12.30.07
Future of socialism?
Future of Socialism
by Randhir Singh
An address to the journal Itihasbodh at Allahabad on March 8, 2007. See below
Blog comments: The basic insights of Marx remain as they were at the beginning of his career, and if it weren’t for that it would be pointless to discuss the issue. But the question of socialism is now so hopelessly confused that it is hard to see how anything can come of the idea in the current socio-political scence. Randhir Singh at least does something long overdue which is to renounce the prior history of communism and the failed experiment it represents.
Many conventional Marxist groups, visible on the net, completely omit this the most obvious of necessities for a socialist perspective, although I think Chavez, remarkably, senses the question better than the cluster of leftist bystanders attempting to kibbitz.
This is unfortunate, and we have become so nettled by the destruction of the socialism’s reputation as a concept that we are blind to the accurate analysis of the early socialists (indeed, those who preceded Marx), and the way the predictions of Marx about what happens in capitalist dominated economies have caught up with us.
Even the most reserved reading of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine shows this to be the case, and the irresponsibility and risk of NOT trying to recast the meaning of socialism. The last generation has shown the results of the unchecked behavior of rightist neoliberals.
And just at the moment of action, we are stuck with a century or more of marxist idiots who are in the way, and apparently unable to grasp that Leninist sadists let loose again aren’t going to do better this time given a second chance.
The left needs a new mindset. A new look on history. A complete expose of their own theories, an accurate compendium of the classic critiques of such, a clear view of the confusion created by the Hegelian context in which Marxism emerged, and much more.
It should be remembered that Marx invented very little, and borrowed a great deal. All his views of socialism emerge form the 1840’s generation of early socialists. These early groups may have been naive, disorganized, or immature, but the Marxist takeover of the concept, in so far as it failed so badly, allows us to displace Marx/Engels to approach the question differently. That actually might help to strip away the Marxist hype to see accurately all over again why the acute but flawed Marxist analysis prevailed, unfairly on not.
One crucial step is to liberate Marxism from Darwinism and the ideology it represents. The right has made complete fools of the left on this score.
There are many other issues here, but one can’t be too optimistic in the current cultural context. Actually, a look at Alternet or Znet or Chomski’s writings etc shows that a host of new lefts have already come into existence, and they are not cursed by the monumentally fanatic hate-trip of cosmically ordained Marx idiots ready to liquidate millions in the name of socialism.
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I have been asked to speak on ‘Future of Socialism’. What I am going to say is based on my recently published book, Crisis of Socialism — Notes in Defence of a Commitment, which may be referred to for the detailed argument in support of the propositions I am going to advance with the help of passages culled from this book. I am going to deal with the question in four separate but interrelated segments of my address.
During the heady, rebel days in the late sixties, students of Paris used to ask of everyone who would address them to first tell them: ‘where do you speak from?’ For every speaker, inescapably speaks from a particular philosophical-political standpoint and owes it to his audience to publicly state it. It is only fair to acknowledge that I am going to speak from the standpoint of Marxism, rather Marxism as I understand it. For I have no pretensions to scholarship in Marxism. I picked up some on the way and have found it useful not only in my politics or profession as a teacher, but in living my life as well. This last is not just a formal statement. Knowing Marx does make a difference to what sense you make of life, how you understand, live and act in the world. ‘Indeed, I must confess that Karl Marx made a man of me’, is how George Bernard Shaw once put it. Marx, therefore, is important to me and, I believe, he is important to all of us, today more so than ever before, if for no other reason than this: the world we are living in is a capitalist world, more capitalist than ever before after the Soviet collapse, and Marx more than any other human being, then or now, devoted his life to explaining the reality of this world and his achievement here remains unrivalled. In one sense, this is what I am going to speak about, for socialism, properly understood, is a historically necessary and possible negation of capitalism.
I
No discussion of socialism today, least of all its future, can bypass what happened in the erstwhile Soviet Union. What we have here, as I have argued at length in my book, is a failed revolutionary experiment: a grievously deformed socialism that was built and the final crisis and collapse of the sui generis class exploitative system it had ultimately degenerated into — all of which is fully amenable to a Marxist explanation in terms of its method of historical materialism and class analysis. In other words, what failed in Soviet Union was not socialism but a system that came to be built in its name. I have no time to discuss this subject here. Immediately I would only like to emphasise the need for socialists to understand the why and how, and the implications, of what happened in the erstwhile Soviet Union.
It is indeed imperative for socialists who wish for a future beyond capitalism to understand what has happened, what was built and what has failed as socialism in the Soviet Union. They must assess the costs and consequences of this failure, the collapse of what we have described as ‘actually existing socialism’, and some others as ‘authoritarian communism’ — though they must do so fully mindful of the costs and consequences of ‘actually existing capitalism’ or ‘authoritarian capitalism’ which has rushed in to pick up the pieces. It was certainly mistaken to see the struggle for socialism in our times as a contest between ‘the socialist world’ and ‘the capitalist world’, as official Marxism in the post-1917 period made it out to be. It was, as always, an international class struggle with several more or less important fronts. The countries of ‘actually existing socialism’, while it lasted, were only one front of this struggle, and while they did condition or influence this struggle, positively as well as negatively, they did not determine or settle the question of its outcome. Nor does the collapse of these countries now, or their return to the capitalist fold, in any way settle the question of the future of socialism — the struggle still goes on and will, so long as capitalism lasts. Nevertheless, these countries constituted what was in many ways a most important front of the ongoing international class struggle and their collapse demands that socialists understand and come to terms with it. If they no more need to carry the burden of a deformed and degenerated socialism or be answerable for its ugliness and cruelties, the burden of a genuine, Marxist explanation of its collapse has still to be carried by them so that our people know the truth and appropriate lessons are drawn for struggles of the future. . . .