The socialist imagination

As the world economy plunges further into its worst crisis since the Great Depression, political discourse has been dominated by a discussion of socialist revolution. The word "socialism" designates one of the the noisiest topic of current debate. Everyone is using it. Everyone thinks it means something different. Into this universal catchword everyone injects whatever he or she loves or hates, fears or desires. Socialism has always abounded in visions of a life free from the pressure of capitalist market forces, whether in self-sufficient local communities or in democratically planned economies. But as Frederick Engels argued back in the 1870s, state ownership is not the same as socialism and is, in fact, quite compatible with support for capitalism. Commenting on events in Germany at the time, Engels noted:

“Since Bismarck went in for state-ownership of industrial establishments, a kind of spurious socialism has arisen, degenerating, now and again, into something of flunkeyism, that without more ado declares all state ownership, even of the Bismarckian sort, to be socialistic. Certainly, if the taking over by the state of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of socialism.”

Socialism means more than state ownership or state intervention in a mixed economy. Previous show-cases for what should be called state-capitalism have been exposed.  Russia’s command economy collapsed. China has a system of market exploitation. Europe’s social democrats have long ago transformed themselves from defenders of the welfare state to advocates of privatisation and deregulation. It is becoming obvious to millions around the world that we cannot solve our economic and environmental crises without replacing capitalism. Yet the left have little to offer because they no longer know what socialism means.  It is true socialism has been a contested term ever since it was first coined in the early nineteenth century. Engels noted that in the 1840s “socialism” was associated with “the most multifarious social quacks who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances,” and who had no connection with the workers’ movement. Little then seems to have changed with today. Reformers still argue that now is not the time to advance a case for full socialism and offer up instead a fare of half-measures and a list of palliatives. Socialists certainly need to be realistic, and nobody will object to fighting for social justice, but the problem with the gradualist approach emerge as soon as we looks at the concrete proposals they offer up. The bottom line is that many proposed reforms are so cautious that they fail to make any serious challenge to the status quo. Instead, they are little more than a recipe for propping up capitalism. They are “realistic” only if our goal is to preserve the existing system for as long as possible, not if we hope to create a movement to replace it and the real fantasy is the idea of a market-based solution to the environmental crisis. Political action inspired by the goal of ending all forms of oppression, exploitation and degradation is similarly necessary but insufficient. An understanding of the economic causes of these phenomena and how they impact on people globally is vital. Economic categories of explanation with universal instantiation such as labour, commodity, value, and capital are required for a global perspective on the task of liberation. Explanations of that have a partial understanding of its nature will produce partial programmes for liberation. Partial forms of anti-capitalism will be utopian. An exclusive focus on reforms makes the goal of social revolution unrealisable. As long as the commodity form dominates the labour process in the spheres of production and consumption then market forces would destroy such experiments as cooperatives. The only practicable way of abolishing money, wage slavery and the law of value, Marx argued, would be to remove all aspects of the mode of production from its global form as commodity and value, including labour power itself. The only means to achieving this end could be the global movement of workers towards the collective appropriation of the means of production including machinery, raw materials and labour. Workers, as a class, liberate their labour power at the same time as liberating the products of labour from their value form as money, wages and capital. Thus today, Marxists tend to argue that movements for women, black, gay or national liberation are de facto utopian if they promote partial solutions to their oppression and ignore the connection with the global struggle for freedom from economic oppression and for a classless society.

Unlike the utopian socialists, who drew up intricate blueprints of post-capitalist society (which they sometimes attempted to put into practice on a small scale), Marx and Engels never publically speculated on the detailed organisation of a future socialist society. The key task for them was building a movement to overthrow capitalism. If and when that movement won power, it would be up to the members of the new society to decide democratically how it was to be organised, in the concrete historical circumstances in which they found themselves. Marx and Engels were the first to bring socialism down from the clouds and put it on a real-world, scientific basis. Their starting point was not ideals, but reality:

“The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, but those which they find existing and those produced by their activity.”

Utopians before Marx dreamed of an egalitarian society, and drew up elaborate plans for them--rigorously detailed blueprints for industry, education and social life. The utopians hoped that if these plans were presented to rich and powerful people, they would be convinced by the rationality of socialism and that change would be the product of enlightened, courageous minorities working on behalf of the grateful masses. Marx and Engels were the first to see socialism as the logical end result of the class struggle that was already in progress. "All previous historical movements," they wrote in the Communist Manifesto "were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority." This movement of the "immense majority" is not a utopian dream. It is a part of the real world, a struggle already in progress. As Marx wrote in a letter:

“We do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world's own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for... explaining to it the meaning of its own actions.”

We don't have to draw up elaborately detailed plans for a socialist future, but we can imagine the broad outlines of would be possible if we, the working people, ran society: We could house everyone with free housing? We could feed everyone with free food. We could give people real leisure time, to spend with their friends and families, travel, pursue other interests by reducing the time spent at work. There has been a tradition within socialism that blueprints, or anything that could even resemble them must be shunned. Not all would agree: a detailed sketch of the future society is desirable, if not essential. We are required to draw up our vision of future society. Critics of capitalism have got to think through and explain to others how we propose to do things differently, and why outcomes will be significantly better. Even though people are receptive to our criticisms about capitalism, we have little credibility when it comes to replacing capitalism with a wholly different economic system. In the light of the unfortunate history of socialism and its frequent misrepresentation, people have every reason to be sceptical that the Socialist Party knows how to create a superior economic system. We have to give concrete answers to serious questions.  The first question is, “What do we want?” What, in general, and even not so general terms, is the form of the socialist society that we seek? The second question is, “Why do we want it?” What exactly is wrong with capitalism, and why is socialism a improvement? And the third question is, “How can we achieve it?”

We clearly need to speculate on the nature of a non-market classless society and the possibility of realising this in the present. Speculation involves the exercise of the imagination. Speculation is involved in the creation of theory. It is an activity that generates ideas of where current tendencies and trends might lead. Setting imaginative goals and creating blueprints to guide action are not only a necessary feature of democratic planning but an essential aspect of understanding history. Marx and Engels used their speculative imaginations to describe the non-market society of the future. They had clear conceptions of the socialist project both as viable goal and means. For Marx, the goal of the socialist project is the emergence of free individuality and the recovery of human sociality from the effects of exploitation and oppression. Marx argued that the socialist project needs certain objective conditions, one being the formation of a global non-market classless society.