State-less Socialism

I get called an oxymoron (which I guess is better than being called just a moron, by Warren Kinsella) for using the term Libertarian Communist.

When I pondered the title of this page I could have called it an anarchist, or anarcho-syndicalist, or autonomous marxist or a libertarian socialist, or left communist. But I decided to use the contradictory phrase libertarian communist. Which to me is embraces all these the ideas and those of the Anti-Parlimentary Communists, which included Sylvia Pankhurst, James Connolly and Guy Aldred.

My, my all these terms which are really interchangable. They really are only terms used for what Kropotkin orginally said of anarchism, 'we are the left wing of the socialist movement'. Why I use the term Libertarian Communist rather than Anarchist Socialist could be best illustrated by comparing the ideas of Marx and Benjamin Tucker .

Not to abolish wages, but to make every man dependent upon wages and secure to every man his whole wages is the aim of Anarchistic Socialism. What Anarchistic Socialism aims to abolish is usury. It does not want to deprive labor of its reward; it wants to deprive capital of its reward. It does not hold that labor should not be sold; it holds that capital should not be hired at usury. Benjamin Tucker

This is what I call distributist economics, that is the idea that the problem with the market place is distribution of goods rather than the social relations of production. Tucker was influenced by Prodhoun in this and it is the idea that the problem with capitalism is usury and monopoly, and could be summed up as a fair days wage for a fair days work.

In fact it is exactly that phrase which we get from the old labour movement of the time the American Federation of Labor, which was influenced by another 'anarchist socialist' Joe Labadie. Both Labadie and Tucker represent this American school of anarchist socialism.

Whereas the IWW took as their watchword Abolish the wages system. from Marx's essay Value, Price and Profit.

And for good reason, wages will never reflect thre real value of labour, merely its exchange value, the price paid for a good. In this Marx was using the original idea of gift economy, where the intrinsic value of the goods exchanged were determined socially, by prestige or importance of the person giving them, rather than their value as appraised in money or exchange value. Thus the call to abolish the wage system is a call to also end wage slavery, which is the source of all capitalist profit.

It is not a question of wages or prices; these are but the reflections of the social relations of capitalism. K. Marx

And this is where the Anarchist Socialist school of Labadie and Tucker diverges from what I call Libertarian or Anarchist Communism. Labadie and Tucker were the percursors of todays Libertarian movement, and still are. Whereas my position is closer to that of the older Anti-Statist Socialists and Communists.

Too often today Libertarianism is equated or associated with Ayn Rand, Objectivism, neo-conservatives, the Austrian School of Economics, and a host of other right wing theorists. The knee jerk reaction of many so called right wing libertarians (because they follow neo-liberal regulation economics I refer to them as liberaltarians for accuracy) I read or who occasionally post here, is to immediately equate ALL socialism as STATE socialism.

Idealistic socialists consider the socialism under Stalin’s state to be a far cry from what they want, which, if I understand their paradoxical philosophy correctly, is actually some form of voluntary socialist anarchy –In the end, state capitalists and state socialists will always find enough common ground to work together. They’ll continue to advance a corporate state socialism that no peaceful, freedom-loving individual wants. And so the rest of us, who reject the state and are willing to put all our other nominal differences aside, must stick together, at least in our attempts to push back the wave of statism imposed on us by the authoritarian socialists and state capitalists of all parties and all stripes.

Corporate State Socialism by Anthony Gregory

And this is their major failure in understanding the history of the socialist movement, which is where their libertarianism (anarchist socialism) originates from. They continue to mistake state capitalism (a historic evolution of capitalism) with socialism.

However there are some who you will find listed in the sidebar either under Blogs I Read, or A little Anarchy who are evolving a new debate amongst those of us that are Anti-Statists, Left Libertarians.

"Tom Knapp, you see — like Kevin Carson, myself, Professor Roderick Long and the Libertarian Left in general — holds that free-market anarchism is, in all essentials, fundamentally compatible with and/or identical to a genuinely voluntary, anti-state socialism." Brad Spangler

And it is not just the right that suffers from this knee jerk reaction, the left wing anarchists do as well. They like to dis and dump on Marx, Engels as well as the socialist and communist movements, as if the old fights over the First International of Bakunins day occured mere moments ago.

In doing so they often throw Marx out with the bath water, something even Bakunin wouldn't do, since he admonished anarchists to read Marx's writings. Their dispute was political, over the practice and formation of the revolutionary organization of the workers movement. Bakunin was fascinated with secret societies, as well as unions and direct action. Marx and Engels argued for public mass workers political parties, to win sufferage and democratic reforms of the state.

The anarchist movement was very broad, as broad as the entire socialist movement itself. It carried the seeds of the gay and womens movement in it in England, where anarchism and socialism were united in William Morris's Socialist Labour Party.

When those that talk of nationalization, without speaking of workers ownership of the means of production, they are speaking of state capitalism, not socialism.

The influence of anarhco syndicalism on the communist left and the socialist movement cannot be under estimated. Along with the workers councils (soviets) that arose in 1905 in Russia and again during WWI in Russia and Italy showed that workers could run production by themselves for the good of all.

It gave a model of real socialism, not state socialism, not nationalization of capitalist industry and not Prussian War Socialism which the Bolsehveks degenerated into. Rather it opened a door on a future socialism that was not parlimentary, but revolutionary, and not middle class; the social welfare state.

Here are some quotes from the radical socialist movement which sound like they lept off the pages of the Libertarian movement in their criticism of the State and State Socialism.

Man will be compelled, Kropotkin declared, "to find new forms of organisation for the social functions which the State fulfils through the bureaucracy" and he insisted that ''as long as this is not done nothing will be done."

Anarchism as a Theory of Organization Colin Ward (1966)

On the other hand the State has also been confused with Government. Since there can be no State without government, it has sometimes been said that what one must aim at is the absence of government and not the abolition of the State.

However, it seems to me that State and government are two concepts of a different order. The State idea means something quite different from the idea of government. It not only includes the existence of a power situated above society, but also of a territorial concentration as well as the concentration in the hands of a few of many functions in the life of societies. It implies some new relationships between members of society which did not exist before the formation of the State. A whole mechanism of legislation and of policing has to be developed in order to subject some classes to the domination of others.

The State: Its Historic Role
Piotr Kropotkin
(1897)

For ourselves, we consider that State is and ought to be nothing whatever but the united power of the people, organized, not to be an instrument of oppression and mutual plunder among citizens; but, on the contrary, to secure to every one his own, and to cause justice and security to reign.

The State
Frédéric Bastiat
(1848)

Finally, in its struggle against the revolution, the parliamentary republic found itself compelled to strengthen, along the repressive measures, the resources and centralisation of governmental power. All revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it. The parties that contended in turn for domination regarded the possession of this huge state edifice as the principal spoils of the victor.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Karl Marx
(1852)

Socialism properly implies above all things the co-operative control by the workers of the machinery of production; without this co-operative control the public ownership by the State is not Socialism – it is only State capitalism.

Schemes of state and municipal ownership, if unaccompanied by this co-operative principle, are but schemes for the perfectioning of the mechanism of capitalist government-schemes to make the capitalist regime respectable and efficient for the purposes of the capitalist; in the second place they represent the class-conscious instinct of the business man who feels that capitalist should not prey upon capitalist, while all may unite to prey upon the workers. The chief immediate sufferers from private ownership of railways, canals, and telephones are the middle class shop-keeping element, and their resentment at the tariffs imposed is but the capitalist political expression of the old adage that “dog should not eat dog.”

It will thus be seen that an immense gulf separates the ‘nationalising’ proposals of the middle class from the ‘socialising’ demands of the revolutionary working class.

State Monopoly versus Socialism
James Connolly
Workers’ Republic, 10 June 1899

There is not a Socialist in the world today who can indicate with any degree of clearness how we can bring about the co-operative commonwealth except along the lines suggested by industrial organization of the workers.

Political institutions are not adapted to the administration of industry. Only industrial organizations are adapted to the administration of a co-operative commonwealth that we are working for. Only the industrial form of organization offers us even a theoretical constructive Socialist programme. There is no constructive Socialism except in the industrial field.

Here is a statement that no Socialist with a clear knowledge of the essentials of his doctrine can dispute. The political institutions of today are simply the coercive forces of capitalist society they have grown up out of, and are based upon, territorial divisions of power in the hands of the ruling class in past ages, and were carried over into capitalist society to suit the needs of the capitalist class when that class overthrew the dominion of its predecessors.

What the Socialist does realize is that under a social democratic form of society the administration of affairs will be in the hands of representatives of the various industries of the nation; that the workers in the shops and factories will organize themselves into unions, each union comprising all the workers at a given industry; that said union will democratically control the workshop life of its own industry, electing all foremen etc., and regulating the routine of labour in that industry in subordination to the needs of society in general, to the needs of its allied trades, and to the departments of industry to which it belongs; that representatives elected from these various departments of industry will meet and form the industrial administration or national government of the country.

In short, social democracy, as its name implies, is the application to industry, or to the social life of the nation, of the fundamental principles of democracy. Such application will necessarily have to begin in the workshop, and proceed logically and consecutively upward through all the grades of industrial organization until it reaches the culminating point of national executive power and direction. In other words, social democracy must proceed from the bottom upward, whereas capitalist political society is organized from above downward.

It will be seen that this conception of Socialism destroys at one blow all the fears of a bureaucratic State, ruling and ordering the lives of every individual from above, and thus gives assurance that the social order of the future will be an extension of the freedom of the individual, and not the suppression of it. In short, it blends the fullest democratic control with the most absolute expert supervision, something unthinkable of any society built upon the political State.

Industrial Unionism and Constructive Socialism
James Connolly
From Socialism Made Easy, 1908.

Trade Unionism has conquered social power and commanded influence in so far as it satisfied and arose from the social necessities of the capitalist epoch. Because it has answered capitalist needs, the Trade Union has qualified for its modern position as the sign manual of skilled labour.

But the growth in social and political importance of the Trade Union leader has not menaced the foundations of capitalist society. He has been cited more and more as the friend of reform and the enemy of revolution. It has been urged that he is a sober and responsible member of capitalist society. Consequently, capitalist apologists have been obliged to acknowledge that he discharged useful and important functions in society.

This admission has forced them to assert that the law of supply and demand does not determine, with exactness, the nominal - or even the actual price of the commodity, labour power. Hence it has been allowed that Trade Unions enable their members to increase the amount of the price received for their labour-power, without being hurtful to the interests of the commonwealth-i.e. the capitalist class-when conducted with moderation and fairness.

Modern Trade Unionism enjoys this respectable reputation to a very large extent because it has sacrificed its original vitality. This was inevitable, since, in its very origin, it was reformist and not revolutionary. Trade Unionism has sacrificed no economic principle during its century's development. It has surrendered no industrial or political consistency. But it has not maintained its early earnestness or sentiment of solidarity. Had it done so, it would have been compelled to have evolved socially and politically. Instead of stagnating in reform, it would have had to progress towards revolution.

Our Trade Unionist friend, with his loose revolutionary violence and threatening, as opposed to a sound revolutionary activity, finding himself either consciously or unconsciously on the side of bourgeois society, will insist that there must be representation and delegation of authority.

To this I reply with the statement of Marxian philosophy, that every industrial epoch has its own system of representation. The fact that minority and majority rule find their harmonious expression in the political bureaucratic autocracy of capitalism signifies that its negation in the terms of Socialism shall embody a counter affirmative which embody the principle of true organisation and freedom of the individual idiosyncrasy. What the details of that organisation will be shall be made the subject of discussion in another essay. That it will not be "a Socialist majority" can be' seen from the fact that democracy usually signifies the surrender of majority incompetence and mis-education to the interests of minority expertism and bourgeois concentration of its power over the lives and destinies of the exploited proletarians, no less through the medium of the worker's Trade and Industrial Union, than through that of the Capitalist State.

Marx truly conceived of the bourgeois State as being but an executive committee for administering the ~affairs of the whole bourgeois class, which has stripped of its halo every profession previously venerated and regarded as honourable, and thus turned doctor, lawyer, priest, poet, philosopher, and labour leader into its paid wage workers. The Trade Union becomes daily more and more an essential department or expression of the bourgeois State.

Out of the class or property social system there cannot emerge a "representation" which signifies an honest attempt to secure just exposition of principles and expressions of antagonistic interests. Where there is no social or economic equality, there can be no democracy and no representation. The barren wilderness of money- juggling "freedom" cannot secure real personal liberty of being to any citizen. True organisation like true liberty belongs to the future - and the Socialist Commonwealth, or, as I have termed it elsewhere, the Anarchist Republic.

Trade Unionism and The Class War (1911)
Guy Aldred

Thus, economically, politically, and psychologically the whole of the trend of social evolution shows that Socialism can only have its social expression in an era of freedom, and its political expression in a State which shall treat of the management of production instead of the control of persons*. The psychological guarantee against expertism will be found in the contempt with which all men will regard it, and the tendency to excellence of administration ~ill be reposed in the admiration which all men will have for efficiency Should this possibility still meet with opposition on the ground that such a central directing authority finding its embodiment in a collective will, would not find legal oppression incongruous with its industrial basis, one cm only conclude that either humanity is inherently bad and progress an impossibility or else that in a system of absolute individualism must humanity's hope lie.

*Here the term 'State' is used in a sense entirely unhistorical. Such a political order is Anarchy and can only be termed a state in the sense of being a social condition

Representation and the State (1940)
Guy Aldred

Well thats all well and good and I could find more quotes to make my point but that is the past what about the future. Could we organize ourselves into self governing associations and federations? Could we replace the state with self governing anarcho communism? Why heck sure we could cause you are online in a libertarian communist gift economy right now.

During the Sixties, the New Left created a new form of radical politics: anarcho-communism. Above all, the Situationists and similar groups believed that the tribal gift economy proved that individuals could successfully live together without needing either the state or the market. From May 1968 to the late Nineties, this utopian vision of anarcho-communism has inspired community media and DIY culture activists. Within the universities, the gift economy already was the primary method of socialising labour. From its earliest days, the technical structure and social mores of the Net has ignored intellectual property. Although the system has expanded far beyond the university, the self-interest of Net users perpetuates this hi-tech gift economy. As an everyday activity, users circulate free information as e-mail, on listservs, in newsgroups, within on-line conferences and through Web sites. As shown by the Apache and Linux programs, the hi-tech gift economy is even at the forefront of software development. Contrary to the purist vision of the New Left, anarcho-communism on the Net can only exist in a compromised form. Money-commodity and gift relations are not just in conflict with each other, but also co-exist in symbiosis. The 'New Economy' of cyberspace is an advanced form of social democracy.

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Here are 10 things you need to know about socialism

By YES! Magazine - Commentary


What do we mean when we talk about “socialism”? Here are ten things about its theory, practice, and potential that you need to know.

Over the last 200 years, socialism has spread across the world. In every country, it carries the lessons and scars of its particular history there. Conversely, each country’s socialism is shaped by the global history, rich tradition, and diverse interpretations of a movement that has been the world’s major critical response to capitalism as a system.

We need to understand socialism because it has shaped our history and will shape our future. It is an immense resource: the accumulated thoughts, experiences, and experiments accomplished by those yearning to do better than capitalism.

In my latest book, Understanding Socialism (Democracy at Work, 2019), I gather and present the basic theories and practices of socialism. I examine its successes, explore its challenges, and confront its failures. The point is to offer a path to a new socialism based on workplace democracy. Here are 10 things from this book that you should know.

1. Socialism is a yearning for something better than capitalism
Socialism represents the awareness of employees that their sufferings and limitations come less from their employers than from the capitalist system. That system prescribes incentives and options for both sides, and rewards and punishments for their behavioral “choices.” It generates their endless struggles and the employees’ realization that system change is the way out.

In Capital, Volume 1, Karl Marx defined a fundamental injustice—exploitation—located in capitalism’s core relationship between employer and employee. Exploitation, in Marx’s terms, describes the situation in which employees produce more value for employers than the value of wages paid to them. Capitalist exploitation shapes everything in capitalist societies. Yearning for a better society, socialists increasingly demand the end of exploitation and an alternative in which employees function as their own employer. Socialists want to be able to explore and develop their full potentials as individuals and members of society while contributing to its welfare and growth.


Karl Marx, date unknown. Photo from Bettmann/Getty Images.

Socialism is an economic system very different from capitalism, feudalism, and slavery. Each of the latter divided society into a dominant minority class (masters, lords, and employers) and a dominated majority (slaves, serfs, employees). When the majority recognized slavery and feudal systems as injustices, they eventually fell.

The majorities of the past fought hard to build a better system. Capitalism replaced slaves and serfs with employees, masters and lords with employers. It is no historical surprise that employees would end up yearning and fighting for something better. That something better is socialism, a system that doesn’t divide people, but rather makes work a democratic process where all employees have an equal say and together are their own employer.

2. Socialism is not a single, unified theory

People spread socialism across the world, interpreting and implementing it in many different ways based on context. Socialists found capitalism to be a system that produced ever-deepening inequalities, recurring cycles of unemployment and depression, and the undermining of human efforts to build democratic politics and inclusive cultures. Socialists developed and debated solutions that varied from government regulations of capitalist economies to government itself owning and operating enterprises, to a transformation of enterprises (both private and government) from top-down hierarchies to democratic cooperatives.

Sometimes those debates produced splits among socialists. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, socialists supporting the post-revolutionary Soviet Union underscored their commitment to socialism that entailed the government owning and operating industries by adopting the new name “communist.” Those skeptical of Soviet-style socialism tended increasingly to favor state regulation of private capitalists. They kept the name “socialist” and often called themselves social democrats or democratic socialists. For the last century, the two groups debated the merits and flaws of the two alternative notions of socialism as embodied in examples of each (e.g. Soviet versus Scandinavian socialisms).

Early in the 21st century, an old strain of socialism resurfaced and surged. It focuses on transforming the inside of enterprises: from top-down hierarchies, where a capitalist or a state board of directors makes all the key enterprise decisions, to a worker cooperative, where all employees have equal, democratic rights to make those decisions, thereby becoming—collectively—their own employer.

3 .The Soviet Union and China achieved state capitalism, not socialism

As leader of the Soviet Union, Lenin once said that socialism was a goal, not yet an achieved reality. The Soviet had, instead, achieved “state capitalism.” A socialist party had state power, and the state had become the industrial capitalist displacing the former private capitalists. The Soviet revolution had changed who the employer was; it had not ended the employer/employee relationship. Thus, it was—to a certain extent—capitalist.

Lenin’s successor, Stalin, declared that the Soviet Union had achieved socialism. In effect, he offered Soviet state capitalism as if it were the model for socialism worldwide. Socialism’s enemies have used this identification ever since to equate socialism with political dictatorship. Of course, this required obscuring or denying that (1) dictatorships have often existed in capitalist societies and (2) socialisms have often existed without dictatorships.

After initially copying the Soviet model, China changed its development strategy to embrace instead a state-supervised mix of state and private capitalism focused on exports. China’s powerful government would organize a basic deal with global capitalists, providing cheap labor, government support, and a growing domestic market. In exchange, foreign capitalists would partner with Chinese state or private capitalists, share technology, and integrate Chinese output into global wholesale and retail trade systems. China’s brand of socialism—a hybrid state capitalism that included both communist and social-democratic streams—proved it could grow faster over more years than any capitalist economy had ever done.


4. The U.S., Soviet Union, and China have more in common than you think

As capitalism emerged from feudalism in Europe in the 19th century, it advocated liberty, equality, fraternity, and democracy. When those promises failed to materialize, many became anti-capitalist and found their way to socialism.

Experiments in constructing post-capitalist, socialist systems in the 20th century (especially in the Soviet Union and China) eventually incurred similar criticisms. Those systems, critics held, had more in common with capitalism than partisans of either system understood.

Self-critical socialists produced a different narrative based on the failures common to both systems. The U.S. and Soviet Union, such socialists argue, represented private and state capitalisms. Their Cold War enmity was misconstrued on both sides as part of the century’s great struggle between capitalism and socialism. Thus, what collapsed in 1989 was Soviet State capitalism, not socialism. Moreover, what soared after 1989 was another kind of state capitalism in China.

5. Thank American socialists, communists, and unionists for the 1930s New Deal

FDR’s government raised the revenue necessary for Washington to fund massive, expensive increases in public services during the Depression of the 1930s. These included the Social Security system, the first federal unemployment compensation system, the first federal minimum wage, and a mass federal jobs program. FDR’s revenues came from taxing corporations and the rich more than ever before.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, center, and his New Deal administration team on September 12, 1935. Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images.

In response to this radical program, FDR was reelected three times. His radical programs were conceived and pushed politically from below by a coalition of communists, socialists, and labor unionists. He had not been a radical Democrat before his election.

Socialists obtained a new degree of social acceptance, stature, and support from FDR’s government. The wartime alliance of the U.S. with the Soviet Union strengthened that social acceptance and socialist influences.

6. If 5 was news to you, that’s due to the massive U.S.-led global purge of socialists and communists after WWII

After its 1929 economic crash, capitalism was badly discredited. The unprecedented political power of a surging U.S. left enabled government intervention to redistribute wealth from corporations and the rich to average citizens. Private capitalists and the Republican Party responded with a commitment to undo the New Deal. The end of World War II and FDR’s death in 1945 provided the opportunity to destroy the New Deal coalition.

The strategy hinged on demonizing the coalition’s component groups, above all the communists and socialists. Anti-communism quickly became the strategic battering ram. Overnight, the Soviet Union went from wartime ally to an enemy whose agents aimed “to control the world.” That threat had to be contained, repelled, and eliminated.

U.S. domestic policy focused on anti-communism, reaching hysterical dimensions and the public campaigns of U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Communist Party leaders were arrested, imprisoned, and deported in a wave of anti-communism that quickly spread to socialist parties and to socialism in general. Hollywood actors, directors, screenwriters, musicians, and more were blacklisted and barred from working in the industry. McCarthy’s witch hunt ruined thousands of careers while ensuring that mass media, politicians, and academics would be unsympathetic, at least publicly, to socialism.U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy led a campaign to put prominent government officials and others on trial for alleged “subversive activities” and Communist Party membership during the height of the Cold War.


 Photo by Corbis/Getty Images.

In other countries revolts from peasants and/or workers against oligarchs in business and/or politics often led the latter to seek U.S. assistance by labeling their challengers as “socialists” or “communists.” Examples include U.S. actions in Guatemala and Iran (1954), Cuba (1959-1961), Vietnam (1954-1975), South Africa (1945-1994), and Venezuela (since 1999). Sometimes the global anti-communism project took the form of regime change. In 1965-6 the mass killings of Indonesian communists cost the lives of between 500,000 to 3 million people.

Once the U.S.—as the world’s largest economy, most dominant political power, and most powerful military—committed itself to total anti-communism, its allies and most of the rest of the world followed suit.

7. Since socialism was capitalism’s critical shadow, it spread to those subjected by and opposed to capitalist colonialism

In the first half of the 20th century, socialism spread through the rise of local movements against European colonialism in Asia and Africa, and the United States’ informal colonialism in Latin America. Colonized people seeking independence were inspired by and saw the possibility of alliances with workers fighting exploitation in the colonizing countries. These latter workers glimpsed similar possibilities from their side.

This helped create a global socialist tradition. The multiple interpretations of socialism that had evolved in capitalism’s centers thus spawned yet more and further-differentiated interpretations. Diverse streams within the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist tradition interacted with and enriched socialism.



8. Fascism is a capitalist response to socialismA fascist economic system is capitalist, but with a mixture of very heavy government influence. In fascism, the government reinforces, supports, and sustains private capitalist workplaces. It rigidly enforces the employer/employee dichotomy central to capitalist enterprises. Private capitalists support fascism when they fear losing their position as capitalist employers, especially during social upheavals.

Under fascism, there is a kind of mutually supportive merging of government and private workplaces. Fascist governments tend to “deregulate,” gutting worker protections won earlier by unions or socialist governments. They help private capitalists by destroying trade unions or replacing them with their own organizations which support, rather than challenge, private capitalists.

Frequently, fascism embraces nationalism to rally people to fascist economic objectives, often by using enhanced military expenditures and hostility toward immigrants or foreigners. Fascist governments influence foreign trade to help domestic capitalists sell goods abroad and block imports to help them sell their goods inside national boundaries.Blackshirts, supporters of Benito Mussolini who founded the National Fascist Party, are about to set fire to portraits of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin in Italy in May 1921. Photo by Mondadori/Getty Images.

Usually, fascists repress socialism. In Europe’s major fascist systems—Spain under Franco, Germany under Hitler, and Italy under Mussolini—socialists and communists were arrested, imprisoned, and often tortured and killed.

A similarity between fascism and socialism seems to arise because both seek to strengthen government and its interventions in society. However, they do so in different ways and toward very different ends. Fascism seeks to use government to secure capitalism and national unity, defined often in terms of ethnic or religious purity. Socialism seeks to use government to end capitalism and substitute an alternative socialist economic system, defined traditionally in terms of state-owned and -operated workplaces, state economic planning, employment of dispossessed capitalists, workers’ political control, and internationalism.

9. Socialism has been, and still is, evolving

During the second half of the 20th century, socialism’s diversity of interpretations and proposals for change shrank to two alternative notions: 1.) moving from private to state-owned-and -operated workplaces and from market to centrally planned distributions of resources and products like the Soviet Union, or 2.) “welfare-state” governments regulating markets still comprised mostly of private capitalist firms, as in Scandinavia, and providing tax-funded socialized health care, higher education, and so on. As socialism returns to public discussion in the wake of capitalism’s crash in 2008, the first kind of socialism to gain mass attention has been that defined in terms of government-led social programs and wealth redistributions benefitting middle and lower income social groups.

The evolution and diversity of socialism were obscured. Socialists themselves struggled with the mixed results of the experiments in constructing socialist societies (in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc.). To be sure, these socialist experiments achieved extraordinary economic growth. In the Global South, socialism arose virtually everywhere as the alternative development model to a capitalism weighed down by its colonialist history and its contemporary inequality, instability, relatively slower economic growth, and injustice.

Socialists also struggled with the emergence of central governments that used excessively concentrated economic power to achieve political dominance in undemocratic ways. They were affected by criticisms from other, emerging left-wing social movements, such as anti-racism, feminism, and environmentalism, and began to rethink how a socialist position should integrate the demands of such movements and make alliances.

10. Worker co-ops are a key to socialism’s future

The focus of the capitalism-versus-socialism debate is now challenged by the changes within socialism. Who the employers are (private citizens or state officials) now matters less than what kind of relationship exists between employers and employees in the workplace. The role of the state is no longer the central issue in dispute.

A growing number of socialists stress that previous socialist experiments inadequately recognized and institutionalized democracy. These self-critical socialists focus on worker cooperatives as a means to institutionalize economic democracy within workplaces as the basis for political democracy. They reject master/slave, lord/serf, and employer/employee relationships because these all preclude real democracy and equality.Homesteaders, relocated by the U.S. Resettlement Administration, a federal agency under the New Deal, working at a cooperative garment factory in Hightstown, New Jersey, in 1936. The U.S. Resettlement Administration relocated struggling families to provide work relief. Photo by Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images.

For the most part, 19th and 20th century socialisms downplayed democratized workplaces. But an emerging, 21st century socialism advocates for a change in the internal structure and organization of workplaces. The microeconomic transformation from the employer/employee organization to worker co-ops can ground a bottom-up economic democracy.

The new socialism’s difference from capitalism becomes less a matter of state versus private workplaces, or state planning versus private markets, and more a matter of democratic versus autocratic workplace organization. A new economy based on worker co-ops will find its own democratic way of structuring relationships among co-ops and society as a whole.

Worker co-ops are key to a new socialism’s goals. They criticize socialisms inherited from the past and add a concrete vision of what a more just and humane society would look like. With the new focus on workplace democratization, socialists are in a good position to contest the 21st century’s struggle of economic systems.

Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, NYC. He taught economics at Yale University, the City University of New York, and the University of Paris. Over the last 25 years, in collaboration with Stephen Resnick, he has developed a new approach to political economy that appears in several books co-authored by Resnick and Wolff and numerous articles by them separately and together. Professor Wolff’s weekly show, “Economic Update,” is syndicated on over 90 radio stations and goes to 55 million TV receivers via Free Speech TV and other networks.

 

Why Capitalism Cannot Finally Repress Socialism

Richard D. Wolff | 25 Oct 2023

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Nothing more surely secures the future of socialism than the persistence of capitalism.

Image Courtesy: Flickr

Socialism is capitalism’s critical shadow. When lights shift, a shadow may seem to disappear, but sooner or later, with further shifts of light, it comes back. Capitalism’s ideologues have long fantasised that capitalism would finally outwit, outperform, and thereby overcome socialism: make the shadow vanish permanently. Like children, they bemoan their failure when, in the light of new social circumstances, the shadow reappears clear and sharp. Recent efforts to dispel the shadow having failed again, the contest of capitalism versus socialism resumes. In the United States, young people especially applaud socialism so much recently that think tanks like PragerU and the Hoover Institute at Stanford University urgently recycle the old anti-socialist tropes.

In fact, the capitalism-versus-socialism contest does not really resume because it never really stopped. As changing social conditions changed socialism—a process that took time—it sometimes seemed to wishful thinkers that the systems struggle had ended with capitalism’s victory. Thus, the 1920s saw anti-socialist witch-hunts (especially the Palmer raids by the US Department of Justice and the Sacco and Vanzetti persecution) that many believed at the time would extinguish US socialism.

What had happened in Russia in 1917 would not be allowed to sneak into the United States with all those European immigrants. The grossly unfair Sacco and Vanzetti trial (recognised as such even by the state of Massachusetts) did little to prevent—and much to prepare for—subsequent similar anti-socialist efforts by government officials in the United States.

With the 1929 crash, socialism revived to become a powerful movement in the United States and beyond during the 1930s and 1940s. After World War II ended, the political Right and most major capitalist employers tried once again to squash capitalism’s socialist shadow. They fostered McCarthy’s “anti-communist” crusades. They executed the Rosenbergs.

By the end of the 1950s, once again, many in the United States could indulge the thought that capitalism had vanquished socialism. Then the 1960s upset that indulgence as millions—especially young people—enthusiastically rediscovered Marx, Marxism, and socialism.

Shortly after that, the (Ronald) Reagan and (Margaret) Thatcher reaction tried a bit differently to resume anti-socialism. They simply asserted and reasserted to a receptive mass media that “there is no alternative” (TINA) to capitalism any longer. Socialism, where it survived, they insisted, had proved so inferior to capitalism that it was fading in the present and possessed no future. With the 1989 collapse of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and Eastern Europe, many again believed that the old capitalism versus socialism struggle had finally been resolved.

But, of course, the shadow returned. Nothing more surely secures the future of socialism than the persistence of capitalism. In the United States, it returned with Occupy Wall Street, then Bernie Sanders’s campaigns, and now the moderate socialists bubbling up inside US politics. Each time (Donald) Trump and the Far Right equate liberals and Democrats with socialism, communism, Marxism, and anarchism, they help recruit new socialists.

Socialism’s enemies understandably exhibit their frustration. With so little exposure to Hegel, the idea that modern society might be a unity of opposites—capitalism and socialism both reproducing and undermining one another—is not available to help them understand their world.

Handling life’s contradictions has always, for many, entailed pretending they are not there. Very young children do something like that when they encounter a scary dog, cover their eyes with their hands, and believe so doing makes the dog vanish. With time, the children mature and grasp that the dog is still there despite hand-covered eyes. With time, too, adults will grasp that making the socialist other/shadow vanish is a capitalist project sure to fail. One effect of that failed project over the last 75 years is widespread ignorance of how socialism was continuing to change.

Over the last two centuries, as socialism spread from Western Europe across the globe, it interacted with very diverse economic, political, and cultural conditions. Those interactions yielded multiple, different interpretations of socialism. For some, it was an evolving critique of capitalism, especially its injustices, inequalities, and cyclical instability. For others, it became the ongoing construction of an alternative economic system.

More broadly, millions were brought to socialisms that aimed to change basic social institutions (family, city, government) that capitalism had subordinated to its needs. The different, multiple socialisms debated and influenced one another, accelerating change within them all.

One kind of socialism that became prominent in the 19th and 20th centuries (and still exists) focuses on economics and government. It criticises how governments are captured by the capitalist class and serve its social hegemony. It strategises that using mass struggle (and eventually universal suffrage) can free the state from its subordination to capitalism and use it instead for transition beyond capitalism to socialism.

In the 20th century, this kind of socialism offered a framework for constructing a socialist economic system alternative to capitalism. Such a socialist system entails the continuance of traditional capitalism: enterprises owned and operated mostly by private capitalists, individuals, or corporate groups. What it adds that makes it socialist is a government (often but not necessarily run by a socialist party) that closely regulates and supervises markets and enterprises.

Such socialist governments aim to moderate key effects of private capitalism including its very unequal distributions of income and wealth, extreme business cycles, and unaffordable access by the general population to healthcare, education, and much else. Progressive taxation typifies socialist governments’ means of intervening in otherwise private capitalism. Moderate socialisms of this sort are found in many European nations, in the programmes of many socialist parties around the world, and in the statements and writings of socialist individuals.

Another kind of socialism shares moderate socialism’s focus on government and economics but differs from it by transforming many or all privately owned and operated enterprises into state-owned-and-operated ones. Often referred to as Soviet socialism—because the Soviet Union adopted it a decade after the 1917 revolution—this kind assigned greater powers to the state: to set prices, wages, interest rates, and foreign trade parameters according to a state plan for the economy.

Because socialists around the world split over World War I and the Russian Revolution, one side (more aligned with the USSR) took the name “communist” while the other retained “socialist.” Soviet socialism was thus organised and operated by a state apparatus governed by the communist party of the USSR. Variations of Soviet socialism in other countries (Eastern Europe and beyond) were established and operated similarly by communist parties there. The Soviet and other communist parties always referred to the Soviet Union as a socialist system. It was mostly the enemies of socialism—or those simply uninformed—that persisted in referring to the USSR as an example of “communism.”

A third kind of socialism, comprising a hybrid form of the first two, is how the People’s Republic of China organises its economy. There the Chinese Communist Party oversees a strong state apparatus that supervises a mixed economy of both state-owned-and-operated enterprises (on the Soviet model) and private capitalist enterprises (on the moderate socialism model). It is roughly a 50-50 split between state- and privately owned-and-operated enterprises in China.

China had experimented with both moderate and Soviet socialisms since the 1949 revolution brought its Communist Party to power. Based on its critiques of both prior socialist models and the stunningly rapid economic growth achieved by the hybrid, a focus on fine-tuning the hybrid model seems settled policy in China today. The criticisms and opposition from both the Trump and (Joe) Biden administrations have not changed that.

A fourth model is newly important in and for this century even though examples of its way of organising the production and distribution of goods and services exist throughout human history. People have often organised their collaborative production and distribution of goods and services as self-conscious communities within larger societies. Sometimes such productive communities were organised hierarchically with governing groups (councils of elders, chiefs, kings, lords, and masters) paralleling how they organized residential communities. At other times, they organised productive communities more horizontally as democratic cooperatives.

A rapidly rising concept of socialism in the 21st century differs from the three basic models discussed above in its focus on and advocacy for the organisation of workplaces as democratic, productive communities functioning within society.

This fourth model emerges from a socialist critique of the other three. Socialists have acknowledged the lesser inequalities and greater economic growth achieved by the other models. However, socialists have also faced and considered when excessive powers were accorded to and abused by states and parties. Among critical socialists’ analyses, some eventually reached the conclusion that previous socialisms focused too much on the macro-level of capitalist society and too little on the micro-level.

Socialism cannot only be about the balance between private and state enterprises, about “free” versus state-regulated markets, and about market versus state-planned distributions of resources and products. That limitation can and should be broken. Failures at the macro level had causes at a micro level that socialists had too often neglected.

When socialisms left the internal organisations of production and distribution enterprises inherited from capitalism largely unchanged, they made a major error. They left in place human relationships that undermined chances for enterprises in socialist economies to reach socialism’s goals.

A truly democratic society cannot be built on a foundation of productive enterprises whose internal structure is the opposite of democratic. The employer-employee capitalist model is that foundational opposite. Capitalist employers are neither chosen by nor genuinely accountable to their employees.

In worker cooperatives, by contrast, the employer-employee division is ended and replaced by a democratic community. The employees are likewise and collectively the employer. Their one-person-one-vote decisions, by the majority, govern what gets produced: how, where, and when. They likewise decide democratically what to do with the fruits of their collective labour, how enterprise revenues will be distributed among individual workers, and as investment funds and reserve funds.

This fourth kind of socialism repairs the other three kinds’ relative neglect of the micro-level transformation of capitalism into socialism. It does not reject or refuse those other kinds; it rather adds something crucial to them. It represents an important stage reached by prior forms of and social experiments with socialism.

Previous socialisms changed because of their results, good and bad. Those results provoked self-awareness, self-criticism, and determination to improve the emerging, new forms of socialism.

Capitalism’s critical shadow returns again to challenge capitalism by inspiring a powerful new alliance of its victims with its critics. That has been, after all, the goal all along: to empower and inform social change beyond capitalism, to realise the slogan, “We can do better than capitalism.”

Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York.

SOURCE: Independent Media Institute

CREDIT LINE: This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

 

Abdullah Öcalan: Let’s reclaim socialism through peace and building a democratic society

By Abdullah Öcalan

Published date 24 December, 2025

Abdullah Öcalan’s message to the International Conference for Peace and Democratic Society. Republished from Ocalanvigil.net.

Esteemed thinkers, dear comrades, valued delegates, and all people who continue to believe that socialism is still possible;

I address you today from İmralı Island under the conditions of isolation of 26 years, at a moment when a new dialogue with the state over the Kurdish question in search for peace and a democratic society have resumed again.

To address you, at the International Conference on Peace and Democratic Society, on the path of rebuilding socialism, is both meaningful and significant.

As Kurds, over the course of 52 years of PKK struggle, we have completed our fight for existence and dignity, and we now enter a period in which a democratic republic and a democratic society can be rebuilt.

The PKK has fulfilled its historical mission by securing the national existence of the Kurdish people, while also exposing the limitations of nation-state socialism. Twentieth-century socialism emerged as a negative revolutionary intervention, yet failed to present a lasting alternative. Despite enormous sacrifices, this struggle has become a legacy enriched through both theoretical and practical critique. 

To honor and to own this legacy properly requires transforming socialism from a mere memory to a living social force beating at the heart of the people. The socialist tradition in history must be understood as a legacy aimed at building both peace and democratic society, and the path forward lies in fulfilling internationalist responsibilities — in theory and in practice.

Although utopian socialists and Marxists have offered comprehensive critiques of the capitalist hegemonic system since the 19th century, they failed to develop a decisive line with concrete results. Today’s capitalism is no longer merely a crisis; it has become a disease threatening the very survival of humankind. The monopoly of violence in the form of the nation-state plays a defining role in this collapse.

Just as capitalism cannot be explained solely through economic motives, the failures of socialist movements cannot be explained only by capitalist repression. Historical and contemporary mistakes have also been decisive.

My critiques of Marxism must be understood correctly. I do not blame Marx; in his era, history was not better understood as it is today and there was no ecological crisis, and capitalism was still on the rise. Even so, Marx was a thinker of profound self-questioning and intellectual courage. He perceived the importance of women’s liberation, yet approached it superficially, believing that once economic exploitation was overcome, gender oppression would naturally dissolve. His attempt to interpret social history exclusively through class, and his insufficient analysis of the state and the nation-state, led to serious consequences. 

While offering these critiques, I would like to underline my deep respect for Marx’s efforts and have no doubt of his sincerity, and note that I distinguish Marxism from Marx himself. When we critique Marxism and actual existing socialism on certain fundamental questions, what we feel — as socialists — is the spirit of self-critique from within.

Anti-systemic forces must revisit historical materialism in a way that aligns with the reality of human society. It is essential to understand that capitalism did not “descend from the heavens” in the 16th century; rather, its roots extend back to the 10–12 thousand years of evolution of civilization that began in Lower Mesopotamia. Archeological sites such as Göbeklitepe and Karahantepe shed light on this historical origin. 

For this reason, I find it more accurate to define the existing system of civilization as a “caste-based system of social murder.” Archaeological and anthropological findings show that male hunter castes, through the development of killing techniques, suppressed and enslaved women-centered clan communities. This marks the deepest rupture in human history — indeed, a major counter–revolution shaping all subsequent developments of civilization.

Understanding capitalism from this long historical perspective allows for far more eye-opening analysis. This system not only deepens internal social contradictions; it also threatens the extinction of the human species by producing chemical and nuclear weaponry that can annihilate the planet, by polluting the environment, and by plundering nature’s riches both above and below the ground. It is one of the essential duties of the international to offer the humanity with a new analysis of capitalism founded upon this grave reality.

We need to examine the history of the oppressed through the perspective of the commune, which emerged first and foremost as a formation of self-defense. This requires seeing early tribal communities as the beginnings of the commune and adopting a historical perspective stretching to today’s proletariat—and to all oppressed groups.

On this basis, we state that history cannot be reduced solely to class struggle. While class struggle is indeed part of it, it is more accurate to read history as a long process of relation and conflict between communal development and anti-communal development extending back roughly 30,000 years.

I anticipate that this conference also by engaging with the theoretical analyses I have offered here, will foster important debates that can contribute to the development of a new perspective of political program and organization. In this process, the fundamental method is dialectical materialism. 

However, certain excesses of classical dialectics need to be overcome. We must see contradictions not as opposing poles destined to eliminate one another, but as social phenomena that also sustain and shape each other. For without the commune, there would be no state; without the bourgeoisie, no proletariat. Thus, contradiction must be assessed not with a logic of annihilation, but through a transformative historical perspective.

Scientific developments show that the dialectical method remains an effective tool for social analysis, so long as it is not treated as absolute. With this framework, updating the commune–state and class–state dialectics is imperative. 

The failure of 20th-century real socialism stemmed from an inability to interpret this historical dialectic correctly: state-centered socialism seized the state, only to be defeated by it. By binding the right of nations to self-determination to the nation-state, it became confined within the boundaries of bourgeois politics. The concept of a “proletarian nation-state” similarly produced nothing but a reproduction of statist mentality.

Interpreting this reality correctly, I stated the following: nation-state socialism leads to defeat, whereas democratic society socialism leads to victory. Today, the time has come to advance toward democratic emancipation on the basis of democratic society socialism.

On this path, I move forward with the conviction that we will succeed in reconstruction not through the state, but rather through the paradigm of a democratic republic and a democratic nation founded upon principles of women´s freedom, ecology and democratic society.

This awareness has renewed our movement ideologically and politically, revitalized its organizational dynamism, and deepened its roots in society — enabling it to develop a socialist program capable of responding to the needs of the century.

The relationship between democratic socialism and the state is also being reshaped within the context of the peace and resolution process. I define my relationship with the state as a relationship of democratization. 

The concept of the democratic republic requires that the state not function as a divine power standing above society, but rather as a structure operating within the framework of a democratic contract made with society. Through a strategy of democratic politics, it is possible to bring about change and transformation of the state and to rebuild society on democratic foundations.

Grounding this strategy in law will form the lasting basis of peace. Law is a mechanism that guarantees and balances the democratic relationship between state and society, serving as an instrument that prevents violence. At the same time, it will institutionalize the establishment, legitimacy, and reconstruction of the democratic republic. 

In relation, one of the key strategic arguments I have proposed is the concept of democratic integration and its legal framework. Democratic integration law, in which legal norms are reconstructed in favor of society through individual and universal norms along with collective rights, must rest on the following three fundamental principles:

• A law of the free citizen
• A law of peace and democratic society
• Laws of freedom

Democratic integration law will not only transform the state into a normative one but will also allow to institutionalize the societal gains, enabling society to realize its freedom. The “Call for Peace and Democratic Society” process that I launched is in itself a process of dialogue. In a region such as the Middle East — defined by complex relationships of ethnicities, religions, and sects — much can be achieved through democratic dialogue and negotiation. 

In addition, I believe that a meaningful socialism can be organized not through a violent revolutionary method but through a positive system of construction and existence — one that takes shape through democratic dialogue. Without comprehensive and profound democratic dialogue, it is difficult to believe that socialism can be built, or that it could endure even if it were built.

Lenin, too, said: “Without an inclusive and advanced democracy, socialism cannot be built.” With these thoughts and determination, I once again wish you a successful conference, and extend my enduring comradely greetings and affection.