Future socialisms
“SOCIALISM is dead; Long Live Socialism,” wrote fellow Berkeley scholar Roger Burbach in 1997, bravely predicting socialism’s rise in new forms even as older ones were falling. As capitalism’s damaging toll on humans expands hugely, the search for alternatives to the beast assumes urgency. Many think this means ending wage labour, profits and private capital, which they wrongly see as capitalism’s core.
But sociologist Karl Polyani argued that these had existed even before capitalism for long. Capitalism rose only in the 17th century when capital’s interests became society’s dominant logic to replace other human concerns, with a false promise that its sway ensures common welfare.
Capitalism expands its profits by penetrating all human spheres and coaxing humans to satisfy all their needs via markets that they are satisfying via family, community, state or nature for free, arguing that market solutions better cater to all human needs. But the ills of this idea, spread cunningly by owners of big capital, are visible now in high inequity, environmental loss, resource wars and irrelevance of millions of workers as AI spreads fast, as capital’s dehumanising interests hold sway even over human realms that transcend commercial logics. Thus, ending capital’s corrupting sway over all other human concerns is imperative.
Socialism is usually seen as a system with state-owned production assets. But Polyani’s insights about capitalism’s core inspire a new vision of socialism as a system with common welfare as its dominant logic/ aim (rather than an uncertain derived one as in capitalism) that allows all ownership forms that don’t nix common welfare. This vision can spawn many forms of socialism, as the plural in the title suggests. The Nordic model is a form built on private capital, with common welfare ensured via provision of public social services, big state investment in education, health, and other human capital services and strong labour-force protection via unions and safety nets.
Ending capital’s corrupting sway is imperative.
But poor states lack the globally competitive economies to generate enough taxes to fund a generous welfare state. They need a conjoint twin: a developmental-cum-welfare state where the first twin spawns an inclusive economy that gives income options to all able beings and the welfare twin that gives safety nets to the few labour-deficit beings. But new forms must avoid the ills of failed forms: over-centralised political and economic power that disempowers and disincentivises masses, kills energies and creativity and causes political autocracy and economic unproductivity.
Oddly, huge oligopolies are producing some such results even in capitalism that aged oligarchs did in former USSR. Donald Trump wants to keep afloat US oligarchies that can’t compete with efficient Chinese units, just as Soviet oligarchs tried against efficient US ones 50 years ago.
Politically, new forms must embrace multiparty democracy over a one-party system and disperse power horizontally and vertically. Empowered local bodies must empower community organisations to help gain market power, protection, assets, skills and social services. The economic system must be similarly devolved and encourage a wide range of ownership forms, ie, employee-owned, non-profit, producer cooperatives, dispersed ownership by different state levels and bodies and private companies, with a bias for micro, small and medium units.
The state must review the cause of poverty among small producers and labourers in rural and urban areas in different regions. Such bottom-up analysis will reveal not only the lack of economic and social investment by the state for such groups as key factors but also their exploitation and marginalisation by markets and local elites. This will give a wide, structural agenda that covers legislation, policies, strategies, projects, services and institutional reform at federal, provincial and local levels.
This major investment in poor regions will drive national progress as reduced poverty ignites win-win growth that benefits society. Our internal market is small, despite our large population, given low incomes. Increasing incomes will expand the national market size and profits for producers. This in turn will expand incomes for the poor and hence national market size and ignite a virtuous progress cycle. Local initiatives will tap local savings digitally to plough them into local investments. Smart regulation will replace deregulation and broader state units restructuring will replace only privatisation.
Such devolved and empowering socialisms will use the political and economic mobilisation of masses as the key force driving both a state and economy of the people, by the people and for the people.
The writer is a political economist with a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
Published in Dawn, November 26th, 2024