THE REPUBLICAN hyperventilating about socialists in the White House is nonsense. But the depths of the economic crisis and the Obama administration's break with the past, however timid, are opening up the debate about alternatives to a capitalist system that is inflicting so much misery and suffering.
Certainly, the recession-headed-for-depression has vindicated Karl Marx's critique of capitalism. As he argued, the blind, anarchic struggle for profit comes at the expense of human needs for the vast majority.
In his day, Marx described how capitalism gave rise to "a new financial aristocracy, a new variety of parasites in the shape of promoters, speculators and simply nominal directors; a whole system of swindling and cheating by means of corporation promotion, stock issuance and stock speculation."
Sounds a lot like the defunct investment bank Lehman Brothers--a firm that was, in fact, around back when Marx was writing his book Capital.
Marx also explained how financial panics can often magnify the periodic recessions that are endemic to capitalism. As Marx and his collaborator Frederick Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto, capitalism is "a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange [that it] is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells." That's a pretty good description of the current financial panic and recession.
Even mainstream journalists and economists have started to admit that Marx was onto something on this score. But they want nothing to do with the alternative he put forward: democratic workers' control of production, distribution and exchange.
Marx's vision of a new society has been smugly dismissed by capitalism's ideologues ever since. But the system's inevitable lurches into crisis have kept the authentic socialist tradition alive, despite the perversion of its ideas by Stalin's dictatorship in Russia and by pro-business social democratic parties like the British Labour Party.
The time has come to revive genuine socialism--not simply as a critique of the system, but as an organized force that can link today's struggles for jobs, affordable housing and health care to a different kind of society based on human need.
Certainly, activists need to be fighting for reforms in the here and now--opposing racist police violence, organizing unions, demanding that LGBT people have the right to marry and more.
But unless we ultimately uproot an exploitative system that gave us crazed financial speculation, enormous inequality, a gravely damaged environment and endless imperial wars, we will have to fight the same battles over and over again.
The socialist transformation of U.S. society won't come through a vote in Congress, Republican hype notwithstanding. It will be the product of countless struggles taking place now and in the future, which give rise to a militant, working-class left in the U.S. and internationally that can organize a fight to turn the very structure of society upside down.
Such a perspective may seem distant from today. But as the economic slump continues and the U.S. government rushes to take previously unthinkable measures to bail out the financial system, there's an increasingly urgent debate over what to do next. It's time to put socialism--the real thing--into the mix.
http://socialistworker.org/2009/03/11/the-return-of-socialism
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