent needs of the present, while also not losing sight of the needs of the future. If the planetary ecological crisis has taught us anything, it is that what is required is a new social metabolism with the earth, a society of ecological sustainability and substantive equality. This can be seen in the extraordinary achievements of Cuban ecology, as recently shown by Mauricio Betancourt in The Effect of Cuban Agroecology in Mitigating the Metabolic Rift in Global Environmental Change.28 This conforms to what Georg Lukcs called the necessary double transformation of human social relations and the human relations to nature.29 Such an emancipatory project must necessarily pass through various revolutionary phases, which cannot be predicted in advance. Yet, to be successful, a revolution must seek to make itself irreversible through the promotion of an organic system directed at genuine human needs, rooted in substantive equality and the rational regulation of the human social metabolism with nature.30

Building on G. W. F. Hegels philosophy, Engels famously argued in Anti-Dhring that real freedom was grounded in the recognition of necessity. Revolutionary change was the point at which freedom and necessity met in concrete praxis. Although there was such a thing as blind necessity beyond human knowledge, once objective forces were grasped, necessity was no longer blind, but rather offered new paths for human action and freedom. Necessity and freedom fed on each other, requiring new periods of social change and historical transcendence.31 In illustrating this materialist dialectical principle, Lenin acutely observed, we do not know the necessity of nature in the phenomena of the weather. But while we do not know this necessity, we do know that it exists.32 We know the human relation to the weather and nature in general inevitably varies with the changing productive relations governing our actions.

Today, the knowledge of anthropogenic climate crisis and of extreme weather events is removing human beings from the realm of blind necessity and demanding that the worlds population engage in the ultimate struggle for freedom and survival against catastrophe capitalism. As Marx stated in the context of the severe metabolic rift imposed on Ireland as a result of British colonialism in the nineteenth century, the ecological crisis presents itself as a case of ruin or revolution.33 In the Anthropocene, the ecological rift resulting from the expansion of the capitalist economy now exists on a scale rivaling the biogeochemical cycles of the planet. However, knowledge of these objective developments also allows us to conceive the necessary revolution in the social metabolic reproduction of humanity and the earth. Viewed in this context, Marxs crucial conception of a community of associated producers is not to be viewed as simply a far-off utopian conception or abstract ideal but as the very essence of the necessary human defense in the present and future, representing the insistent demand for a sustainable relation to the earth.34

But where is the agent of revolutionary change? The answer is that we are seeing the emergence of the material preconditions of what can be called a global environmental proletariat. Engelss Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845, was a description and analysis of working-class conditions in Manchester, shortly after the so-called Plug Plot Riots and at the height of radical Chartism. Engels depicted the working-class environment not simply in terms of factory conditions, but much more in terms of urban developments, housing, water supply, sanitation, food and nutrition, and child development. The focus was on the general epidemiological environment enforced by capitalism (what Engels called social murder and what Norman Bethune later called the second sickness) associated with widespread morbidity and mortality, particularly due to contagious disease.35 Marx, under the direct influence of Engels and as a result of his own social epidemiological studies twenty years later while writing Capital, was to see the metabolic rift as arising not only in relation to the degradation of the soil, but equally, as he put it, in terms of periodical epidemics induced by society itself.36

What this tells usand we could find many other illustrations, from the Russian and Chinese Revolutions to struggles in the Global South todayis that class struggle and revolutionary moments are the product of a coalescence of objective necessity and a demand for freedom emanating from material conditions that are not simply economic but also environmental in the broadest sense. Revolutionary situations are thus most likely to come about when a combination of economic and ecological conditions make social transformations necessary, and where social forces and relations are developed enough to make such changes possible. In this respect, looked at from a global standpoint today, the issue of the environmental proletariat overlaps with and is indistinguishable from the question of the ecological peasantry and the struggles of the Indigenous. Likewise, the struggle for environmental justice that now animates the environmental movement globally is in essence a working-class and peoples struggle.37

The environmental proletariat in this sense can be seen as emerging as a force all over the world, as evident in the present period of ecological-epidemiological struggle in relation to COVID-19. Yet, the main locus of revolutionary ecological action in the immediate future remains the Global South, faced with the harsh reality of imperialism in the Anthropocene.38 As Samir Amin observed in Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marxs Law of Value, the triad of the United States, Europe, and Japan is already using the planets bio-capacity at four times the world average, pointing toward ecological oblivion. This unsustainable level of consumption of resources in the Global North is only possible because

a good proportion of the bio-capacity of society in the South is taken up by and to the advantage of these centers [in the triad]. In other words, the current expansion of capitalism is destroying the planet and humanity. The expansions logical conclusion is either the actual genocide of the peoples of the Southas overpopulationor, at the least, their confinement to ever-increasing poverty. An eco-fascist strand of thought is being developed which gives legitimacy to this kind of final solution to the problem.39

A revolutionary process of socialist construction aimed at building a new system of social reproduction in conformity with the demands of necessity and freedom cannot occur without an overall orienting principle and measure of achievement as part of a long-term strategy. It is here, following Mszros, that the notion of substantive equality or a society of equals, also entailing substantive democracy, comes into play in todays struggles.40 Such an approach not only stands opposed to capital at its barbaric heart but also opposes any ultimately futile endeavor to stop halfway in the transition to socialism. Immanuel Kant spelled out the dominant liberal view shortly after the French Revolution when he stated that the general equality of men as subjects in a state coexists quite readily with the greatest inequality in degrees of the possessions men have. Hence, the general equality of men coexists with great inequality of specific rights of which there may be many.41 In this way, equality came to be merely formal, existing merely on paper as Engels pointed out, not only with respect to the labor contract between capitalist and worker but also in relation to the marriage contract between men and women.42 Such a society establishes, as Marx demonstrated, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right.43 The idea of substantive equality, consistent with Marxs notion of communism, challenges all of this. It demands a change in the constitutive cells of society, which can no longer consist of possessive individualists, or individual capitals, reinforced by a hierarchical state, but must be based on the associated producers and a communal state. Genuine planning and genuine democracy can only start through the constitution of power from the bottom of society. It is only in this way that revolutions become irreversible.

It was the explicit recognition of the challenge and burden of twenty-first-century socialism in these terms that represented the extraordinary threat to the prevailing order constituted by the Venezuelan Revolution led by Hugo Chvez. The Bolivarian Republic challenged capitalism from within through the creation of communal power and popular protagonism, generating a notion of revolution as the creation of an organic society, or a new social metabolic order. Chvez, building on the analyses of Marx and Mszros, mediated by Lebowitz, introduced the notion of the elementary triangle of socialism, or (1) social ownership, (2) social production organized by workers, and (3) satisfaction of communal needs.44 Underlying this was a struggle for substantive equality, abolishing the inequalities of the color line and the gender line, the imperial line, and other lines of oppression, as the essential basis for eliminating the society of unequals.

In Communism as an Ideal, Sweezy emphasized the new forms of labor that would necessarily come into being in a society that used abundant human productivity more rationally. Many categories of work, he indicated, would be eliminated altogether (e.g. coalmining and domestic service), and insofar as possible all jobs must become interesting and creative as only a few are today. The reduction of the enormous waste and destruction inherent in capitalist production and consumption would open up space for the employment of disposable time in more creative ways.

In a society of equalsone in which everyone stands in the same relation to the means of production and has the same obligation to work and serve the common welfareall needs that emphasize the superiority of the few and involve the subservience of the many will simply disappear and will be replaced by the needs of liberated human beings living together in mutual respect and cooperation. Society and the human beings who compose it constitute a dialectical whole: neither can change without changing the other. And communism as an ideal comprises a new society and a new [human being].45

More than simply an ideal, such an organizing principle in which substantive equality and substantive democracy are foremost in the conception of socialism/communism is essential not only to create a socialist path to a better future but as a necessary defense of the global population confronted with the question of survival. Dystopian books and novels notwithstanding, it is impossible to imagine the level of environmental catastrophe that will face the worlds peoples, especially those at the bottom of the imperialist hierarchy, if capitalisms creative destruction of the metabolism of humanity and the earth is not stopped midcentury.

According to a 2020 article on The Future of the Human Climate Niche in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, based on existing trends, 3.5 billion people are projected to be living in unlivable heat outside the human climate niche by 2070, under conditions comparable to those of the Sahara desert.46 Even such projections fail to capture the enormous level of destruction that will fall on the majority of humanity under capitalist business as usual. The only answer is to leave the burning house and to build another now.47

Although untold numbers of people are engaged in innumerable struggles against the capitalist juggernaut in their specific localities all around the world, struggles for substantive equality, including battles over race, gender, and class, depend on the fight against imperialism at the global level. Hence, there is a need for a new global organization of workers based on the model of Marxs First International.48 Such an International for the twenty-first century cannot simply consist of a group of elite intellectuals from the North engaged in World Social Forum-like discussion activities or in the promotion of social-democratic regulatory reforms as in the so-called Socialist and Progressive Internationals. Rather, it needs to be constituted as a workers-based and peoples-based organization, rooted from the beginning in a strong South-South alliance so as to place the struggle against imperialism at the center of the socialist revolt against capitalism, as contemplated by figures such as Chvez and Amin.

In 2011, just prior to his final illness, Chvez was preparing, following his next election, to launch what was to be called the New International (pointedly not a Fifth International) focusing on a South-South alliance and giving a global significance to socialism in the twenty-first century. This would have extended the Bolivarian Alliance for Peoples of Our America to a global level.49 This, however, never saw the light of day due to Chvezs rapid decline and untimely death.

Meanwhile, a separate conception grew out of the efforts of Amin, working with the World Forum for Alternatives. Amin had long contemplated a Fifth International, an idea he was still presenting as late as May 2018. But in July 2018, only a month before his death, this had been transformed into what he called an Internationale of Workers and Peoples, explicitly recognizing that a pure worker-based International that did not take into account the situation of peoples was inadequate in confronting imperialism.50 This, he stated, would be an organization, not just a movement. It would be aimed at the

alliance of all working peoples of the world and not only those qualified as representatives of the proletariatincluding all wage earners of the services, peasants, farmers, and the peoples oppressed by modern capitalism. The construction must also be based on the recognition and respect of diversity, whether of parties, trade unions, or other popular organizations of struggle, guaranteeing their real independence. In the absence of [such revolutionary] progress the world would continue to be ruled by chaos, barbarian practices, and the destruction of the earth.51

The creation of a New International cannot of course occur in a vacuum but needs to be articulated within and as a product of the building of unified mass organizations expanding at the grassroots level in conjunction with revolutionary movements and delinkings from the capitalist system all over the world. It could not occur, in Amins view, without new initiatives from the Global South to create broad alliances, as in the initial organized struggles associated with the Third World movement launched at the Bandung Conference in 1955, and the struggle for a New International Economic Order.52 These three elementsgrassroots movements, delinking, and cross-country/cross-continent alliancesare all crucial in his conception of the anti-imperialist struggle. Today this needs to be united with the global ecological movement.

Such a universal struggle against capitalism and imperialism, Amin insisted, must be characterized by audacity and more audacity, breaking with the coordinates of the system at every point, and finding its ideal path in the principle of from each according to ones ability, to each according to ones need, as the very definition of human community. Today we live in a time of the perfect coincidence of the struggles for freedom and necessity, leading to a renewed struggle for freedom as necessity. The choice before us is unavoidable: ruin or revolution.

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The Renewal of the Socialist Ideal - Monthly Review