Orientation
International political economy at a crossroads

As most of you know the world economy is peppered with fault lines. On one hand we have the rising in the East of a new economic block, the BRICS nations and their friends. On the other hand, in the West we have a rapidly declining Yankeedom and its European vassals on. What are socialists in the West to do with this malestream, this great turning point? Is it not clear whether to support BRICS or not? After all, the BRICS countries have only one clear socialist country and two countries that are Hindu fundamentalists (India) as well as a theocracy (Saudi-Arabia). So does it make sense for socialists to support Russia, India, and Saudi-Arabia that are conservative politically? This article proposes that Western socialists need to give up their purist ideologies and accept that while the BRICS countries may be lacking in socialist policies domestically,they still should be supported because of their international attempts to follow Marx and Engels’ exhortation to “develop the productive forces”. This means striving to create material abundance through technological innovation.

Who am I
I am no academic socialist nor am I a red diaper baby. In fact, reading and school for me were mutually exclusive opposites. When I was a young adult I couldn’t stand reading and dropped out of community college. I only started to care for reading after I left and began hitchhiking across the country. Because I am self-educated, I did not have the benefits of being systematically educated in all the different schools of socialism, what socialist organizations were like and where and how socialism was applied all over the world. So I eclectically dabbled with books and organizations. I eventually found my way and this article is the result of conclusions I’ve come to after 50 years. Twelve years ago my partner and I started our own website and Facebook page which now has 10,000 followers. We each work 20-25 hours per week in various aspects of this work. Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism is our baby!

What do I Mean by Socialist Purist?
By the term socialist purist I mean someone who holds out for the most extreme, utopian form of socialism, whether it is defined by Marx, Engels, Lenin or an anarchist hero like Kropotkin. For Leninists socialism means no capitalism with the state which controls all economic transactions, the society is classless and does not use any currency. For the anarchists the ideal is no state, no capitalism, no classes and no money. If actually existing socialism has any of these things it is treated, not as part of a long process of development, but as a sign of a) betrayal of the party or a bureaucracy (Trotskyists) and b) corruption or some kind of pollution from the original source. That source is most often treated like a bible. It is more or less the same as the old ruling law in Louisiana that if a person had 1/32 of what was considered African American blood, they were considered black.

China
If I support China, I will be told that China isn’t really socialist or communist. If the state-controlled enterprises compose 60% of the Chinese economy I will be told that the 40% of the economy that is in private hands matters more. It will also be pointed out that in China strikes are outlawed and independent labor unions are illegal. I would prefer that strikes in China were legal and workers were allowed to form unions. There are labor unions in China but under the auspices of the state. Also, there are plenty of strikes in China. But for the purists this is enough for the entire country to be dismissed as a socialist project. For me it is not. Where do the purists get their definitions? I will be told that Marx and Engels defined socialism and communism in a particular way and that is the definition we should work with despite the fact that the definitions were intentionally sketchy and they were written over 150 years ago. If I point out China’s great work on the Belt and Road Initiative of building infrastructures and harnessing energy all over the world, I would be told they are still deriving a profit from them. Profits are bad! From anarchists for whom all states are bad, I will be told that China is really just continuing Western imperialism. For anarchists, helping to develop the productive forces in another country is nothing more than a “debt trap”. For them all capitalist and state socialist societies are imperialist the moment they engage with a country on the capitalist periphery.

Russia
There is no country in the world which has been more brutally and tenaciously demonized than Russia and that was so before, during and after the Russian Revolution. If we post a story on our website or social media pages about the Russian economy now being the fourth strongest in the world, we will be told by Trotskyists or Social Democrats that Russia is, after all, a capitalist country, as if that should end all discussion. Anarchists will tell me that Putin is a dictator. These folks don’t understand that Russia has at least four or five parties and that in the last election, Putin’s party got 49% of the vote and the Community party got 20%. I will be told by other purists that much of Russia’s spending is on its own and others’ military, not so much on producing goods and services for a better life for its citizens. The anarchists will tell me that anarchists and other dissidents are rotting away in Russian prisons. For them it doesn’t seem to matter that Putin has 80% approval ratings and Russia has built up its domestic economy even more since US sanctions. For socialist purists, the fact that Russia has been investing in the northern Arctic Silk Road which will increase trade in regions that have not been connected seems not to matter to them. The domestic economy is first and geopolitics is second. I believe the reverse to be true.

The International Proletarian Revolution Around the World at the Same Time

For anarchists any power at a national level is against socialism. So what do they advocate? An international revolution of workers’ councils that overthrows all states and is linked up locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. How realistic is this? As we stand now in the history of the United States we have never had a general strike that encompassed more than one local state. If we face this fact it is ludicrous to propose that workers’ councils are going to spontaneously arise, spread across an entire country then link up to other countries until the whole system is global. Doesn’t it seem ridiculous to assume this is going to happen in the near future? In Europe, the English, French and German heads of state are hated. Germany is de-industrializing, the French and English living standards have declined, still we have yet to see a general strike among the working classes of all countries that can drive them from power. It has struck me that:

• Since these European rulers are all bitterly against Russia;
• Russia possesses that cheap natural gas which could improve working class living standards; and
• the working classes could unite against their rulers and demand to have cheap Russian gas shipped to them.

How likely is even this semi-continent alliance? Unfortunately, not very. It has taken the rulers of states and capitalists roughly 300 years to convince people that their nation-state deserve more loyalties than their previous loyalties to provinces, principalities, regions and city states. How likely are the citizens today to give that national loyalty? Marx and Engels naively thought that workers would give up their fatherland for the international loyalty of the working class. All socialists found out the hard way through the results of two world wars that workers of the world uniting is not something workers across states have any intention of doing. So whether we like it or not, the real fight for the foreseeable future is between the rulers of capitalist states and their working classes. That is the best we can do for now and in the near future.  

World-Systems Theory and the Long View of Capitalism
In Giovanni Arrighi’s great book The Long Twentieth  Century, in world systems terminology, over the last 500 years capitalism has jumped all over the world from Italy, Holland, England and to the United States. Each ‘hegemon’ has ruled from between 220 to 100 years before its decline. In every case when the hegemon has fallen it has been replaced by a country on the capitalist semi periphery. The United States has been in decline for over 50 years. What’s next? Well, China certainly qualifies as a semi-periphery country that is still rising. But something much deeper is going on. Not only China, but all the other BRICS countries – Russia, India, Iran and Saudi Arabia have been in the semi-periphery world system. Can it be that after 500 years in Europe, we are witnessing the world economy shifting from the West to the East? It certainly looks that way. Every member of BRICS is a country on the capitalist semi-periphery.

The Rise of BRICS
I celebrate the emergence of a block of anti-imperialist countries that have broken away from the Anglo-American Empire. China, Russia, Iran and to a lesser extent India have resisted using the dollar as a world trade currency. Further, they have insisted on using their own local currency in trade transactions. With the exception of China Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia are capitalist countries, but their commitment has not been primarily to make a profit on war or forms of fictious capital such as stocks, bonds, derivatives or stock options as does the United States. Following the Chinese great Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) these countries have traded with each other in exchanges of energy systems, infrastructures such as roads and trains as well as in agricultural products and military defense.

The BRICS economic agreement between Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa was established as an alternative to the imperialist World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This breakaway movement is growing stronger by the day as the United States and the rest of the West sinks into decay. As a socialist I support this breakaway movement even if it is not explicitly socialist. In answer to my support of BRICS, I will be told that most of its members are capitalist and that socialism can never come from it. So how is socialism supposed to come about?

Nationalism as a Revolutionary Force in a BRICS Dominated World

For traditional socialists, nationalism has been the enemy. After all, historically it keeps workers from uniting with other workers around the world and it propagandizes them into aligning with the capitalist class rather than their own class. These are all reasons to be against nationalism. But the problem in today’s world is that we are fighting against a global capitalism that sets up continental systems such as the European Union which is organized to encourage the free flow of capitalism across the entire European continent. The EU does big business for the European capitalist class, a kind of Bilderberg economic union. The EU has no working-class representation. In my opinion, it is an advance for the working class of nation states to fight for independence from this European parasitic organization.

Conservative parties are moving towards nationalism – socialists are not

The problem for socialists is that in Europe and other parts of the world the  traditional conservative parties have taken positions of supporting the nation-state against the European Union and are not anti-Russian. This includes Le Pen in France, the AFD in Germany and Orban in Hungary. Sadly, to my knowledge there is not even an intermediate scale socialist party in Europe that has taken a nationalist stance. So am I advocating support of these conservative parties?

The linear political spectrum is bankrupt in the 21st century
In order to align ourselves with the current BRICS program we badly need a new political spectrum, one that leaves behind the current linear version. On this topic, please see my article of 2 ½ years ago which is still highly relevant.  As I said in my article, Are Socialists Going to let Neoliberals Define Fascism: Why the Linear Political Spectrum is Bankrupt this spectrum must be:

• inclusive of many more combinations than the communism-liberalism-conservative, fascist and libertarian, linearly strung out;
• economic as well as political;
• must account for qualitative leaps – which is the difference between socialism and capitalism;
• decentered so that both moderate and extreme solutions would seem reasonable under certain conditions. This means that all political tendencies would have to be seen as having pros and cons. The way it stands now liberals and conservatives are seen as virtuous and communism and fascism are seen as having vices;
• the spectrum must be flexible enough to make room for alliances between the extremes on the political spectrum such as China and Saudi Arabia or between India (fundamentalist) and China and
• not limited to ideologies that are next to each other on the political spectrum.

BRICS Leads the Way in Revolutionizing the Linear Political Spectrum                      

This is where things get messy. If we follow the lead of China, Xi Ping does not form alliances based on loyalty to socialism. He is committed to building communism but has formed alliances with a Hindu fundamentalist nationalist in India and with the theocratic state of Saudi Arabia. Putin is no socialist yet his strongest ally is to a country that wants to build communism. Modi, a right-winger is ok doing business with communist China. Cuba and Venezuela would be happy to do business with any of the BRICS countries whether they are socialist or not. So what united these BRICS countries that might make socialists of the West support them?

• They are anti-imperialist.
• They are anti-war.
• They are anti-finance capital.
• They want to develop the productive forces of the world.

Importance of Technological Innovation
Let me develop the last point. In the Communist Manifesto Marx spent a good deal of time praising the capitalist system for developing industry – building railroads and factories and upgrading the standing of living for the middle classes and parts of the working class. These are the very activities the BRICS countries are engaged in now. In Marxian terms, what is so good about this? It is based on the idea that socialism must be founded on abundance. It means increasing the ratio between freedom and necessity. This means maximizing productivity while decreasing the numbers of work hours. For me this is a more important goal to fight for even if internally the countries of BRICS suffer from class, race and gender inequalities.

Siege Socialism
Typically in the West, when socialist countries are compared to capitalist countries they are criticized in terms of standard of living, varieties of political parties and freedom of expression. In the first place, socialist countries should be measured in comparison to what these countries were like before the socialist revolution. Capitalist countries have had 300 years to develop themselves unopposed after they defeated feudalism. Socialist countries have had a little more than 100 years to develop yet they have done so in spite of constant capitalist attempts at sabotage, assassinations and betrayal. It is way too soon to make sweeping generalizations about the viability of socialism. In fact, based on the last 35 years of the “triumphant” West, when we look at the world around us, it is capitalism that is either is in deep trouble or has failed.

Secondly, capitalist critics fail to understand that Western concepts of freedom are not shared around the world. What matters to working-class people most is the ability to read and write, have low-cost health care and free education. In terms of housing, socialism either provides low-cost housing or makes it possible for people to buy their house outright. Socialist countries like China and Cuba have a higher percentage of home ownership than the United States. As far as the variety of political parties, I can well understand that the socialist leaders who have come to power may be extremely cautious about allowing many political parties to form. When we consider the ability of capitalist spies to turn alternative parties into organs of counter revolution, the concerns of socialist leaders is completely understandable. The best book I know which makes a case for actually existing socialism, is Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds.

Throwing Down the Gauntlet
What’s wrong with anarchism?

I do not share the criticism of anarchists by Marxists and or Marxist-Leninists. For the most part they were not “petite bourgeois individualists.” Most of the 19th and 20th  century anarchists were working classpeople who were very influential during the revolutions in Russia, 1917-1921, and Spain, 1936-1939. I respect many of their leaders from Bakunin to Louise Michel to Kropotkin to Malatesta, to Emma Goldman and to Buenaventura Durruti. However socialism must be based on abundance, not scarcity. Many anarchists don’t believe material abundance is a necessity. For those anarchists who support material abundance, a decentralized economy is not going to deliver the goods. A kind of promethean socialism requires some state centralization coordination of the distribution of water, heat, gas and electricity and other infrastructural projects.

Following Pannekoek and Gorter I agree that workers’ councils should be the micro unit of a communist society. But local workers’ councils plans for production need to be linked up regionally and then nationally. Centralization is necessary but it must be open so that there is a dialectical relationship from workers’ councils to the top and from the state back down to the bottom. Anarchists are hostile or cynical about centralization. The way political organs are organized today, a political body has to be a state in order even gain recognition. What do anarchist expect to do? Dismantle the entire state system founded at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648? It’s completely unrealistic.

Secondly, anarchism and workers’ councils have always been hostile to parties. The heart of politics is to steer, to develop social policy. Workers’ councils or radical unions cannot be solely economic organizations. Whatever their production goals they have to be coordinated by social needs outside of work. This includes consumer groups with community needs, family needs, social and psychological needs where there is an ongoing dialectic in which plans are first made and monitored. Political parties are necessary for both directing our future and learning from our past.

Lasty, there needs to be room for markets. As many of you know markets are much older and much different than capitalist exchange. They go all the way back to horticultural societies and even existed among complex hunter-gatherer societies. Markets will continue to exist among small traders who do not hire workers for wages. The possible relationship between workers’ councils, the state and markets is well laid out in David Schweickart’s  book After Capitalism.

What is Wrong with Stalinism
By themselves workers can only achieve trade union consciousness (more money and better working conditions)
I do not share Trotskyist evaluations of Stalin as some kind of bureaucratic madman implying that Trotsky wanted more party democracy. Neither do I share anarchist dismissal, not only of Stalin, but also equating Stalin, Lenin and even Marx as all authoritarian. My criticism of Stalin as a political leader can be broken down into the following parts. As far back as 1905 with the founding of the Bolshevik party, they claimed that left to their own devices working class people can attain only a trade union consciousness. They ignored what the workers did during the Paris Commune which went way beyond trade union consciousness. Workers  created revolutionary organs of self-management without much, if any, input from any socialist or socialist parties at the time. This leads me to my second criticism.

This is that the Communist Party, not just Stalin, but also Lenin never trusted the workers’ councils that formed in Russia. They did not trust workers’ own creativity. “All power to the Soviets” was a slogan the Bolsheviks used before they came to power. After that the factory committees in the cities and the self-organization of the peasants were treated as rivals rather than comrades. In addition, Stalin actively destroyed workers’ councils during the Spanish revolution when he saw he could not control them. Devoted Leninists will state that it was the war against Western capitalist parties that forced the communist parties into a narrower, heavy-handed approach. I agree with this up to a point, but I don’t think it could explain all the more repressive behavior. The anarchists have every right to despise the Communists for what happened to them and their comrades.

The limits of vanguard parties
Marx and Engels never talked about vanguard parties. In fact, they made fun of the secret revolutionary societies of August Blanqui. However, it makes sense to me that a secret party was necessary in Russia in the early 20th century, a society without even a liberal party, no constitution and a monstrous secret police. But Leninist parties that continued to build vanguard parties that operated under relatively liberal stable conditions in the West, where a legal party was possible and political activity could be public is just mechanically holding  onto a theory that longer fits in Western conditions. In their hands Leninist theory became a dogma.

The scholastic treatment of the sciences and philosophy

There were a number of areas where dialectical materialism became dogmatic rather than scientific. I will mention two. In anthropology, Marxist-Leninist, with or without Stalin preserved Marx and Engels’ stage theory of social evolution for 100 years in spite of real empirical data from anthropologists that challenged Marxism. There were new stages of simple and complex horticulture societies that came between hunter-gatherers and the emergence of the state. In addition, slavery and feudalism were not  universal stages of social evolution. Also, in the field of psychology, the communist psychology of Vygotsky was banned in Russia for 20 years. One his most creative followers, Evald Ilyenkov was forbidden to publish and was harassed to the point of committing suicide.

Every school in the history of philosophy was crammed into the categories of objective idealism, subjective idealism or materialism. See my article which shows philosophy can be grouped into six different schools: Out on a Limb With Dialectical Materialism. Lastly the various schools of 20th century philosophy are crudely labelled based on whether the school of philosophy – pragmaticism, logical atomism, analytical philosophy – was for or against imperialism. In addition to which class the school represented. This was the case even if the school of philosophy never made any political statements.

Lastly it was very short-sighted for Stalin to insist on controlling all communist parties of the world in the service of Russia. In the case of the United States, the American Communist Party lost many opportunities to move the Yankee working class towards communism because the American communist leaders were never allowed to adapt communist theory to their own conditions. It makes complete sense to me that on a world scale, smaller communist parties should defer to the party that had achieved state power. But that doesn’t mean the party that achieved state power should dictate the strategies and tactics of countries with different political and economic conditions. We need a mass socialist party, not a secret vanguard party.

What Stalin did right
Internationally Stalin was a great politician. For 25 years the Communist Party outfoxed the entire Western world of the United States, England, France and Germany that were all in cahoots to destroy state socialism in Russia. Also the Communist Party practically single-handedly defeated the Nazis. Nationally Stalin raised the standard of living for workers and peasants compared, not to Western societies, but under the conditions of that existed under the czars until the Revolution.

There are issues that in the West Stalin is regularly attacked about:

• the treatment of peasants on the collective farms;
• the famines in Russia;
• the notion that Stalin was a dictator;
• that Russia operated in totalitarian way and
• the political trials of the 1930s.

Ludo Martens in his book Stalin: Another View, talks about each of these issues and exposes the typical Western ideology about this. It is important to remember that the statistics about the collective farms and famines were mostly written by CIA agents. Further, Martens does not take the position of idealizing everything that Stalin did. He simply presents facts that show Western propaganda as either wrong at worst or exaggerated at best.

So What are Messy Transitions?
The world of BRICS is a messy world. As I said before, China is the only country moving in a clear socialist direction. It has to work with two right wing countries – Hindu fundamentalist India and a theocracy in Saudi Arabia. Russia and Iran are clearly locked in with China but they are not socialist. Secondly, there is the class struggle going on within BRICS countries. None of these countries are supporting radical labor unions so the class struggle will go on within BRICS. Thirdly, workers cooperatives are a growing but small movement around the world. They represent potential dual forms of power. It is unclear how the heads of the BRICS countries will deal with worker co-ops as radical forms of economic exchange. Fourthly there are the ecological problems of extreme weather, accumulation of toxins, desertification and species extinction that the human species face. BRICS countries will deal with this in various ways. Lastly, there is the collapsing empire of the United States whose ruling class will fight to the death to keep it from slipping even to a minor power status. It will take all the ingenuity to navigate in, around and through this ruling class before it takes down half of the world with them.

Over many years organizations such as the United Nations have developed world programs for abolishing poverty and world hunger, increasing political participation and many other improvements. Those plans continue to gather dust because the world capitalist class is dead set against them. These plans can be potentially put into practice by some of the more progressive members of BRICS. In short it will be a messy bitches’ brew for the next century. We socialists have to accept messes and attempt to be more dialectical, not only in how we deal with the messes but also the bitterness of all socialists groups to each other.

Cooling Out the Socialist Family Feuds

For the past 170 years socialist groups have fought each other bitterly, sometimes justified and sometimes not. But we might do better if we understand each other as having various tensions that were there from the beginning, specifically:

• What is the role of the state?
• What is the role of a socialist party?
• What is the role of self-organizing workers? and
• What is place of markets?

To begin with, Leninists of all types need to face the fact that they don’t have the answers to everything. In fact, workers’ councils have shown that workers are far better at co-creating than they have been given credit for. On the other hand, anarchists and Council Communists need to come to terms with the fact that the state is a necessary part of socialism and for socialists to compete with capitalism on a world scale, some infrastructural industries require a state. In addition, council communists and anarchists cannot exist by themselves in economics organizations with no party. We need socialist parties to navigate political direction. Lastly, both anarchists and Council Communists need to appreciate that what the USSR, Cuba and Venezuela have achieved with their population is to be admired, not just criticized.

Finally, all these groups have to respect what the social democratic parties in the Scandinavia countries achieved domestically, at least before the rise of neoliberalism. They made some real improvements domestically for the populations in terms of standard of living, wages, health care and housing.  On the other hand Social Democrats internationally should be roundly condemned for actively or passively not standing up to the imperialist powers of the West with a sense of international solidarity with other socialist countries against capitalists. Finally, while Social Democrats have given far too much power to capitalists domestically in their own country, they have also shown that local markets can be productive contributors to socialism and that markets are not synonymous with capitalism.

What is the Opposite of Purity?
Throughout this article I have criticized socialist purity. But the opposite of purity is enmeshment. In psychological terms, enmeshment is a process by which a person cannot easily tell where their boundaries end and another’s begin. The worst example of enmeshment politically are the actions of the social democratic parties of the world since the end of World War II. They allowed themselves to become entangled with capitalism. Their boundaries were enmeshed. They couldn’t tell the difference between domestic socialism and international imperialism

The worst example of socialist enmeshment is the Democratic Socialists of America. This organization for 60 years has been devoted to “moving the Democratic Party to the left”. In reality the Democratic Party has been moving right despite whatever interventions they’ve made. The Democratic Party has continuously moved to the right, today being a center-right party. Yet the leaders of the Democratic Socialists of American continue to support the Democratic Party. Today it is difficult, if not impossible to tell the difference between Social Democrats and left liberals.

Conclusion
I began my article by defining what I meant by socialist purity. I said it could apply to both the anarchist as well as the Leninist left – Trotskyists, Stalinists or Maoists. At the end my article I said that the opposite of socialist purity was socialist “enmeshment”. It is the Social Democrats in Europe and the Democratic Socialists in the United States that are the best example of this. I pointed out examples of socialist purity in attitudes towards two countries, China and Russia. I argued why BRICS holds the best hope for a socialist future and I based this partly on World Systems Theory of the history of capitalism. I pointed out the Utopian nature of the wish for a workers’ revolution all over the world at the same time. I argued that based on how they behave today, workers fighting for socialism within their nation-states is the best we can do. I also claimed that these days nationalist loyalties in the West is an advance against regional institutions like the European Union on the one hand  or global institutions like the IMF or the World Bank on the other. I proposed that nationalism is an advance, whether it comes from countries such as Cuba or Venezuela on the left or European nationalists on the right including Le Pen’s party in France, the AfD in Germany or Orban in Hungary.

I attempted to be dialectical in weighing both anarchism and the varieties of Leninism for their pros and cons. I defended what has been called siege socialism against the purists, using Michael Parenti’s book Black Shirts and Reds and Ludo Martens book, Stalinism: Another View as two sources.

For over 50 years I have drawn from some very unlikely bedfellows. Some of these groups I joined and some I was on the periphery of and only knew them from their writings:

• beginning with historical anarchists culminating with Murray Bookchin (2 years);
• The Situationists of Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord culminating in Pannekoek and Gorter’s council communism (3 years);
• National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) converging in Lyndon Larouche’s book Dialectical Economics (1 year). More recently I’ve been influenced by William Engdahl, Matthew Ehret and Cynthia Chung, also in the Larouche orbit;
• world-systems theory following the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, Christopher Chase-Dunn and Giovanni Arrighi;
• communist psychology of the Soviet Union whose main practitioners were Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev. Also one year’s involvement with Social Therapy founded by Fred Newman and Lois Holtzman in New York City;
• in 2000 the anti-war movement headed by ANSWER (8 years);
• the Occupy movement from 2011-2012;
• the founding of our own organization Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism from 2012 to today; and
• one year with anarchists from Olympia Assembly and the Industrial Workers of the World.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Orientation

Summing up Part I

My purpose in this two-part article is to show how creativity can be understood not only at the micro level of the individual artist, but also at the macro level of world history. I began in Part I by describing the ways in which the individual artist is different from the other workers. But then I show how romantic theories of art get in the way of seeing creativity as also a collective process rooted in history. I discuss the creative process of the artist, but then close by following Gertrude Stein and Henry Miller in demanding that an artist’s whole life should be a work of art.

What’s ahead?

We are now ready to discuss creativity at the macro level of workers. Like sleeping giants for the last 5,000 years workers have been unconsciously shaping and reshaping society. First, I talk about how all the arts were once integrated into magical activity in egalitarian hunting and gathering and horticultural societies.But then with the rise of caste and class societies, collective creativity in labor became unconscious and alienated. The magical rituals of egalitarian societies that united all the arts in the service of magic is undermined. What happens is:

• all the magical preparations that involve the arts – mask-making, drawing, sculpture, music, song, dance – become separate fields and secularized;
• the arts are used as a handmaiden and supporter of the monotheistic religion; the Catholic Church’s use of painting, sculpture and music are used to praise an otherworldly god.

But then I describe how even within capitalist societies there are instances during natural disasters, social movements and ultimately revolutionary situations where workers express their collective creativity consciously in the construction of workers’ councils. Ultimately, in communist society all the arts will be joined again in communist magical activity which will include the merger of the sciences and the arts in the service of communist planning, the development of high technology which allows us to do more and more with less and less.  Unlike in tribal societies where creativity was mostly collective, in communist societies creativity will be conscious at both the individual and group level.

Creativity as Collective Activity

Labor as human species activity

In order to earn a living in our environment and solve problems the human species has to work. Work involves collective-creative cooperation in the process of deciding on a means of subsistence, making and using tools, harnessing energy, dividing up the work and sharing the resources if successful. Labor is the totality of collective human energy, both physical and mental, which is expended on reproducing society, hence reproducing human beings. It is creativity beyond how an individual lives their life. The problem is that this is unconscious collective-creativity.

Co-creation of the socio-sphere

Labor creates and sustains human society. Over tens of thousands of years the activity of working and using up resources over generations has introduced creative changes onto the surface and depths of Earth. This socio-sphere is like a film, a social membrane which has also developed over generations. The socio-sphere overlays and interacts with the biosphere. The earth is our collective canvas that we have been painting for the last 100,000 years. We are thus self-transforming beings. By the practical transformation of the world through working we find ourselves changed, we find ourselves in a new world, a world of our own making, a world which invites us to satisfy new needs, desires and powers.  Let me briefly review:

• the reproduction of the human species is a collective-creative activity, labor, which is largely unconscious;
• human labor creates a new level of evolution beyond the biosphere, human society, a “socio-sphere”;
• this socio-sphere is the collective canvas of humanity, but so far we have been painting behind our own backs, as if sleepwalking.

From society to history

Human social institutions are shaped and in turn shape the biosphere, but as society changes over time, it can no longer simply be understood as an extension of biological evolution. The “aging” process of society becomes human history which developed its own processes and laws that are not reducible to the biosphere. History-shaping includes periods when particular means of subsistence were dominant—hunting-gathering, horticulture, agriculture, industry. These ways of life come into being as creative strategies to ward off population pressure and a resource depletion crisis.

Human practice

History is the story, the ongoing saga, the odyssey of the marriage of society’s actions and consequences upon the rest of nature over time. This is called human practice, which is partly conscious and partly unconscious, and contains these ingredients:

• those collective actions which we consciously design and succeed at, such as roads or buildings which last;
• those collective actions which we consciously design and fail at, such as a rocket ship which fails to leave the launching pad or a bridge which collapses;
• collective endeavors which are unconscious but which have consequences which accumulate behind our backs. For example, the long-term effects of shabby health-care, education and housing on the productivity of a society.

The historical unconscious

It is this last dynamic that we can speak of as the historical unconscious. This is a result of a series of collective actions which slip beyond our attention span and over which we lose control. The collective sleep walk is our everyday work-life. We become unaware of the effect of our collective actions or inactions upon the production of history. We are like painters who are too close to the canvas to see what we are doing.

There are social institutions which produce a kind of collective defense mechanisms – ideologies. These go with the suppression of this historical unconscious. This is where history is presented as something other than the collective creative activity of the average individual working and breeding. Either taken together or taken separately, here are some examples:

• history is the story of political institutions that appear to have a life of their own;
• history as the story of spectacular events or the work of extraordinary people;
• history is exclusively about the past.

In the first case, behind the institutions and the upper class and upper-middle class elites who embody these institutions are the countless laboring actions which provide the food and other necessities that provide those classes with what they need to govern. Without the work of the lower classes, these institutions would cease to function. The second proposition assumes that only vivid and unusual events created by extraordinary men make up history. Everyday events and the average person who makes them stand outside of history. The third proposition ignores that history is always being made in the past, present and future. It ignores the possibility that groups can intervene in history by using what is known about the past to change the future. In fact, we cannot shape history. We either shape it consciously or it is shaped unconsciously.

Creativity as matters of scale

Summing up: creativity can be expressed as matters of scale as:

• the particular objects (paintings, sculpture, writings) or performances (dance, music) of individuals;
• the lives of individual people;
• the collective creativity of history shaping of the entire human species.

The Alienation of Collective Creative Activity in Class Societies

So how did it come to be that the collective creativity of humanity, labor in shaping history and the lives of individuals were not connected to creativity and the only activity associated with creativity was the arts?

Egalitarian hunting and gathering societies and participatory magic

In egalitarian hunting-gathering and in simple horticultural societies, collective-creativity – labor – was collective and conscious. People decided together what the means of subsistence was, what the division of labor would be, how long they would work, what tools they would fashion and how the fruits of their labor would be distributed.

At the same time, before going out to hunt, gather plants or cultivate them preparation was needed. Magical rituals were undertaken to increase the chances of success. Most, if not all the activities which we now associate with art including  mask-making, drawing, music, dance and theatre were once magical rituals. In the beginning both arts and crafts were in the service of magic, and magic was in the service of transforming the world.

Chiefdoms and pristine states

As hunting-gathering societies and simple horticultural societies became more complex commodity production emerged. Alongside arts and crafts in the service of ritual, we now have arts and crafts as secular activities in the service of commodity production. With the emergence of state civilizations 5,000 years ago, there is a split between conscious and unconscious creativity. Conscious creativity is channeled into three social arenas.

• economic and political collective managerial decisions of the ruling class over social policy;
• religiously in the collective construction of myths and rituals by a priest or priestess caste;
• religiously in the alienation and projection of the collective-creative activity of humanity into the plans and actions of gods and goddesses;
• artistically in that a class of artists and artisans emerge who produce profane objects not only for public sale, but objects which for ideological support, as for example, monumental architecture for the ruling class. A second group of objects is in the service of conspicuous consumption by the ruling class.

Fall of magic and the rise of religion

With the fall of magic and the rise of monotheism, art ceases to be a collective-creative activity and becomes the act of isolated and rarefied individuals who prostitute themselves to religious authorities. Art becomes a wandering ghost, with a methodology but without an ontology.

Capitalist Societies

At the same time, the work of the lower classes becomes alienated, more or less mechanized and unconscious. In other words, the work itself contributes to the creative reproduction of society. But because the lower classes do not participate in the design and implementation of social policy, because they do not reap the full fruits of their labor (most of it is given over to the ruling class and its minions) their part of the creative contribution to society appears alien. The lower classes become unconscious of the full weight of what they produce. They merely perceive their work as something that reproduces their own life and the life of their family, rather than for the whole of society.

Making History Collectively Consciously

There is a kind of collective creativity which surfaces periodically in our society and sometimes sustains itself alongside the social unconscious. These activities are harbingers of what collective creative activity might look like in a post class society. The first kind is the spontaneous response of groups of people to natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes and swarming lizards. These collective actions are more or less reactive to circumstances and they dissipate when the catastrophic events have subsided. We will call this “historically conscious” collective creativity. There is another kind of collective-creative activity which is ongoing and designed to change history. This is the collective-creativity of social movements. Marx called this practical critical activity. I will also call this “historically self-conscious creativity”.

People in natural disasters

The following is a description of a personal experience I had with others during a snowstorm. The setting is New York City in the early 1960’s. I am 15 years old. It is the dead of winter in January and about 3:30 in the afternoon. It has been snowing for days. Upon leaving high school I see that the snow drifts have smothered all traffic. Things seem eerily still. In the distance I see something moving. Someone is coming towards me, waving for me to meet him. My fleeting reservation fizzles in the face of the starkness of these extraordinary circumstances. He asks me to help him push his car to the side of the road. As we begin, I notice that we have been joined by two or three others who spontaneously pitch in. When the car is safely pushed to the side of the road, we proceed to help the latest arrivals dig their cars out. More people come along. They suggest we all shovel out the entire street, since then we will all have access to the main road. Since I don’t have a car, this is not relevant to me. Still, I am caught up in the moment and what under normal circumstances I wouldn’t do in the name of individual self-interest, I find myself doing anyway. We organized ourselves into little groups and worked into the night

What is happening here? I am hustling about, shoveling here, pushing there. I have long since forgotten about eating. I feel as if I’m regressing in time, as if I were 8 or 9 years old. My adolescent posturing has wilted and, in its place, seeps an adventurous joy of plotting and scheming with playmates long ago. But this time, instead of “let’s pretend” fantasies, the snow and the storm invite us to actually change reality.

As this street-clearing project takes shape, we relax a little. Strangers are laughing and joking. Grateful neighbors are out in the street. Some offer hot chocolate and a hardy fire to war up by. Someone throws a snowball at me from across the street. A man in a three-piece suit ducks behind a car to avoid retaliation. How bizarre! But then this whole episode suggests something forbidden, not of this world. Time seems to have stopped. Since no traffic is moving, the street is ours to do anything we want with the piled-up snow, from sleigh-riding to castle-building to snowball fights. Kids come out of the houses and begin sleigh riding. Some are carrying ice skates on their way to a frozen pond three blocks away.

Both in process and result, we have created the seeds of a new social life. The labor of clearing the street, digging out cars, chopping ice was a spontaneously organized collective activity, achieved without coercions from authorities nor with the carrot of wage labor as a consolation. But some nameless abdication, we have inherited some hidden recess in the Himalayas.

Sometime around 7:00 pm the snow has stopped. The snow plows are out and traffic has begun to move. People acknowledge their exhaustion and car pool for rides home. But I don’t want this to end! I no longer have a material foundation to house the exuberance I felt that has begun to rapidly dissipate. I felt joy with those people in the wild snow, but the snow has been tamed. What do I do with the joy? Under what social conditions could I feel this way again? Will I ever feel this way again? Rarely have I despised the prospect of “normal life” as much as I did then. It is as if the freshly plowed street was like the sun beating on my face, early in the morning, awakening me from an enchanting dream.

On that twilight winter’s day, social life itself seemed as pliable, as impressionable as a slab of clay or a blank canvas. In our collective actions – shoveling snow, pushing cars, chopping ice – we experienced a creative process similar to what the individual artist lives through from the beginning to the end of a single painting – inspiration, a flurry of activity and finally a new artifact or situation. Our snow shovels were our paints and brushes, and the street, that microscopic chunk of social terrain, was our canvas. Society turned out not to be an impenetrable aggregate of frozen institutions, but a vast network of activities whose future is open-ended.

Under normal circumstances it is hard not to think of social institutions as solids rather than liquids, as nouns rather than verbs, as things rather than processes. Just as a fan revolving at maximum speed does not reveal how the individual rudders are connected or even visible, so too, the macroscopic “social fan” of life under normal times whirls too quickly and over too vast a terrain (an entire country) to display its structural components, the collective creativity of people working to produce the life of social institutions. It is as if the snow storm clogged a small corner of the rudder long enough for its constituent elements to become detectable.

Social movements

The second kind of collective creative activity is more assertive. Instead of reacting to extraordinary circumstances, social movements are on-going rather than sporadic and they are, at least in some cases, dedicated to creating extraordinary social conditions. These movements aspire to actively change the course of history.

Let’s take a very small, simple example. Let’s say a group of neighbors call a meeting to combat the rise of drugs and prostitution in their neighborhood. In order to address the problem, these people must meet more than once if to have a chance of being successful. Phone calls need to be made, petitions drawn up, house to house calls made, flyers designed, meetings with local neighborhood mediators scheduled and a system of vigilance set up. This endeavor involves collective creative activity. Like all creative actions there comes a point where the work they have done is tested by the larger community response including, the surrounding neighborhoods, the dealers, the prostitutes, their Johns and the police.

The reactions of these groups affect the future plans that these neighbors made. Resistance calls for one set of plans while a positive response calls for another. Other neighbors might be indifferent, the police ignore the problem, but a local socialist politician is supportive and willing to work with them. Just as an artist will alter the subject matter of his work, together with the color scheme or medium in response from the public, so too this community of neighbors will develop new plans and theories based on their practice. Social movements can be reformist (as above) or they can be revolutionary. In some cases, social movements seize power and transform the economic and political relations. This is the highest form of historically self-conscious collective-creative activity.

Workers’ councils

Especially in the last 150 years, there erupted a series of attempts to take over social life without capitalists, or without the state. These “workers’ councils” arose out of irreversibly critical situations in the existing order. In some situations, they emerged alongside the state, creating a “dual government”. When the state fell, some workers’ councils spread over a wider terrain. During the Spanish revolution they reached as much as 1/3 of the country. In some cases, they not only governed without the state but in places they abolished the local currency and began their own system of exchange. These experiments took place during revolutionary processes when the official authorities lost power but before their power was regained. The organization of this world and the experiences that participants experienced must have been beyond their wildest dreams. These movements lasted as briefly as 3 days (the Seattle General Strike) or as long as 3 years (the Spanish revolution).

Like most social movements, these councils began by simply reacting to the abuses of the existing order. Workers wanted higher wages, better working conditions, most justice. But once the authorities lost power, these workers found themselves doing far more than they bargained for. Though these workers’ councils were inventive and festive, like all creative activity it was productive and it contained its own collective discipline. In Spain, following the failure of Franco’s coup in 1936, at least one third of the country was self-managed with better productive records than the overthrown government. This was done in the middle of a civil war!

The internal organization of the councils expressed the creativity it was demonstrating in the world. They were organized in an anti-hierarchical and anti-bureaucratic manner. The workshop of the councils, the foundation from which all decisions were made, was the general assembly. Whatever resolutions resulted were carried out by mandated delegates who had no independent power of their own (unlike representatives who, once elected have power to make their own decisions). They merely carried out decisions already made in the assembly. Secondly, these delegates were often rotated so that no one got too comfortable being a permanent authority. Lastly, the delegates were immediately revocable. This means that any abuses of power were grounds for immediate termination. There were little state bureaucratic procedures or the political red tape where population had to wait until the next election.

In both their amazing coherence of their social management capacities and the profound change in the quality of their interactions, these experiments were truly “out of this world”. In fact, the depiction of what happened to the participants runs into the same problems that any mystic or artist or anyone who has had a peak experience has when they try to describe what happened to them. How do you describe an experience which seems almost that it is on another plane of reality than the language of the existing order.

Where did they occur? Workers’ councils have dotted the globe in at least the following countries:

• The Paris Commune of 1871
• The St. Petersburg Soviet of 1905
• The Russian Revolution of 1917
• Short-lived experiments in Poland, Italy, Germany and Bulgaria between 1917-1920
• The Seattle General Strike of 1919
• The Spanish Revolution of 1936 (for most of the first year and then on and off until 1939)
• The Hungarian Revolution of 1956
• The French General Strike of 1968
• The Chilean Revolution 1970-1973

Workers’ councils today exist in hundreds of factories in Argentina and are present in an embryonic form in workers’ cooperatives around the world. Let us look at how the metamorphosis begins.

The Paris Commune: From Reacting to Collective Creativity

In order to envision how these workers councils begin, we will combine the descriptions from the Paris Commune of 1871 with the French General Strike of 1968. The Paris Commune emerged at the tail end of the Franco-Prussian war. It began as a patriotic movement at odds with its government which it felt was conducting the war in a half-hearted manner. In 1870 while the army was called to the front, the National Guard was called on to defend the fortifications in Paris.

The war fever that now gripped the city generated a patriotic demand that all citizens be armed. Within a few weeks, there were over 130 new battalions, making a total of some 300,000 Parisians in the National Guard. ‘No one could call himself a citizen’ it was being said “unless he had a rifle’. The cry was for more arms, and the authorities were forced to distribute hundreds of thousands of weapons to those flocking to join the newly formed battalions. (Steward Edwards, The Communards of Paris, 1871, 21).

Here we have an armed, but so far merely patriotic population. The change from this to a social revolution began on March 18, 1871:

Thiers [then the head of the government] sees the armed workers of Paris as his main obstacle to the conclusion of a peace treaty with Bismarck {head of Prussia]. He decides to send ‘loyal battalions to remove the cannons… the operation starts successfully in the early hours of the morning…but the operation has been bureaucratically and inefficiently planned. The necessary gun carriages don’t arrive to remove the captured guns. The crowd begins to grow. Women, children, old people mingle with the troops…Some …start talking to the guard. When General Lecomte, losing his head, orders his troops to fire, it is already too late. The soldiers refuse to fire, turn their rifle butts up…soldiers and civilians have fraternized…the soldiers who have deserted their regiments shouted to them to surrender, but they stayed in the saddle, and continued to spur their horses on furiously…’cut the traces’…The crowd let out a great cheer…the women closest to the cannons, to which they had been clinging to for half an hour took the knives that the men passed down to them from hand to hand…the maneuver was carried out amid joyful laughter and cheering. The artillerymen were carried off by their mounts and found themselves cut off from the guns and surrounded by groups of people inviting them to fraternize. They were offered flasks of wine and meat rolls… They were soon won over to the side of the rebels. The cannon had been retaken. . (Steward Edwards, The Communards of Paris, 1871, 63).

Two points are worth mentioning. First, revolutions begin when situations get desperate enough to where formerly indifferent or hostile groups recognize they have more in common with other groups than they had first suspected. In this case the soldiers, who were supposed to be loyal to their commanding officers. But in reality, most soldiers are working class. They have more in common with the people in the streets than with their officers. When a critical mass of soldiers refuses to follow orders, it undermines and limits what loyal soldiers can do. From the disarming of these solders the next logical step is the building of the barricades. For a portrayal of this we turn to the French general strike of 1968.

Here with the help of cars, billboards, railings, torn off branches, trees, as well as cobblestones, the first serious barricades went up…(Singer, Daniel Prelude to Revolution, 127)  anything could serve the purpose… a neighboring building site was a real treasure. The most precious find there was an air hammer, which, once mastered made it possible to open up the streets wholesale. The paving stones then went from hand to hand…people were coming down with sandwiches, drinks, chocolate.” (139-140).

Whereas yesterday social life appeared as this alienated series of exchanges out of the control of most everyone, for days, weeks, months and even years in some places, these alienated institutions revealed their true nature as malleable institutions dependent on the continued alienated activity of workers for their very life. When social life stops their true origin in labor reveals itself. When social life resumes without these institutions people begin to grasp how superfluous capitalists and the state really are to social production and reproduction.

Seattle, 1919

The Seattle strike of 1919 was different than other strikes. The ship workers did not simply shut everything down and limit themselves to a set of demands. They used the strike as a stepping stone for starting things up under their own management. Additionally, the strikers organized themselves to provide essential services in areas not under the direct control of the strikers, such as taking care of hospital laundry, getting milk to babies, and collecting wet garbage. They didn’t stop at controlling their own factories or buildings. They related to the entire city as if it was theirs. Just as Daniel Cohn-Bendit argued, in expanding the terrain of their management they gradually learned how the city is run:

The strikers were at once brought face to face, with the way in which the whole community, including their own families, is intrinsically tied together… if life was not to be made unbearable for the strikers themselves. (Root and Branch: The Rise of the Workers Movements, 280).

Here are some of the achievements of the milk wagon drivers who:

…established through their own organization thirty-five neighborhood milk stations all over the city…The stations were announced as open from nine to two., but the milk was always gone before noon. The amount handled increased as the days went on until about 3,000 gallons were handled in various stations. The first day the supply ran noticeably short…but by the third day…the irregularities were ironed out and the supply was more adjusted to the need. (Root and Branch: The Rise of the Workers Movements, 254-255).

The most intense and complex re-organization fell to the provision trades, charged with feeding the strikers:

Some 21 eating places were opened in various parts of the city. The food was cooked in large kitchens…and then transported to various halls where it was served cafeteria style …(R and B, 256-257)…Locations had to be found, numbers of diners estimated, food purchased, equipment borrowed or bought, transportation problems solved. (Robert Friedheim, The Seattle General Strike, 127).

The resolution of these problems depended upon an improvised community of people who probably barely knew each other, without the benefit of any pre-existing organization and in open hostility to all established authority. There were delays in the opening day of this “feeding depot” for many reasons:

…there was no corps of dishwashers to keep up the meager supply of dishes until the waitresses union, assisted by patrons, leaped into the breach…By the second day however, the difficulties were much reduced and meals began to appear with regularity. (R and B 256-257)…By the last day of the strike, 30,000 meals a day were served without a hitch. (Robert Friedheim, The Seattle General Strike, 128).

In summary,

…the machinery of the strike, so hastily arranged…was astonishingly successful bogging down in only a few spots. Initial mistakes were quickly corrected. No one starved or lacked heat; no children had to do without milk: no sick or injured were denied hospital care. (Robert Friedheim, The Seattle General Strike, 126).

Commonalities between natural disasters, social movements, workers’ councils and artistry

Both kinds of history shaping – reactions to natural disasters and consciously planned as in social movements – require the spirit of the arts and those who make them. Art, like all forms of creativity, has its feet in both worlds. On one hand, it is an expression of what is possible. On the other hand, it reproduces and justifies the old world. But the highest form of art does not represent reality, or even make pictures of the world to come. Artists must supersede art itself and use artistic talents in the planning, together with others, the world to be built. Henry Miller sensed something like this when he wrote:

One has to pass beyond the sphere and influence of art. Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant, it merely points the way…All art will one day disappear…and life itself will… definitely and for all time usurp the field… (The Creative Process, Ghiselin, 162).

History of Conscious and Unconscious Creativity

I would like to close by summarizing the place of creativity in the human species, both at the individual and collective levels, at the micro world of individual development and the macro world of history.

Bio-social, historical foundations

First, creativity in general was a survival strategy that human beings use in competition with other species for resources. Second, we built an envelope around the earth, a “socio-sphere” first locally then regionally, then nationally and finally globally. Third, there is the building up of a thickening crush of human history as human societies change over time.

Creative and conscious creativity in egalitarian societies

There is conscious collective creativity involved in the production, circulation, distribution and consumption of goods. There is also conscious collective creativity involved in magical rituals for hunting and planting societies and these magical activities include all the arts, including mask-making, drawing, sculpture, music, singing and dancing.

Unconscious creativity in caste and class societies

This appears in the alienated labor of peasants and workers in Bronze Age, Iron Age civilizations as well as feudal societies and industrial capitalist and socialist societies.

Conscious creativity in caste and class societies

This exists in the economic and political design and implementation of social policies by elites—priests, priestesses, aristocrats and merchants. Secondly, in the religious construction of myths and rituals by priestly castes. Third, in the religious projection of creativity out of humanity in the forms of the activity and characteristics of gods and goddesses in the work of priest and priestesses. Further, there is a sacred and secular realm in individual creativity of men and women in the arts and crafts which serves the ruling classes as conspicuous consumption. Lastly, as we have seen, there is conscious creativity in the work of those involved in survival during natural disasters and in social movements.

Conscious creativity in communist societies

The first stop is what people do in revolutionary situations. The description of the activities in workers’ councils is an example. From there, maximum collective creative activity lies in the political and economic decision about the production and circulation of goods and services by a dialectical exchange between the local and regional workers councils on the one hand and the centralized socialist state on the other. This happens first locally regionally and internationally. The same process occurs when the human species sets up civilizations in outer space. In addition, there are collectivist myths and rituals for socialists which draws from the rich traditions of Neopaganism. In the process women and men re-own their alienated labor and become goddesses and gods themselves. On the individual level there are not visionary arts in the service of socialism

Conclusion: Healing the Split Between Conscious and Unconscious Collective Creative Activity

As I’ve shown in the last section, collective responses to natural disasters and the building of social movements are examples of attempts to make collective creativity conscious. In the case of social movements, through what Marx called “practical-critical activity”. In the case of workers’ councils, examples include conscious creativity in the service of building dual power proto-communist organizations.

Conscious collective creative activity under communism

Collective creativity would express itself in the design and implementation of political and economic organization and no longer be determined by aristocrats, capitalists or state bureaucrats. Secondly, whatever myths and rituals remained in society would be co-created by everyone, not by a priestly caste. Thirdly, humanity would re-own the projection of its creations as the work of gods and goddesses and simply recognize that humanity creates itself over time and across space through laboring. Lastly, while there would be arts and artists who would pursue their work on an individual basis, the arts would be freed from the service of the ruling class either as ideology or for conspicuous consumption. The arts would no longer be for elites. On a collective level, the arts would return to their magical roots, not as superstition but in the form of visions of the world being born through mask-making, drawing, sculpture, music, dancing, theater and writing for a socialist future.

How would conscious collective creativity be different in a post-class society in comparison to a pre-class society? In at least three areas – scale, technology and material wealth. Collective creativity in the socialist future would not be local or regional, but national and international. Secondly, the technology used to make goods and services as well as communication will be vastly superior to tribal societies. Products will be of higher quality and made in less time. Lastly, the amount of wealth produced would make it possible for everyone to live in great comfort. Fifty five years ago, Buckminster Fuller argued that we have the material wealth in place so that every member of the population could live a middle-class lifestyle and work about 20 hours per week. The impediments to this are not natural scarcity, but economic and political class war. The anarchist Fredy Perlman, who understood Marx very well, once said that in tribal societies people were much but had little; in class societies people had more but were less; in socialist society people will have more and be more.

•  First published in https://socialistplanningbeyondcapitalism.org

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Our most important contribution is to have demonstrated concretely how to reconcile democratic planning with worker and consumer autonomy. We believe this was the Achilles’ heel of socialism during the twentieth century, which must be resolved if there is to be a future for socialism in the twenty-first century.

— Robin Hahnel speaking to the breakthrough that would be achieved in A Participatory Economy, 2022 (p 236-237)

In his book, A Participatory Economy, Robin Hahnel, a professor emeritus of economics at American University, begins by clarifying the goals of a participatory economy: economic freedom, economic justice, solidarity, efficiency, environmentally sustainable, and economic variety.

Economic justice is achieved by remunerating people based on their effort and sacrifice, how much of the burden one bears. Effort and sacrifice will be judged by colleagues in the workplace. Efficiency is the converse of wastefulness — that work performed is beneficial. Environmental sustainability means attaining intergenerational equity. Economic variety recognizes that people are different, have different tastes and wants; therefore, achieving an economy that produces a diversity of outcomes and lifestyles is sought.

Chapter 2 looks at different political-economic models and discusses why a participatory economy (parecon) is preferable and superior to capitalism, communism, and democratic socialism.

Hahnel shoots down the canard relentlessly propounded by adherents of capitalism that humans are motivated by greed. Hahnel writes, “The fallacy is in asserting that people will act in the same greedy and fearful ways in a system where they are given the opportunity to make their own decisions, are positively rewarded for embracing a fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of economic activity, and are rewarded, not punished, for acting in solidarity with others.” (p 32-33)

Perhaps the most controversial feature in a parecon is that there will be no private enterprise. This is because of the belief that “… only full social ownership of all productive resources is capable of achieving economic justice and distributive justice.” (p 40)

Markets are also eschewed for a variety of reasons, including their unfairness and subversion of democracy.

Instead of markets determining outcomes, people will get together and plan the economy. This is not a centralized command economy. A permanent top-down hierarchy has been eliminated. All workers and consumers are equally empowered in a parecon, although workers within a job complex will have greater input into their particular job complex than others outside that job complex.

There are many factors that go into protecting the environment (by, e.g., eliminating externalities), determining planning, creating balanced job complexes, determining effort, special needs, etc. Nonetheless, parecon and its planning are not pie-in-the-sky. Hahnel cites the promising results of computer simulations that support the feasibility and efficiency of annual planning. (see chapter 5)

A Participatory Economy also includes a chapter on reproductive labor. Thus labor, that has traditionally been heavily skewed to women (e.g., housework, child care), is recognized for its value to not only the family unit but society. Women’s equal participation in the workplace and economic life is a given in a parecon.

Parecon is a system in which fairness means fairness is across all ethnicities, genders, and whichever identifying features people choose for themselves. Application of the principles that underlie parecon must be accorded to all human distinctions with fairness. This is a sine qua non to be faithful to parecon’s principles.

Subsequent chapters examine participatory investment planning and long-run development planning.

But how does all the forgoing relate to international economic relations? Hahnel relates that a parecon rejects foreign direct investment in all forms because it is at odds with worker self-management. Private, for-profit business is not allowed in a parecon.

Foreign trade would take into account the level of economic development in a trade partner and seek to rectify long-standing economic injustices. Hahnel details a more-than-50-percent rule to greater benefit disadvantaged economies and respect a commitment to economic justice.

Parecon is not considered a finished product. Neither is it a process. It answers the question of what kind of economy and world do we desire once markets are supplanted and the masses of people have gained control of the resources, economy, and their futures.

A Participatory Economy is an eminently worthwhile read for people devoted to social justice and an economically just society. Seek answers to your questions and gain a deeper understanding of the principles and details of a promising people-oriented economic model that cannot be sufficiently covered in a book review.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

False choices, bad options, and mixed messages abound. Week after week, one news source claims that everything is great while another says that the economic forecast looks gloomy for the next decade. Economic concepts like inflation, interest rates, costs, prices, and unemployment are rendered in the most tortured manner over and over again, with different representatives of the rich constantly making unscientific and confusing claims about what is “the real problem” and how to “get us back on track.”

Anticonsciousness has produced a stubborn refusal on the part of the superfluous political and economic elite to provide a concrete and lucid description, explanation, and evaluation of what is actually unfolding, leaving people disinformed and marginalized. This tiny ruling elite is plagued with old ideas and concepts about the economy. It has no interest in consciously investigating phenomena and reaching warranted conclusions.

This August 21, 2022 headline from The Register-Herald from West Virginia is one of endless examples of the mainstream media failing to empower people:  “U.S. economy flashes signals of hope and concern in mixed data.” Like so many news items, this article leaves people riding the fence and unable to decipher real developments in the economy and society. This is usually done in the name of “balance,” which is really an attempt to conceal a multifaceted reality that can be grasped only when investigated consciously and objectively. One is left as powerless at the end of the article as when they started the article. Half-truths, incorrect information, hedging and waffling here and there—such common tactics leave people with no bearings or direction. It is not a serious approach.

Another confused source, The Nation, carries this headline: “Looming recession in 2023” (September 7, 2022). The article relies on capital-centered discourse with all its limitations. It provides no integrated coherent view on what is happening in the economy or why. It ignores the fact that the long depression started 12 years ago and that most economies have been running on gas fumes since then, if not before then. The “economic slowdown” started many years ago and will continue for years to come. Years later there is still no meaningful recovery and resilience in most countries, just worse living and working conditions for the majority year after year. Living and working standards are not rising in the U.S. and elsewhere. Endless chatter by the elite and their representatives about “recession” serves mainly to confuse and distract people. It seeks to embroil them in debates that do not serve their interests.

Conflating different concepts and trends, this September 1, 2022 headline from Bloomberg News, “Strong Economy Is Bad News for Fed’s Inflation Fight,” also leaves readers with no coherence about the economy. What “strong economy”? Why is a so-called “strong economy” a bad thing? And what about the fact that the Fed ran out of ammunition long ago and is only exacerbating things?

Other bizarre news headlines look like this one from the New York Times: “America’s Dueling Realities on a Key Question: Is the Economy Good or Bad?” (September 13, 2022). The presentation of the economy to the public in this irrational manner can be found everywhere today. Objectivity of consideration is absent and everything is reduced to what a handful of “registered voters” think. Everything is reduced to subjective interpretations, as if the economy does not exist independent of the will of individuals. On top of all this, the article openly admits that economists and journalists are bad at predicting economic phenomena. In other words, they are not scientific.

Many other examples of media disinformation on the economy can be given. Desperate attempts to find something positive in a dying and decaying economy are not going anywhere any time soon. Such efforts continue because the ruling elite are terrified of more people recognizing the illegitimacy, bankruptcy, and dysfunction of current arrangements and uniting with others to usher in a fresh new alternative.

Research and experience show that most Americans are very worried about the state of the economy. ¹ Millions feel insecure. Everyone knows we have a bad economy, whether you call it a recession or not. High prices are everywhere and interest rate increases by the Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world are only creating more problems. Today many people have to work two full-time jobs just to survive. Millions live pay-check to pay-check, including many who make six figures. On top of all this, price-gouging, bankruptcies, evictions, hunger, homelessness, inequality, debt, anxiety, and crime are increasing. The fact is that “Rising costs force millions of Americans to choose between paying health care and utility bills” (August 31, 2022).

Yet Jerome Powell, head of the U.S. Federal Reserve, recently promised “more pain” for millions. More agony and unemployment, we are told, is the way forward.

Why? How is this a responsible and acceptable approach in 2022? Why should there be more suffering for everyone centuries after the scientific and technical revolution made it possible to meet the needs of all several times over? Why more pain for everyone when objectively there is an overabundance of wealth in society produced by workers? Is the public to believe that the approach embraced by economic “leaders” is the only viable approach to the problems confronting the economy, society, and humanity? And whose economy are we talking about? There is nothing bright or human-centered about the approach, outlook, and agenda of the rich and their representatives, which is why they have not solved any major problems in decades.

It is clear that what the rich mean by “economy” bears no resemblance to what an economy actually is: the relations people enter into with each other in the course of reproducing themselves and society. For the rich, the economy is anything that makes rich people richer, including war, price-gouging, wage cuts, stock buy-backs, aggressive advertising, and wild speculation on the stock market. These are not things the producers of wealth in society support. Working people are interested in using socially-produced wealth to advance society, not narrow private interests.

The ruling elite and their representatives view the economy in the most narrow and distorted way. They do not see the economy as an integrated whole whose many parts are run by millions of working people that produce all the wealth of society. Major owners of capital look at the world from their own narrow private interests and protect their “own turf” as they compete intensely with other owners of capital to maximize their profit, regardless of how damaging this might be to the natural and social environment. They do not care about how the economy as a whole operates. They do not look at the parts in relation to the whole or strive to ensure the proper extended reproduction of society. Chaos, anarchy, and violence prevail in this outdated set-up in which greed is cynically normalized as a virtue.

From a capital-centered perspective, workers are not seen as the source of value. Their labor-time is not recognized as the source of new value. Workers are viewed instead as a derogatory cost of production, a liability, a loss, a burden, a nuisance, a negative consequence; something to be suffered or grudgingly tolerated. In reality, though, it is owners of capital, those who “legally” seize the surplus value produced by workers, that are a burden and liability to society. They are a historically-exhausted force that drags society backward. They are a block to progress.

In this fractured context it is also troubling that humans and citizens are constantly reduced to consumers, and consumerism is given as that which defines the modern human personality. Buying and subordinating oneself to objects, things, and commodities is given as the core of the modern individual—a phenomenon further exacerbated by social media.

Capitalist ideology turns reality upside down. It mixes up who exploits who. It conceals the irreconcilable antagonistic interests between workers and the financial oligarchy. It hides the fact that wage-slavery is the main mode of  profit maximization for owners of capital. It obscures severe contradictions between workers and the rich.

People can expect no clarity or guidance from the rich and their media, which is why they must rely on their own conscious acts of finding out and undertake their own efforts to disseminate information, analysis, and perspective.

There is no reason for today’s economies to be as chaotic, anarchic, and fragmented as they are. They must be brought under conscious human control and organized to advance the general interests of society, not a tiny ruling elite that uses its power to get richer while disinforming and marginalizing people.

1. See the 12-part series titled “Booming” Economy Leaves Millions Behind“.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Shawgi Tell.