Victorious in War But Defeated in Peace -- How Development-Socialism Ended in Capitalism

From 8^th to 9^th May of this year, the Russians and many other peoples of the world celebrated the 70^th anniversary of victory of the Soviet and allied armies over Nazi Germany (Berlin had fallen a few days earlier in 1945).
    On 30^th April 2015, anti-imperialists and socialists all over the world should have celebrated the 40^th anniversary of the great victory of the North Vietnamese army and NFL guerrillas over the hated American imperialists (Saigon had fallen On 30^th April 1975). But it did not occur to me. Two days later, I read an article in the internet, the title of which was a call to its readers: "Salute The Nation That Brought The US Empire To Its Knees".¹ The article ended with another call: "Let’s ensure that the heroism and sacrifices of the Vietnamese people are not only remembered with reverence but celebrated with pride."

But What Is There to Celebrate?

I knew the date at which Saigon fell. I remember we rejoiced over the great news. But forty years later, the great significance of that date was out of my mind, until two days later the said article reminded me of that. Why was it out of mind? Obviously because I had in the meantime written Vietnam off as a socialist state. Because, although the country is officially called Socialist Republic of Vietnam, there is in fact no socialism there since long. Moreover, it is a small country and, unlike Russia and China, it does not celebrate its great military victory over the imperialists. Therefore, for me too, there was nothing to celebrate on 30^th April.
    But it is a good occasion to fill up some gaps that I left in the answer I gave in 1999² to the question why socialism failed in the Soviet Union. I now slightly reformulate the question as follows: Why did socialism fail and why couldn't a socialist society be built up in the Soviet Union or China and Vietnam respectively? In this short article, I can only present some of my reflections; it is not a full analytical study comparable to the one presented in my 1999 book.
    I am leaving out the erstwhile socialist countries of Eastern Europe because there the people had not made their own socialist revolution. Socialism was, depending on the observer's view of the things, given to them as a present or imposed on them. And I am leaving out Cuba, firstly, because there the matter is still in a state of flux and, secondly, because I have already published my doubts and fears in this regard in two texts posted in this blog.
    I know that many leftists, particularly anarchist socialists, refuse to accept that these countries had been proper socialist ones. OK, but let us not debate here what proper socialism should be. Let us ask why Soviet, Chinese and Vietnamese communists failed to defend their socialist society built up following their conception of socialism or gave up the attempt to realize it in their respective countries, although they there wielded absolute power. We should ask this question, if only for the sake of understanding what happened in history, which is also very important for us.

The Compulsion to industrialize

There is a difference between the case of the erstwhile Soviet Union and the two cases of China and Vietnam. Already in 1936, Stalin declared the Soviet Union to have become, also in the economic sense, a socialist state. The preceding three periods were characterized as War Communism, the period of New Economic Policy (private enterprise and profit-making were allowed), and the period of rapid, forced, and planned industrialization under the leadership of the state. By 1936, the Soviet Union was deemed to have become an industrial country, which, in the socialism theories of those days, was considered to be an essential condition for a socialist society. When socialism was wound up in the Soviet Union (beginning in1991), it was a very highly developed industrial country of long standing, second only to the United States, and a super power. In contrast, China and Vietnam had not yet risen to the status of an industrial country when – in 1978 and in the 1980s respectively – they gave up their goal of becoming a socialist society.
    In my book Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism?², I devoted two long chapters to the question why the Soviet model of socialism failed. Here I would like to summarize the answer in one sentence: The Soviet model of socialism failed, firstly, because the overdeveloped Soviet Union had reached the ecological and resource-related limits to its material growth, and, secondly, because of the moral degeneration of Soviet society. These were the two fundamental causes. Other causes stated in the relevant literature were secondary.

Primitive Socialist Accumulation

The first of these two causes does not apply to the cases of China and Vietnam. In 1978 and in the 1980s, they were still very underdeveloped. They could not yet fulfill the most essential task on their path to industrial development, namely the task of primitive socialist accumulation, which turned out to be an insurmountable problem under the then given conditions.
    The Soviet Union had solved this problem by postponing for a few years the goal of building a socialist society. The country was ravaged by war and civil war, the economy was ruined. The Bolsheviks gave up the socialist policy of a fully state-controlled economy and introduced a more capitalism-oriented policy. The New Economic Policy, adopted in 1921, allowed private enterprise and profit-making in most areas of the economy. Foreign investment was also allowed and welcomed. The new bourgeoisie (the so-called NEP-men) that came up were hated but tolerated. In agriculture, forced grain requisition was given up. Farmers were allowed to operate as independent entrepreneurs. They were required only to pay a tax in kind. The rest of their produce they could sell on the market. In China and Vietnam – against a roughly similar background of war, civil war, economic destitution, and ruined infrastructure (in China also due to the chaos generated by power struggle and the Cultural Revolution) – a roughly similar change in policy took place.
    There were however three differences: In the Soviet Union, after just seven years, the New Economic Policy was ended. The Communist Party began in 1928 a policy of building socialism in one country. It comprised massive state-led and planned programs of rapid industrialization with emphasis on heavy industries, state-control of trade, and collectivization of agriculture. All that was possible, because the economic situation had improved in the seven years of NEP. But primitive capital accumulation had to be continued in various forms: confiscation of the surplus produced in the agricultural sector, which resulted in famine in the countryside, reducing the real wages of workers, forced labor in the Gulags etc.
    In China, the new economic policy was never ended. It continued under the name and form of reforms toward market socialism. Capital accumulation largely took place through enormous amounts of foreign investment in the country.
    The case of Vietnam has been much different and extreme in this category. During the ten years long American war (1965–1975), the country was, literally speaking, physically destroyed – in addition to the usual destructions wrought by a brutal modern American war – by means of carpet bombing and the pouring of the chemical agent-orange that poisoned the forests, the soil and living beings. What is worse, the USA and their vassal states, after being defeated in the hot war, began an economic war against Vietnam – using trade and investment embargo and boycott by all US-lackey-states as well as international financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank.
    I do not want to narrate the modern history of Vietnam in this article, the purpose of which is something different. Politically conscious and active people, who ought to be interested to know this history, should at least read the excellent article of Nick Davies entitled Vietnam 40 years on: how a communist victory gave way to capitalist corruption³. I shall here use and quote from this article in support of my argument.

The capitulation of Socialists

After describing the devastations of the war and the dire economic situation, Davies writes:

"It is not clear how any economic model could have survived this hostile encirclement. Inevitably, Vietnam’s socialist project began to collapse. It adopted a crude Soviet policy that forced peasant farmers to hand over their crops in exchange for ration cards. With no incentive to produce, output crashed, inflation climbed back towards wartime levels, and the country once again had to import rice. In the early 1980s, the leadership was forced to allow the peasants to start selling surplus produce, and so capitalism began its return. By the late 1980s, the party was officially adopting the idea of 'a market economy with socialist orientation'. "
   
Davies, who recently visited Vietnam and talked with many Vietnamese to collect information for this article, says that following this policy change the Vietnamese did have much success in reducing poverty. But many former soldiers and guerillas told him, that they fought not just to liberate their nation from colonialism and imperialism. They were communists/socialists. They had a dream. "And that dream was not simply nationalist, to expel the foreign invader. It was specifically communist and revolutionary." Le Nam Phong, a former lieutenant general in the army of North Vietnam told Davies of his own revolutionary motive:

“Socialism? Yes, of course. The purpose of all the fighting was to build a socialist society, to gain freedom and independence and happiness. During the first days against France and against the US, we already had in mind the society we wanted to create – a society where men would not exploit other men; fair, independent, equal."

    Note that in the above quote the old lieutenant general did not say the purpose of all the fighting was to make Vietnam an economically developed country or to economically catch up with France. But, although he did not use the word development at all, we know from our studies that economic development was in those days implicit in the term socialism. But it was not the old general's top priority. His top priority was rather equality, happiness etc.
    But by the mid 1980s it was already too late for Vietnam. The big brothers Soviet Union and China had already veered toward what they euphemistically called market socialism but were in reality capitalism-oriented market reforms. China had introduced them in 1978 and the Soviet Union again in the mid 1980s. They could not help Vietnam economically, because they themselves had great economic difficulties. It was not possible for small Vietnam to stop the tide that by the end of that decade became a deluge. Beginning in 1989, all the bastions of socialism in Eastern Europe fell one by one. The Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, the socialist economy there started being dismantled.

What Really Was the Problem?

In order to understand why such reforms were regarded as necessary, although by that time the ravages of wars and civil wars and related economic difficulties had largely been repaired and smoothed out, we have to know something about the thinking of the communist party leaders of those days, those who initiated and put such reforms through. Of course, there was some opposition to them from traditionalists among party leaders. But they were decried as left-deviationists. Deng Xiaoping, the then top leader (but never the official Chairman) of the Communist Party of China once said: "It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice". Catching mice, i.e. making money (or getting rich) was the main goal. The color of the system (red or not) was unimportant. Deng is also reported to have said: "To get rich is glorious!"⁴ The nation, the people getting rich (i.e. developed) was already a part of standard socialist thought. But Deng thought of individuals, a minority getting rich. Why?
    The answer can be found in a quote from Vietnam. Khe, a sincere and rebellious journalist – who, as student, was a communist, suffered imprisonment at the hands of the French colonialists, and who today is fighting against corruption –, told Davies:

"We traded millions of lives for independence and equality. When I was in prison I imagined the country would be clear of corruption after the war, but it didn’t happen. The development of the country should proceed, so we don’t go against those who make money legitimately. But we can’t allow those who make illegitimate money to continue to make poor people poorer.”

For the Lieutenant General quoted above, the top priority in his vision of socialism was equality. Khe has now given up that ideal. For him, the more important goal is development, for which, he implicitly argued, it is necessary to accept that some people get rich. It is logical, he implicitly argued, that with equality, in a poor country there would be no savings and hence no capital accumulation. Khe would be satisfied if rich people get richer legitimately, that is, without using illegal and/or corrupt means. That is also the position of the Chinese communist leadership today. They are fighting against corruption, not for equality.
    Both the Chinese and the Vietnamese communists saw a causal connection between the profit motive of private individuals/entrepreneurs and national economic development. Khe believed that only money made illegitimately (i.e. by illegal and/or corrupt means) makes poor people poorer.
    But how could an underdeveloped country like Vietnam have economically developed, when the greater part of its already accumulated capital was no longer available after the war? We know that the greater part of its infrastructure capital (roads, railways, canals, bridges, houses, factories, buildings, hospitals, telephone lines etc.) were destroyed. The greater part of its human capital (the labor power, skills, intelligence and knowledge of over 3 million dead young working people and many times more invalids) were no longer available in 1975. Vietnam had to start the process of its primitive capital accumulation again, almost from scratch.
    Marx described the process of primitive (original) capital accumulation in militarily mighty Western capitalist countries. And we know how it took place in the relatively underdeveloped socialist USSR. In both cases, it was a brutal process of exploitation, expropriation and application of force. The ruling classes took away everything they could from their own people as well as from the peoples of their colonies. But neither China nor Vietnam could have repeated that brutal process in favor of private capitalists without giving up all claims of being a socialist country. (The Soviet state could at least say they were building up socialism). They had moreover no colonies that could be exploited. And they did not want to wait many more years before they have accumulated enough capital within their own territory and by legitimate means. So they opened their doors and told foreigners, who already had huge amounts of accumulated capital seeking profitable investment opportunities, to come and exploit their workers and natural resources. But the foreigners would not invest unless and until the laws and the business climate have become conducive to making profit. They demanded of all countries that were seeking foreign investments that they subordinate their economic systems and national laws to the inexorable laws of global capitalism. That is, they would not invest unless the socialist goals and the corresponding constitutions and laws had been given up. The communist leaders of China and Vietnam (later also the nationalist leaders of semi-socialist Third World countries, such as India, and post-socialist Russia) had to comply. They decided to capitulate. They had no other choice, they had to bow to the demands of their former enemies: the Americans and their vassal countries. They were "victorious in war but defeated in peace." The imperialist and capitalist West had won after all.

Lessons From Recent History

The purpose of studying history is to draw lessons for the present and the future; the rest is merely satisfying curiosity. Inspired by the recent history presented above, an anti-socialist political activist formulated the bon mot: "Socialism is the longest way from capitalism to capitalism." Should it serve as one of the most important lessons from recent history? For us too? In plain English, it means that all efforts to build an egalitarian socialist society are futile; and such socialist societies, if they can be built somehow, are bound to fail sooner or later because innate selfishness is a biologically, i.e. for survival, necessary part of human nature. If one reads history superficially, these conclusions may appear to be most convincing. One may then draw the lessons: (1) that there is no use trying to build an egalitarian socialist society, and (2) that at most only market socialism has some chance of success. In fact, some theorists have asserted that only this type of socialism can succeed because market-socialist economies give humans enough (but not too much) scope to be selfish and enrich themselves, while they can still justifiably be called a socialist economy because they are planned and/or guided and regulated by the state for the common good and because in such economies the "commanding heights" (i.e. the basic heavy industries and the financial infrastructures such as banks and insurances) remain public property. Frans van Waal, a famous ethologist (and primatologist) once said in an interview (given to the tageszeitung, Berlin) that he thought that the maximum egalitarianism that humans can achieve at a societal level is a social market economy (or social capitalism) – the model that existed in the seventies in most western European countries. (from my memory).
    We know that the Soviet Union was not a paragon of egalitarianism. Already in the 1930s, Stalin had introduced a degree of social and income inequality. And in the mid 1980s, Gorbachev even cautiously introduced some degree of profit-motivated competitive market system. All that did not help save socialism. In my 1999 book I explained why.
    I think, the only conclusion that we are compelled to draw from the above exposition of the recent history of socialist countries is that development-socialism has failed. And since we (humanity) have already bumped against the limits to growth, we must conclude that development-socialism has little chance of success in the future. Anybody who observes the world today must, I think, also conclude that even social market economy (capitalistic welfare state) has no future. Not all people can become rich. Only some people can if brutal Manchester capitalism makes a comeback. And that is happening in the world today.
    But can we imagine any other kind of socialism that would deserve the name "socialism" and might have a chance of success? I think yes, but only if we can give up the old idea/goal of development. As Otto Ullrich wrote,

"Socialism is a question of social constitution, of relationships of humans to each other. It is unnecessary … even fatal to connect this question with an indefinable minimum technological and organizational development of equipment of work." Developing the point further, Ullrich asserted: "There is no lower limit of the 'development of productive forces' below which socialism is impossible, … ."⁵

Ullrich has convinced me fully. Now, if the ecological and resource-related crisis compels humanity to accept a policy of economic contraction (degrowth) until at a much lower level of production and productive forces the economy becomes a sustainable steady-state economy, then the question comes up whether it will it be possible to build a socialist society on the basis of such a contracted economy. Following Ullrich's dictum, we must say Yes. Further, I am convinced that it will not only be possible but also an absolute necessity. For when the contraction begins and every year less and less goods and services would be available for distribution, only an egalitarian socialist system can avert chaos and total breakdown of society.
    One may now say: that may be theoretically possible, even necessary, but, humans being selfish by nature, what are the real chances that this will also happen, i.e., the creation of an egalitarian eco-socialist society? To this question, I would like to reply with a quote from the famous German ethologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, who wrote:

"Our innate characteristics are not laid down for ever. We are capable of controlling our nature through our culture. … What is decisive is that we humans are the first creatures to be in a position to set goals for us and thereby give a meaning to our life. That does not mean that we cease to be a part of nature, but we actively put ourselves in new situations, in which new conditions of selection affect us."⁶

I think, the new situation, in which we are today – i.e. the global ecological and resource-related crisis – might compel us to do what is necessary for our survival as species. There is, of course, no guaranty, but a chance that this will happen.

The Perspective

Unlike Russia, China and Vietnam are still being governed by their respective communist parties, and the latter still profess to be pursuing the goal of creating a socialist society. Deng Xiaoping maintained that "socialism and market economy are not incompatible". A few years ago, one middle-level Communist Party leader (I have forgotten his name) told a BBC journalist that the goal remains the same, namely a socialist society, but the path to that goal has changed since the death of Mao. If it is axiomatic for communists that, as Deng said, "the very essence of socialism is the liberation and development of the productive systems (of forces of production, in proper Marxist jargon)", then of course, nobody can object to communists using the path that has already been trodden by more successful old capitalist industrial countries like the USA, the UK etc. and, more recently, South Korea and Taiwan, who were, until the 1950s, economically as underdeveloped as China until 1978. And the term "liberation" can be reinterpreted as liberation from the fetters of state socialism (planning and bureaucracy), i.e. introducing capitalistic market principles. Indeed, that "liberated" the Chinese economy, and it grew (economically developed) by leaps and bounds in the following decades. But a true socialist's question is: when will this allegedly "unfortunately necessary" march along the capitalistic path end for China and Vietnam? Will it ever come to an end? And when will the work of building up a socialist society (socialist relations of production, in proper Marxist jargon) begin?
    Even if we could believe – which is actually difficult at present – that the communist leaders of China and Vietnam sincerely want to do that in near future, there is objectively little chance of that happening. For, firstly, the moral degeneration of communist cadres (even leading cadres) in these two countries have – according to all reports that one can read outside these countries – advanced (metastasized like a cancer cell) so much, that, I think, there is hardly any Communist Party leader left there who cherishes the true socialist values. And even if there are a few left, their number will not soon grow to that critical mass that is needed to begin that change. All the reports on corruption, criminality, and trials against corrupt high-ranking communists emanating from China itself show that my pessimism could be justified.
    Secondly, no developed country can today produce all the goods and services that its citizens and businesses want and/or need to consume/use – not even the simplest ones such as a bicycle or a phone call – without taking part in international trade. They must import things they cannot produce or do not have at home, and they must export things to pay for them. They are therefore, in a certain sense, dependent on the other countries' willingness to trade with them. That is a weak point in today's world economic system, where small and a small number countries can be isolated and boycotted if they are disliked by the others. Particularly, socialist countries are vulnerable to the danger of trade boycott by enemy capitalist countries – even if they do not need foreign investment any more, e.g. China today. Even the formerly socialist COMECON countries, that were part of a big economic group, had such problems as long as they remained socialist.
    We must also consider that the capitalist system is very efficient in artificially creating new consumption needs. Things which previously didn't even exist (e.g. TV, cell phone, Laser-equipment, holography, strawberries in Winter etc.), have not only been invented, but people have also been made to believe that they are "basic needs". How can socialism survive in a country if it cannot even fulfill the basic needs of its own citizens, whereas it originally promised so much prosperity for all citizens of the world?
    The above exposition of the present world situation leads me to conclude that today, eco-socialism in one country (or in a small group of countries) will probably not survive. It must therefore be a global project.

References:

1. Kenny Coyle: "Salute The Nation That Brought The US Empire To Its Knees".
https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-075a-Salute-the-nation-that-brought-the-US-empire-to-its-knees#.VVCbnJgcS1I
2. Sarkar, Saral (1999) Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism? – A Critical Study of Humanity's Fundamental Choices. London: Zed Books.
3. Nick Davies: Vietnam 40 years on: how a communist victory gave way to capitalist corruption (published in The Guardian online on 22.04.2015)
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/apr/22/vietnam-40-years-on-how-communist-victory-gave-way-to-capitalist-corruption
4 Deng Xiaoping: quotes are from Wikiquotes: Entry on Deng Xiaoping.
5 Ullrich, Otto (1979) Weltniveau – In der Sackgasse des Industriesystems. Berlin: Rotbuch.
6. Eible-Eibesfeldt, Irenäus (1990) "Glaube als Offenbarungswissen und Zuversicht", in:
Deschner, Karlheinz (Hrsg.)(1990) Woran ich glaube, Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn.

 

A Communist Party in Power in a Capitalist State -- Misdirected Critique

(A letter to the editor)

Reg. CPI(M)'s Congress Crutch; in: Frontier, Vol. 48, No.30, Jan.31–Feb 6 2016


http://www.frontierweekly.com/articles/vol-48/48-30/48-30-CPMs%20Congress%20Crutch.html

Dear sir,

The anonymous author of the article (for short, AA) criticizes the West Bengal unit of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in two respects: (1) in respect of the state of moral fiber of the party's cadre and (2) in respect of the party's political and economic policies during its long rule in that province. Seen superficially, the critique may appear to be justified in both respects, but it should not have been directed at a particular unit of a particular communist party that happened to rule in a province of a federally constituted capitalist state. It should have been directed at, if a little generalization is allowed, all or nearly all communist parties of the world that sometime or other ruled over a country.

(1) Anybody having some knowledge of world history of the last hundred years knows of the moral degeneration of various kinds that set in, sooner or later, after a revolutionary communist party became a ruling party. That was the case in the Soviet Union, and that is the case in China and Vietnam.^* The case of Cuba still remains to be investigated.
    The erstwhile "socialist" republics of Eastern Europe were ruled by communist parties that did not have to make their own revolution. They had power handed to them by the Soviet Red Army on a platter. So their moral degeneration, if that had taken place during their tenure of power, does not contain any lesson of great significance. For their mentor, the all-powerful Stalinist Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was already a morally degenerated party.
    It must be said to the credit of the CPI(M) that it did not get, but won power, albeit very limited, by organizing, leading, and taking part in movements of the masses for a better life. Many of its cadre, although they could not be called revolutionaries, were inspired by a high ideal (I know that) and accepted a life of many sacrifices before they came to power. But power corrupted them too, from the provincial capital level to the village level – not all of them, to be sure, but the majority.
    In view of the apparently universal experience mentioned above, it is pointless to criticize the CPI(M) cadre and functionaries for failing to have become the kind of new men that Mayakovsky, inter alia, had expected of the Soviet communists who were in complete control of everything in their country.
    Today, what is needed is a deeper and analytical study of this ubiquitous negative phenomenon, with, I suggest, help of psychology, ethology, anthropology, and some other social sciences.

(2) As to economic development of West Bengal, nobody in his senses could have in those days demanded from the CPI(M)-led government that it should pursue a really socialist policy. Even if it had wanted to try to do something in a really socialist sense within the limited power that a provincial government enjoys in India, it could have done so, I guess, only at the risk of being dismissed by the central government. That was the fate of the communist government of Kerala in 1957.
    AA writes that in the early years of the CPI(M) rule "there were large scopes of organizing the benefited peasants into various kinds of cooperatives". Maybe that is true. But peasants organized in cooperatives could only have initiated some rural development and created some rural jobs in rural small industries. However, in any development theory including socialist ones – except those of Gandhi and his followers – the goal was, and still is, transition from a poor underdeveloped agricultural economy to a prosperous industrial economy. In such theories, also small-scale farming was to be developed to large-scale mechanized farming entailing reduction in the number of people working in the agriculture sector. This was/is deemed to be necessary not only to bring prosperity in the rural areas but also to make more and more labor available to the expanding industries sector.
    Another point that has been ignored by AA is that during the 34 years long rule of the CPI(M), both the total population of West Bengal and the number of unemployed and precariously employed people in the province had been continuously rising. For instance, in the decade between 2001 and 2011 the population increased by 11.17 million.
    Against the background of these facts, the CPI(M) had no other choice but to pursue the economic policy that it did, to industrialize. It has after all never been a Gandhian party! And the people of India had rejected Gandhian economic theories long ago. AA criticizes the CPI(M) for having pursued a "pro-corporate policy of industrialization and development". But both China and Vietnam did the same.¹ They had to. For the CPI(M), a Nehruvian policy of "socialistic pattern" of planned industrialization for West Bengal was out of question, for no government of West Bengal could have raised the necessary capital itself.
    Any industrial project needs land, water, and the necessary infrastructure. With 90 million people living in a small and densely populated area, these things had to be taken away from the peasants. The only thing that was open to negotiation in Singur and Nandigram² was the kind and size of compensation. The only justified criticism against the CPI(M) has been that a communist government did the unthinkable: it ordered the police to kill poor peasants and their supporters in the interest of development.


Notes:

1. The case of China is well-known. For the case of Vietnam, I recommend my article Victorious in War But Defeated in Peace – How Development-Socialism Ended in Capitalism.
http://eco-socialist.blogspot.de/search?q=Victorious+in+War

2. In Singur, the Tata Group was to build a huge car factory for producing their cheap cars christened Nano. The project failed to materialize due to strong resistance from the peasants and their anti-CPI(M) supporters. In Nandigram, where the shooting and killing of 15 people took place, a South Korean corporation was to build a large chemicals factory.

General Theory of Decline of the Old Left

(This discussion-contribution is written in the form of a letter to the author of the review-article Reinventing the Indian Left published in the online journal Alternatives – International Journal on Wednesday 2 March 2016 by Satya Sagar).

http://www.alterinter.org/spip.php?article4441

7.3.2016

Dear Mr. Satya Sagar,

You may or may not know me from reading. If interested, you may go to Google and Amazon. There you will find enough info about me.

First, many thanks for your detailed review of Praful Bidwai's book. I do not think I shall come to reading the 600 page book. So your review of the same was very useful. But I already knew a lot about the history of the Left in India.
    Currently, my main interest in reading articles on the Indian Left is to find out whether they have come (or are slowly coming) to any new conclusion after their decline. You have now given me the motivation and a chance to add and discuss some crucial points about left politics made in the book as well as in your review.
    I had met Praful once, but that was long ago and without having enough time to really discuss anything seriously. About a year or two before his passing away, at the suggestion of Sumanta Bannerjee (whom you might know), I wrote to him with the request that he consider the points I have made in my writings. (I did not get any real response.) I am making the same request to you.

You write: Praful's book "is also impressively broad in scope, analyzing the Left from not just the usual parameters of redistribution of wealth, public welfare and workers’ rights but also ecology, gender and caste." In your review, however, I do not find anything that substantiates the claim that Praful had analyzed left politics (and its ultimate failure) in India also from the standpoint of one concerned about the ecology problematique. (It may also be an omission on your part.) Actually, at the latest after 1972, when the book Limits to Growth appeared, all political activists of the whole world should have changed their politics, indeed their whole thinking, radically. But they did not do that, because, I suppose, they were caught in inertia of the thought process. Herman Daly, I, and a few other writers, have accepted the required paradigm shift – the one that I call shift from the growth paradigm to the limits to growth paradigm. All my speeches and writings since about the mid 1970s have been informed by it.
    If one accepts this compelling paradigm shift, one comes to very different conclusions in regard to analysis of the current world situation (including that in India) as well as in regard to the question of the future of human (and Indian) society. One then also comes to very different answers to the question: what is to be done at the present juncture? ¹

The sorry plight of the Left is a global phenomenon. It began with the decline of the Soviet model of socialism and the subsequent implosion and break-up of the USSR. It was followed by the collapse of socialist societies in Eastern Europe. The communist parties of China and Vietnam, of course, maintained their hold on power, but they had to transform their countries into capitalist ones.² And the latest experiment, the "Bolivarian Revolution" of Venezuela, which Hugo Chavez called "socialism of the 21st century" is also rapidly unraveling. Against this general background, is it any surprise that the Indian Left also failed in West Bengal and Kerala and is rapidly declining? Any author who wants to write something analytical about the decline of the Indian Left or, for that matter, about any left movement anywhere in the world should keep this general background in mind.
    That means, all failures of all left regimes, parties or movements must have had (and still has) a general root cause (in addition to specific and local ones): It is the impossibility of fulfilling the continuously growing demands, aspirations and ambitions of a continuously growing world population, while our resource base is continuously dwindling and the ability of nature to absorb man-made pollution is continuously diminishing – in short, the lunatic idea that on a finite earth infinite growth of production, prosperity and population is possible.¹
    It sounds like an impossibility theorem that old leftists, socialists, communists, humanists, development-NGOs, and technology fans are loath to hear. Especially the last-mentioned ones seem never to have heard of the second law of thermodynamics, AKA the entropy law. But they must accept this impossibility as a fact, otherwise they would continue to sell only illusions, and never succeed in creating a better world, as opposed to a prosperous world. No amount of hard and sincere work, in power or out of power, no amount of mass mobilization for "redistribution of wealth, public welfare and workers’ rights" would help us realize the old vision of socialism.¹

That means we must ditch old socialism, especially cornucopian socialism and reinvent socialism which would be the scientific socialim of the 21st century. I, Bruno Kern, and many others call it eco-socialism. But what are the prospects for eco-socialism? I think it has good prospects, but only if ....³ At least it is worth working for.

Let me stop here. I would be very glad if you read this letter. I would be especially glad if I hear from you.

In solidarity and with best wishes

Saral Sarkar


Notes

1. I have elaborated all these points in my two theoretical books: Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism? – A Critical Analysis of Humanity's Fundamental Choices (Zed Books, London, 1999) and The Crises of Capitalism – A Different Study of Political Economy (Counterpoint, Berkeley, 2012). See also my various shorter writings published in my two blogs: www.eco-socialist.blogspot.com; and www.ak-oekopolitik.blogspot.com.

2. See my article on the transformations in Vietnam and China: Victorious in War But Defeated in Peace – How Development-Socialism Ended in Capitalism
https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4729735685376119377#editor/target=post;postID=6972656501647922776;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=6;src=postname

3. See my article on this question: Prospects for Eco-Socialism
http://eco-socialist.blogspot.de/search?q=Prospects).

Future of Democracy

 

The world economic crisis that began with the Great Recession in developed countries in 2008 has not yet been overcome. Since then hardly anything new has happened. What is new is that the crisis has now reached the so-called emerging-market countries that were at the beginning seen as the hopes or even saviors of the crisis-plagued world economy. The growth rates of their economies have fallen sharply in the past two years. Lately, the currencies of some of these countries have lost value. Against this background, there is also a crisis of democracy emerging, not in this or that country, but in general. It has now become necessary to think about the future of democracy.

In 1992, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc, the American political philosopher Francis Fukuyama announced ‘the end of history’. In his book entitled The End of History and the Last Man, he advocated the thesis that the worldwide spread of liberal democracy, western type of market capitalism and western lifestyles indicates that the socio-cultural development of humanity has reached its endpoint. He thought the combination of these three elements – so to speak, a trinity – is the final form of governance. He backed up this argument with the assertion that after the failure of fascism and communism, there is no alternative to this combination

Despite some criticism of this or that point of his book, Fukuyama's thesis at that time appeared plausible to many people. Some however found the term "end of history" too exaggerated.

Already in 1992 I was sure that the western type of market capitalism could not be the endpoint of the development of the economic order of humanity. For, on the one hand, this type of market capitalism has a growth compulsion, but, on the other hand, there are limits to economic growth. It was also clear to me that the western lifestyle could not be the final one for all humanity, simply because there are limits to economic growth. I was not sure about the future of liberal democracy. I thought, in the future, maybe eco-socialism and a newly conceived democracy could go together.

On this third point, I have now become quite skeptical. At first, back then, it looked like Fukuyama's thesis would gradually come true. Naked dictatorships were gradually replaced both in Africa and in Latin America with some kind of democracy. Long-standing, despotically ruling presidents had to have their legitimacy confirmed through more or less fair elections. In Asia, the military dictatorship in Myanmar recently gave way and initiated a process of democratization. Also the fundamental rights of citizens have been - at least in theory, i.e. on paper - more or less recognized. Left existing are only the dictatorships of the kings and emirs of the Gulf States, the autocracy of the Kim family in North Korea and the power monopoly of the Communist Party in China, Vietnam and Cuba. But several recent events in the world give me reason to have doubts about the future of liberal democracy.

I accept Abraham Lincoln's definition of democracy as the starting point of my reflections. He had said that democracy is governance of the people by the people and for the people. Till now, this definition has been concretized only by representative democracy (with the partial exception of Switzerland) – with the existence of several competing political parties, which participate in periodic elections. The people are represented by the deputies, the majority of whom form the government. In the presidential system the people elect the reigning president. In principle, the minority accepts the decisions of the majority, as long as they do not violate the constitution or any laws. Or the minority swallows them against their will. If the aversion is too strong, the minority may protest and demonstrate. Ultimately, however, they must bow to the will of the majority.

But in the meantime, in many places, democracy is not working smoothly according to these noble principles. Think of Egypt, where an elected president was ousted and arrested by the military, with the support of a few hundred thousand protesting demonstrators. In Greece, Prime Minister Giorgos Papandreou wanted to hold a referendum in order to ask the people whether he should accept the terms of an aid package offered by the leaders of the Eurozone. He was then summoned to Brussels and reprimanded by Merkel and Sarkozy, whereupon he dropped the referendum idea. In the Ukraine, the opposition parties and thousands of their supporters are trying to force the elected government and the elected president to step down before their term is over. In Thailand, the minority of the population – the rich and the upper middle class citizens of Bangkok and the tourist centers of the South – are trying to overthrow the elected government and replace it with one made up of experts nominated by the king or the military. They are not even trying, unlike in the Ukraine, to force early elections, because they are sure they would lose. All these malcontents believe that they only need to assemble one hundred thousand demonstrators at the central square of the capital, camp and demonstrate there for two or three months, and get themselves filmed by the international TV stations. Then the elected government or the elected President will resign. Or they simply march, rifles in hand, into the capital and overthrow the incumbent president, as it recently happened in the Central African Republic. Or, as it is currently happening in Turkey, a battered government abolishes the right to demonstrate, arrests critical journalists, or controls the Internet media. The disgruntled governments of foreign countries instigate the opponents of the battered government, as it is currently happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in the Ukraine. Only in Tunisia the elected government has given in. Elsewhere, chaos reigns, with occasional murders and manslaughters, as in Egypt. In Kenya, the people have elected a president who is accused by the International Court of Justice of instigating mass murder.

These few examples suffice to show that Fukuyama's thesis – that the socio-cultural development of mankind (in other words, "history") has reached its endpoint – was very premature. Liberal democracy is currently suffering one setback after another. We have to ask: why?

It should be repeated here that Fukuyama described the endpoint of history, the final form of governance, as a combination of three elements mentioned above. By doing so he also made the hoped-for global and final victory of liberal democracy dependent on the success of market capitalism. This, however, has now revealed itself to be an idol with feet of clay. Capitalism has not delivered what, in the early 1990s, had been promised to the peoples that dissolved the Communist system in their respective countries or to the peoples that abandoned communism as an alternative perspective – Mandela's South Africa for example. For many nations around the world and for large parts of the population in every country, even in the wealthy United States, Germany, etc., the dream of enjoying the western lifestyle has not materialized. For many, their standard of living has even fallen below what it was before 2008 The people are indeed being governed by the people (i.e., by their representatives), but governance is not being done for the people. What is worse, within a few years after the dissolution of the communist system market capitalism delivered mankind two devastating economic crises – the Asian crisis of 1997-1998 and the bankruptcy of the Argentinean state in 2001. Relatively wealthy nations plunged into destitution.

For now six and a half years, much of the world economy, and thus much of the world's population, has been suffering an economic crisis. The Asian crisis of 1997-1998 ended after only two years and Argentina rallied around the middle of the first decade of this century. But the current crisis is showing no signs of coming to an end. There are reasons for this. This crisis cannot end because it is neither a usual crisis within a business cycle, nor is it a structural crisis. It is a crisis of an entirely different kind. It is the product of growing resource scarcity, rising costs of all kinds of environmental destruction, and continuous population growth, in short, of limits to growth. Most conflicts and unrests of the present are only expressions and symptoms of this fundamental crisis. In addition there are the rising, almost childish demands for prosperity made by all peoples of the world, demands that simply cannot be met, while at the same time the gap between rich and poor is inexorably increasing. I remember reading an interview given to a Western newspaper by a Chinese political refugee who had fled to Europe after the failure of the democracy movement of 1986. He said, very resigned, he thought democracy was only possible in a country where the monthly per capita income amounted to U.S. $ 4000.

We – that is, my political friends and I – are convinced that only an eco-socialist social order can be the solution to the above-mentioned, ever-worsening fundamental crisis of all mankind. But will it also be, can it be, compatible with liberal democracy? In principle, yes. But it is difficult to give a safe answer, because the future is in principle always uncertain. It will depend very much on the way and the circumstance in which such a social order will come into existence. The question could therefore be somewhat narrowed down and concretized: Is there enough reason to hope that we would soon be able to create an eco-socialist society by using the ways and means generally available in representative democracies?

I am afraid not. We cannot ignore the fact that in practice this political system is a pure competitive struggle for power. Ambitious professional politicians organized in parties necessarily have limited horizons. They want to be re-elected every 4 or 5 years. So, prior to each election, they must offer a smart mix of program elements capable of winning a majority. They must promise voters a better and more prosperous future. But, in material-economic terms, eco-socialism cannot promise a better future. On the contrary, eco-socialists will not beat about the bush. They will say openly that a contraction of the world economy and sacrifice of many consumption desires are absolutely necessary.

The most important precondition for the success of the eco-socialist perspective, if only in the long term, is, therefore, that the majority of mankind subjectively accepts the need for the unpleasant measures that eco-socialists propose. Only when this point is reached, in other words, only when the eco-socialist perspective has won cultural-intellectual hegemony in the sense of Gramsci – and that may take a long time – can eco-socialists put up presidential candidates for election, as a start, in some countries. They will probably also be elected. We can only hope that by then it has not already become too late and the collapse inevitable. When the cultural-intellectual hegemony of Eco-socialism has been achieved, it will probably not be so important who rules – just as in Germany today, under the hegemony of neo-liberal globalized capitalism, it does not really matter whether the Christian Democrats are ruling or the Social Democrats. This is because the candidates will then probably offer only slightly different variants of an eco-socialist program. Then surely also the realization of genuine liberal democracy will be possible, even with referenda on questions of detail, in line with Lincoln's definition.

If the above-mentioned precondition is met, it will not be necessary to set up an eco-socialist dictatorship. If not, then also the majority of the soldiers and generals will not support an eco-socialist dictatorship as the solution to the fundamental crisis. For us, therefore, there remains no other option but the long march through the consciousness of our fellow humans, by democratic means. If we do not succeed in this endeavor, then we should prepare ourselves for the collapse and the subsequent barbarism followed by a military dictatorship.

---------000--------

P.S  My conception of eco-socialism is presented in detail in my book Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism? (London, Zed Books; 1999) and in the brochure (with Bruno Kern) Eco-socialism or barbarism (in : www.oekosozialismus.net)

 

From Marxist Socialism to Eco-Socialism --- Turning Points of a Personal Journey Through a Theory of Socialism

At the beginning of the journey stood the most famous two sentences of Marx, which I read as a college student:

“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it.”¹

I was immediately faced with a dilemma. There was no need for me to interpret the world; that had already been done for us by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin et al. But, I thought, in order to be able to contribute to changing the world, I must at least understand it. The purpose was clear to me: to work for creating a socialist/communist society. But for understanding the world, I knew I must read a lot, at least a lot of Marx, Engels and Lenin, a lot of history plus current affairs, and also a lot of modern Marxist literature on the social sciences.
    For the average socialist/communist activist, however, it was the sheer volume of reading required for the purpose that posed the greatest difficulty. She must work to earn her livelihood, work for her conviction, and read a few of the relevant texts. As for me, I had the ambition, and I thought I also had the cerebral capacity, to read all the important works of Marx, Engels, Lenin et al. But being materially in the position of an average activist, it was clear to me in my early youth that I could only become an activist, not a Marxologist.

The Moscow Trials and Destalinization

In 1953 – I was then 17 and in college – I realized how little I knew, when I heard for the first time of the notorious Moscow Trials of 1936–1938,² in which several famous leaders of the Russian revolution were accused of treason, convicted, and then executed. What was worse, I heard it from an anti-communist class mate. I was shocked to hear that Stalin, our great leader of those days, was the perpetrator of these and similar other crimes against several hundred thousand innocent and patriotic citizens and communists. When asked, my communist classmates said they had never heard of it before. But, they opined, it surely was imperialist propaganda.
    I had started reading the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the course of this reading, I later got the official version of the story: the accused were traitors, agents of the enemy etc. This story haunted me for a few years. How could so many communist leaders and activists of the revolution have been traitors, I wondered. The issue was settled in 1956, when Khrushchev, in his secret speech to the 20th Congress of the CPSU(B) confirmed the veracity of what was formerly dubbed imperialist propaganda.
    1956, when a thorough destalinization began in the Soviet Union, was a watershed year. It resulted in a huge, indescribable mental shock, not only for me, but also, I think, for all young communists of those days, who used to think of the Soviet Union as if it were a golden country, our materialized utopia. Thereafter, I began gradually distancing myself from the Soviet model of socialism.
    But among older communists, at least in India, there was no outbreak of disloyalty to the Soviet communist leadership. If asked, they used to say, in the general sense: if in the past mistakes have been made, then it is good that they are being corrected. For me, it was only a logical and rational reaction, not a satisfactory one. Was it simply a case of the leader making a few mistakes? It troubled me very much that the crimes were committed in the name of a communist revolution and in the name of defending a “socialist” state inspired by Marx and his theories. After all, Marx and Engels had endorsed use of force in their kind of revolution. In the concluding para of their Manifesto, they write inter alia, “The communists … declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of …”. We Indians knew that Mahatma Gandhi had strictly and on principle opposed any use of violence in our independence movement. Yet questions regarding ends and means had not crossed my mind before 1956.
    Destalinization was also the cause and 1956 the time when my interest in Marx and Marxism began to wane. I thought, it could not be that just two thinkers of the second half of the 19^th century, however brilliant they might have been, had thought through all the problems of mankind, even those that would arise many decades after their death. It could not be, I thought further, that the results of their analysis of the situation prevailing in the 19^th century were also valid in the 20^th century. So I started taking an interest in other subjects and other thinkers too, e.g. in Malthusianism, and Keynesianism.

Failure of the Russian and the Chinese Revolution

Both the October Revolution (1917–1921) and the Chinese Revolution (1930s to 1949) were made or at least led by people who were communists and Marxists, at least they said they were inspired by Marxism. After success on the battlefields, they tried to build up in their respective countries a socialist society following economic and political principles they claimed were based on and/or derived from Marxism. In the long run both revolutions failed. The Russians and the Chinese themselves willfully reintroduced capitalism in their countries. The Russians openly confess to capitalism, whereas Chinese society is today in reality a capitalist one that is only ruled by self-styled “communists”.
    Can their failures be put down to flaws in the ideology called Marxism? Today, on the occasion of the 200th birth anniversary of Marx, when his total theoretical-intellectual contribution to recent world history is being discussed, criticized, and celebrated, this question needs to be answered. But before that come the questions (1) whether the vision of socialism that the Soviet Russians and the Chinese, the Cubans and the Vietnamese tried to realize – and thereby failed – was really the Marxist one, and (2) whether it was at all realizable. We should not seek an answer to them just in the academic sense of seeking truth for the sake of truth, but also and especially in the practical sense. For if we fail to get the right answer to these questions, we may, in our zeal, make many more mistakes: We may then pursue a wrong goal or choose the wrong path to reach the right goal, or we may make a wrong choice in regard to both.

Marxian and Marxist

There are some disputes regarding the content of Marxism. Once, when he was told about a person who was claiming to be a Marxist while expressing un-Marxist views, Marx replied in frustration: “All I know is that I am not a Marxist.” Ever since, it has become useful to differentiate between the terms Marxian and Marxist. Marxian would mean: strictly based on what Marx himself has written. And Marxist would mean: based on Marxian thoughts as developed and presented by Engels, Lenin and later theoretician-adherents of Marx. For this reason, Marxist theory cannot be regarded as a monolithically consistent theory. Even in the works of Marx himself, inner contradictions and errors have been found by Marx scholars. No wonder. After all, Marx’s writing career stretched over some forty years. Also no wonder that some Marx scholars have reportedly found it necessary to differentiate between the writings of the young (early) Marx and those of the mature (later) Marx.
    Fortunately, we can give a quick and short reply to the question put above (in connection with the crimes of Stalinist USSR and failure of the Soviet and Chinese Revolutions). Pure Marxists say, in the general sense: what has all that to do with Marx and Marxian theory? Nothing. None of the socialist/communist revolutions that have taken place till now has been a Marxian revolution. To give just one recently published example, Paresh Chattopadhyay, an eminent Marx scholar, wrote³ criticizing a description of the Cuban Revolution as a Marxist one:

“However, what kind of revolution are we speaking of? ….. we are invited to a Marxian kind of socialism. The rub is precisely here. Why is the need for bringing in Marx whose whole outlook on socialism is the exact opposite? To refresh our memory, there is no ‘socialist dictatorship’ in Marx’s universe of discourse. For Marx it is a postulate that the laboring people must emancipate themselves. This is the outcome of the ‘autonomous movement of the immense majority in the interest of the immense majority’. And this self-emancipation means the … establishment of a ‘union of free individuals’, which alone is socialism. It follows, secondly, that this is not the task of a group styling itself as the vanguard irrespective of the group’s revolutionary ardor and spirit of self-sacrifice.”

Critique of Pure Marx

I trust Chattopadhyay’s scholarship. This must be a correct paraphrase of the Marxian ideal of socialist revolution (emancipation, as he also calls it.). This quote deals with the questions regarding who and how of a socialist revolution, i.e. the questions: who are the agents of the revolution (emancipation), and how do they go about it – before, during, and after the revolution proper? But it also shows how wrong, how unrealistic, and how utopian in the negative sense Marx has been. For hardly any revolution that has been called proletarian, socialist, or people’s revolution, successful or not, could do without a leadership, most members of which usually came from classes other than the proletariat. Even the leadership of the Paris Commune of 1871, as far as I have learnt, did not come exclusively from the working class.
    I believe, without a good leadership, any attempt to overthrow a hated regime or an exploitative-oppressive system can only end in defeat or a fruitless, chaotic rebellion – even if the crisis situation that triggered it had been favorable to such an attempt. I am of course saying these things without great knowledge of history. But I believe evidence to the contrary must be rare if it at all exists. Also for building a “socialist” society after a successful takeover of power, as, for example, in Russia after 1917 and in Yugoslavia after 1945, a strong leadership proved to be indispensable.

Revolutionary Proletariat?

Marx and Engels had "discovered" the revolutionary proletariat very early in their life, much before the proletariat even became a sizeable class in Germany, and they did it purely deductively. They explained it in 1845 as follows:

“It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will be historically compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today.”⁵

   Three years later, in their Communist Manifesto, they apodictically proclaimed, “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.” Also apodictic was their assertion that “the working men have no country,” which was logically followed by the call “Working men of all countries, unite!”
    On this question, Lenin convinced me (and millions of other activists) more when he asserted that the laboring people cannot emancipate themselves through an autonomous movement of their own, because they lacked the will and the revolutionary consciousness required for this goal, which must be brought to them by a group of professional revolutionaries. A few years before Lenin, Bernstein had maintained that proletarians of the industrially advanced countries of Europe did not even have any reason for willing to overthrow capitalism. He asserted that educated/trained workers/employees actually wanted to be integrated into the given system and rise within it.
    For Lenin, Tito, Mao, and Ho-Chi-Min, and later also for Fidel and Che, the primary, immediate, and urgent task had been to overthrow the hated oppressive regimes of their respective countries – in the case of China, Yugoslavia, and Viet Nam, these were even foreign imperialist invaders occupying the country. There was no question of trying this overthrow later, when the proletariat would have become the immense majority of the population. After fulfilling this immediate task, Lenin, Tito, Mao, and Ho, being communists, could not but try to build a socialist society on the ground and in the situation they found given. They could not have postponed this work in order to do it in the pure way as prescribed by Marx, i.e. waited until their country had achieved the industrial development level of Germany or Britain in the 1870s–1880s, their proletariat had become the immense majority of the population, and had also developed the right revolutionary consciousness.
    Already when I was a young student and had read the Communist Manifesto, I had some doubts on this point. It was wrong, I thought, to say “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.” In any revolution, every revolutionary can lose her life or limbs. After a failed one, she can be incarcerated and lose her livelihood; her dependents can descend into a state of penury. To say that the proletariat (as a class) “have a world to win” is for the average proletarian too abstract a promise of compensation for the said concrete risks and sufferings. Only the inspired are willing to take them. It is alright for a manifesto to contain such high-flown words, but it is better to know that they do not correspond to the reality.
     Also the sentence “The working men have no country” was nothing more than an assertion in high-flown words. How far-fetched, how unrealistic and hollow all these words were, was demonstrated just 31 years after Marx’s death, when, in the 1st World War, the working men of the advanced industrialized countries of Europe not only did not prevent the war, but also, obeying their heads of state, readily went to the front to fulfill their patriotic duty, namely to kill the working men of their respective enemy countries.
    Even after socialists/communists had made a revolution – alternatively, won a revolutionary antiimperialist war – and took over power in Russia, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia, their armies, made up of their working men of all kinds (few proletarians in the Marxian sense), fought against one another, because of petty disputes (partly border disputes). So far as I know, generations of Marxist theoreticians have failed to devote enough attention to this aspect of human nature, which also socialist/communist idealists regularly fall victim to. Only Lenin may have been aware of this serious problem when he advocated the right of peoples to self-determination. In spite of this history, even today as always, in all countries, on the 1^st May demonstrations and rallies, one can observe socialists, communists, leftists mindlessly shouting vacuous slogans like “workers of all countries unite”, “long live international solidarity”.
    I think some people make a revolution – let us modestly say they just revolt – when life under the prevailing conditions has in some sense or another become unbearable – objectively and materially for the broad masses, subjectively for highly sensitive (mostly) young people. Some of them – like Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky etc. – are cool, intellectual and analytical types, others, such as Mao, Fidel and Che, are more like daredevils. They revolt irrespective of whether the time is ripe or not, irrespective of whether the proletariat has understood its world-historic mission or not, irrespective of whether the proletariat joins the revolt or remains aloof. Mao led a communist revolution in an agrarian society, Che even tried to bring revolution to Congo and Bolivia, where there was no working class. Such people cannot just see exploitation and oppression happening and sit idly by.

Revisionism

Till now, in highly developed industrial countries like Germany, England etc., the working class has rejected the revolutionary role assigned to them by Marx and Engels. In Germany, their party, the Social-Democratic Party (SPD, founded in 1863–1875) pursued the reformist strategy advocated by Bernstein. In 1959, it even accepted capitalist market economy in its new program called the Godesberg Program. In Britain, the Labor Party, formed between 1893 and 1900, never explicitly accepted Marxism as its political philosophy, but was for a long time regarded as a constitutional socialist party in some sense. In the 1990s, however, it became an arch protagonist of neoliberal capitalism.
    It would be interesting to go deeper into the question why, in Russia, in 1917ff, the relatively small proletariat made the revolution together with soldiers of a demoralized army, while in Germany, in the Autumn of 1918, the very large proletariat and soldiers of a defeated army refused to heed the call for revolution (except in Munich, Bavaria). This is not the right place for that enquiry. But a few words from Kolakowski’s exposition on Bernstein’s revisionism can be quoted as a short answer:

“When Bernstein started intervening, the real wages of the German working class had risen for a long time, and it had won numerous social security benefits and a shorter working day. ... Of course, ... there was still no universal suffrage in Prussia, … but the elections and the political mobilization as well as the relative power connected with them offered the prospect of a successful struggle for the republic and even assumption of power. … The real experience of the working class in no way supported the [Marxist] theory according to which their situation within the limits of capitalism was basically hopeless and not susceptible of improvements. … The history of revisionism does not support the [Marxist] claim that there is a natural revolutionary attitude in the working class … that results from its very situation as a seller of labor power and incurable victim in this system of alienation. ... The traditional [Marxist] belief in the revolutionary mission of the proletariat was put into question. ... Revisionism robbed the socialist doctrine of the noble pathos of the 'final battle' and total liberation.”⁷

Part II

How much Marxism has gone into my Eco-Socialism?

As regards Marxian/Marxist theory, it is a bit difficult for me to answer the question put above, because I have read only some, not all, of the works of Marx and Engels. Much of my knowledge of their theory is based on reading secondary literature written by well-known Marxists of earlier decades (Sweezy, Mandel. Leontiev, Kolakowski, Vranicki etc.). I, moreover, never believed that intelligent people and scholars of the twentieth century could not study and understand the problems of their century without always asking what Marx had exactly written about an issue. After all, the authors of Limits to growth,⁸ such an important book for our century, were not known for their Marx scholarship.

Agents of Change?

The leaders of the previous revolutionary changes may or may not have come from the ranks of revolutionary proletarians, but without a good leadership overthrow of any capitalist, feudal, colonial or any other sort of oppressive-exploitative regime would not have been possible. However, whether the societies they built up thereafter could be called “socialist” has been a disputed question, which I cannot take up here.
    People who have some knowledge of history know what political role the “working class parties” (sometimes called social-democratic, sometimes socialist) and their proletarian members have played in the highly developed industrial countries as well as in the less developed ones, such as India. Above, in part I, I have given a short pointer to that role. What we read there applies all the more to the trade unions. Sometimes, of course, they defied the wishes of the leadership of their respective parties, but fighting against capitalism has never been at the top of their agenda. In the developed world, they had already explicitly accepted capitalism, calling the system a “social market economy” and their relationship with capitalists “social partnership”. What they fought for has always been higher wages, better conditions of work, and defending their existing jobs, in short, for their own private and class interests. Occasionally, in the past, in the recent past, and at the present, even their national interest got top priority.
    For me, all that means that today and in the near future, we cannot really think of the proletariat as the chief agent of any radical transformation of capitalist society into some kind of a socialist one. For capitalism in the highly industrialized countries of Europe and America is still capable of maintaining a superficially democratic form of governance with many freedoms and a standard of living of averagely skilled workers that is many times higher than that of averagely skilled workers of underdeveloped countries. It is no wonder then that at least in the USA, such workers understand themselves, and are also understood by others, as members of the middle class. They have a strong interest in defending this system.
    Now, if we tell them that in a future eco-socialist society, all, including skilled workers, will have to forgo many of the comforts and privileges that they today take for granted, they will curse us and wish to send us to hell. This has been my experience in Germany. Here, workers and their trade unions have always been the strongest opponents of the ecology movement.
    The proletariat’s political behavior in such countries may change if capitalism there loses the said capability, e.g. in a crisis more severe than anything seen till today, a crisis of whatever origin and kind. But in which direction they will then push society is anyone’s guess. It may be in the revolutionary socialist direction, but it may also be in the direction of fascism.

Crises and Collapse of Capitalism?

Once, between 1929 and 1933, modern capitalist economy faced a severe crisis and stood on the verge of collapse. No society was then transformed into a socialist one. But in one, fascists took over power. Now how probable is such a crisis in our days, or in the foreseeable future?
    After Marx’s death, four Marxian or Marxist crisis theories were in circulation. About two of them there has been some doubt as to whether Marx himself propounded them or his followers derived/developed them from his writings. The other two were creations of Marx himself.

The Breakdown theory

In vol. 3 of Capital, in a passage on the process of centralization of capital, Marx wrote: “This process would soon bring about the collapse of capitalist production … .”⁹ But this passage, according to Sweezy, is nothing more than a description of a tendency, since Marx speaks in the same breath about “counteracting tendencies which continually have a decentralizing effect by the side of the centripetal ones” Nowhere else did Sweezy find in Marx’s works “a doctrine of the specifically economic breakdown of capitalist production.” (ibid:192). However, there is another longish passage in Capital, Vol. 3, which is worth noting in this context. Marx writes:

“The true barrier to capitalist production is capital itself. It is that capital and its self-valorization [i.e. getting returns and capital accumulation] appear as the starting and finishing point, as the motive and purpose of production; production is production only for capital, and not the reverse, i.e. the means of production are not simply means for a steadily expanding pattern of life for the society of the producers. The barriers within which the maintenance and valorization of the capital-value has necessarily to move – and this in turn depends on the dispossession and impoverishment of the great mass of the producers – therefore come constantly into contradiction with the methods of production that capital must apply to its purpose and which set its course towards an unlimited expansion of production, to production as an end in itself, to an unrestricted development of the social productive powers of labor. The means … comes into persistent conflict with the restricted end, … . If the capitalist mode of production is therefore a historical means for developing the material powers of production … , it is at the same time the constant contradiction between this historical task and the social relations of production [i.e. capitalist relations among members of society] corresponding to it^9a

    Some Marx scholars think that this key passage in Marx’s writings, which is his quintessential characterization of capitalism, can be interpreted as a theory of ultimate breakdown of the system. It has to be noted that Marx wrote it while presenting and elaborating on his famous Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit. It is logically correct, I think, to conclude that if this law is a secular tendency, which Marx insisted it was, then sooner or later the rate of profit will fall to such a low level, that, for most capitalists, it won’t any more be interesting to invest their money in industry – in spite of all the “counteracting forces” that Marx also described.
    Another point to be noted here is that Marx enumerated among his counteracting forces “more intense exploitation of labor”, “reduction of wages below their value” (possible because of competition among workers) and generation of “the relative surplus population” (i.e. unemployment). It is logical to conclude from this that Marx had a Pauperization Theory, that he thought universal pauperization of the working people would also contribute to the eventual breakdown of capitalism. In the passage quoted above, Marx himself speaks of “dispossession and impoverishment of the great mass of the producers.” And pauperization theory logically leads to an under-consumption theory, which can also be called the (relative) over-production theory
    I cannot here again discuss these Marxian and/or Marxist theories nor the criticisms thereof.¹⁰ Suffice it to say that the fact that 135 years after Marx’s death, capitalism has not broken down yet, and the fact that, on the contrary, it has now conquered the whole world, and even reconquered the lost territories – the USSR, Eastern Europe, China and Vietnam,^10a – should actually give rise to the conjecture that the famous Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit, the basis of all these theories mentioned above, was itself fundamentally flawed. I had this suspicion when I, as a young man, first read about this law. I did not then dare express it. I thought I had not read enough. So I just put a question mark on the margin of the book, and continued to live and work as a socialist with this suspicion in the back of my head.
    But several years later, when I read the late Paul Sweezy’s book on Marxian economics, I found my suspicion confirmed. Sweezy, himself a famous Marxist, had pointed out the flaw as early as in 1942. For lack of space, I cannot here present his (and my) argumentation in detail. Just this:

“Marx was hardly justified, even in terms of his own theoretical system, in assuming a constant rate of surplus value simultaneously with a rising organic composition of capital.”¹¹

    In short, the enormous gains in labor productivity that capitalist production achieved and is today still achieving thanks to automation and the microelectronic revolution have made it possible that, in the industrial countries, large-scale impoverishment is today a thing of the past. At the most, one can today only speak cautiously of relative impoverishment. These huge gains in labor productivity have allowed capital to accept the higher wage demands of workers and enabled the state to be generous to the unemployed and the unemployable. That these gains went hand in hand with losses in the sphere of ecological balance was known, also to Marx and Engels. But that is another matter.
    If and when Marx’s prediction comes true, i.e. capitalism breaks down because of its inner contradictions, and if we, for the sake of argument, ignore the ecological and resource-related crises, then Schumpeter takes over with his theory of creative destruction.¹² That is what happened in the 1930s, and again in 2008ff.

Is the Situation Today Ripe for Socialism? Limits to Growth.

When the great financial crash of 2008 led to the Great Recession and another Great Depression, many Marxist leftists thought this could be the final crisis of capitalism. Others thought Marx was right after all. A renewed interest in reading Capital was observed. Ten years after 2008, I feel like quoting Schumpeter. In 1943, he wrote:

“The capitalist or any other order of things may evidently break down – or economic and social evolution may outgrow it – and yet the socialist phoenix may fail to rise from the ashes.¹³

    The Great Depression of 2008ff did not prove Marx right, but, once more, Bernstein. As during the Great Depression of the 1930s, this time too, the proletariat of the highly industrialized countries failed to deliver. Even those of the worst-hit countries like the USA, Greece, Spain and Italy¹⁴ did not make any move whatsoever to overthrow capitalism. Today, in such countries, capitalism is of course not thriving, but it is also not dead. Marx, it seems, was totally wrong in writing that “the true barrier to capitalist production is capital itself.” Is then capitalism an immortal system?
    It may not be so, because in the meantime, a new barrier has been discovered, namely limits to growth, which, if translated into Marxist jargon, would read limits to accumulation, limits to capitalist production. And these limits are – unlike Marx’s idea that capital itself is the true barrier – not a mere theoretical construct. They are concrete and tangible limits to the carrying capacity of the earth: (1) limits to the availability of cheap renewable and nonrenewable resources needed for industrial production, (2) limits to the capacity of our natural environment to absorb or, alternatively, neutralize pollutants produced by us humans such as CO₂ (the Earth’s sink function), and (3) limits to the number of modern humans that can live on the earth without ruining the ecological balance of its biosphere.
    However, they are not only a barrier to capitalist production, but to any kind of industrial production, also of the socialist kind. And all environmentally conscious humans, I presume, know of reports by serious scientists that say we have already overshot many of these limits.^14a And journalistic reports show that many of today’s human societies have already collapsed, that many others are fast approaching collapse: Somalia, Central African Republic, Greece, Bolivia, Mexico Venezuela etc.

Prospects for Eco-Socialism

After reading the book Limits to growth (1972) I realized that this discovery was of an import to economics, politics and socio-economic policy comparable to that of the Copernican discovery of the heliocentric movement of the planets. Like the latter, it demanded of us a wholesale paradigm shift, namely from the until then prevailing growth paradigm to what I call the limits-to-growth paradigm.¹⁵ The thought occurred to me that limits to growth may be the real and ultimate barrier that will cause the breakdown of capitalism. It later enabled me to come to a different and better understanding of the causes of the breakdown of the Soviet model of socialism.¹⁶ It meant for me that we must now bid farewell to development of productive forces as well as to economic growth and concentrate our efforts on economic and ecological sustainability, which would require economic contraction in (at least) the highly industrialized countries.
    Here I also saw a new kind of necessity and justification for socialism: A socialist society, because it would be egalitarian, would be an ethically better one and hence more desirable. And only such a society, because it would be planned, could guarantee that no person of working age would go without a gainful employment, even in a contracting economy. And only such a socialist society can guarantee that the job an employed person would be doing would also be a socially useful work. Only in such a society would it be possible that working people would accept policies designed for deliberately reducing production and consumption, for saving the earth. This new conception of socialism should be called, I thought, eco-socialism.
    Marx and Engels had known a lot about the ecological problems and damages that arise from capitalism (actually from industrialism of any kind). But because they did not see any limits to development of productive forces, they did not take them seriously for their own vision of socialism. Engels expressly wrote:

“… after the mighty advances made by the natural sciences in the present century, we are more than ever in a position to realize and hence to control even the more remote natural consequences of at least our day today production activities.”¹⁷ (emphasis added)

   This defect in their theory was also noted by Ted Benton,¹⁸ a famous Marx scholar, who, in connection with the hostile attitude of Marx and Engels toward Malthus and his law of population, writes of a

“… defect in Marx’s economic thought” … which “derives, rather, from an insufficiently radical critique of the leading exponents of Classical Political Economy. … It is plausible to see this failure as in part due to a mystificatory feature of capitalist economic life itself, but it is also connected with a general, politically understandable, reluctance on the part of Marx and Engels to recognize nature-imposed limits to human potential in general, and to the creation of wealth in particular. …”
    “For political reasons, … Marx and Engels were strongly, and understandably, predisposed against ‘natural-limits’ arguments, ….”.(emphases added)

    However much understanding one might have had up to 1972 for this politically motivated attitude of Marx and Engels, today, the Marxist conception of socialism based on stubborn refusal to recognize unpleasant realities must be regarded as obsolete.
    While working on my book on eco-socialism, I was very surprised to find, that Mahatma Gandhi, who was neither known for scholarship nor for scientific thinking, needed only common sense to come, in 1928, to the conclusion for which scholars and scientists needed to wait until 1972. He wrote:

“The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom [Britain] is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”¹⁹

    Yet, it was Marx from whom I got the clue to the theoretical thought that eco-socialism might succeed where earlier socialisms based more or less on his and Engels’s theory failed. Marx wrote in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

“No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore, mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since … it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.”²⁰

    I interpreted the quote as follows: The capitalist social order has not perished yet because until now, there has been enough room in it for all the productive forces to develop. Today, however, this issue is irrelevant. For against the background of the global ecological crisis and rapidly dwindling resources, the global economy, especially the advanced industrial economies, must contract to a sustainable level. That is the task today. Technologically, its solution is easy. There is no need to develop new technologies. But there is a political need to conceive (which is difficult) new relations of production that would allow, indeed facilitate, the fulfilment of this task. One such conception is there. It is called eco-socialism. It has already matured as a conception in the womb of existing society.
    At this point comes up the question whether this interpretation of mine is at all in consonance with the original quotation, which expresses one of the main points of the theory of history of Marx and Engels. It is, obviously, not. Marxists have always maintained that private capitalism has become a fetter to the development of productive forces and that the fetter must be shattered. Take, for instance. the following two quotes from Principles of Communism, an early work of Engels:

“It is clear that, up to now, the forces of production have never been developed to the point where enough could be developed [produced?] for all, and that private property [i.e. capitalism] has become a fetter and a barrier in relation to the further development of the forces of production.”

And

“… though big industry [large-scale industry] in its earliest stage created free competition, it has now outgrown free competition; … for big industry, competition and generally the individualistic organization of production have become a fetter which it must and will shatter;”²¹ (emphases added)

But now we are saying the forces of production have developed so much that they have become destructive for the environment as well as for humans; so, today, they must be fettered and thus prevented from developing further.
    I would like to express this inconsonance with Marx and Engels through a beautiful quote from Walter Benjamin, a famous Marxist literary critique of the 1930s, who, in a different critical political situation, wrote:

“Marx says revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But perhaps it is entirely different. Revolutions are perhaps the attempt of humanity travelling in a train to pull the emergency brake.”²²

    Today, only eco-socialism can actively pull the emergency brakes to stop the destructive course of the locomotive of industrialism. For this task, however, the proletariat is not the right agent. Proletarians are trained to and want to drive locomotives, and drive them as fast as possible. Their vision, if it is at all a kind of socialism, is cornucopian socialism. Erich Fromm, the famous social psychologist, who also admired Marx very much, thought that today there are “only two camps: those who care and those who don’t care.”²³ I agree.

Today, humanity has come to a point where Marxist theory of history has reached the end of its tether, and another theory of history takes over, that of Arnold Toynbee.²⁴ When collapse of the current civilization stares us in the face, the issue is not whether or how we can farther develop the forces of production, but whether we can meet the various challenges we are facing and transform, through contraction, our civilization into a sustainable one. I think with eco-socialism that is possible, but not with Marxian/Marxist socialism with its Promethean productivism.


Notes and References

1. Marx: Theses on Feuerbach. In Marx-Engels: Selected Works. Vol.1.Moscow 1977. P.15.

2. These were the show trials, in which several top leaders of the CPSU (B), such as
 Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, Bukharin etc. were found guilty of treason, sentenced to death, and subsequently executed.

3. Chattopadhyay, Paresh: “A Brief Note on Subrata Bagchi’s write up “Che Guevara …..”.
 in  Frontier, 14.07.2014. Kolkata. (emphases added)

4. (not used)

5. Marx and Engels: The Holy Family, in Collected Works, Vol. 4. 1975, Moscow. P.37.

6. (not used)

7. Kolakowski, Leszek (1978/81) Die Hauptströmungen des Marxismus. Vol.2. Munich.
 P. 133f. (Tr. SS).

8. Meadows, Donella and Dennis et al.: Limits to Growth – Report to the Club of Rome.
London.1972.

9. Quoted in Sweezy, Paul M (1942) The Theory of Capitalist Development. New York: P.191.

9a. Marx: Capital Vol.3; translated by Fernbach. Penguin. P. 358f.

10. I have done that in my book The Crises of Capitalism. Berkeley, 2012.

10a. See my article on Vietnam’s return to capitalism:
https://eco-socialist.blogspot.com/search?q=Vietnam

11. Sweezy (see note 9), P. 102.

12. See Schumpeter; Joseph Alois (1912/1934) The Theory of Economic Development.
 Cambridge, MA. USA.

13. Schumpeter, Joseph Alois (1943) Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. London. P. 56f.

14. See my essay Understanding the Present-day World Economic Crisis – An 

Eco-Socialist Approach
https://eco-socialist.blogspot.com/search?q=understanding

14a. William Rees has recently published a good summary of the ecological state of the world:
https://countercurrents.org/2018/08/17/what-me-worry-humans-are-blind-to-imminent-environmental-collapse/

15. See Kuhn, Thomas (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago.
I used and explained the terms in my book
Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism? – A Critical Analysis of Humanities Fundamental 
Choices. London (Zed Books). 1999.

16. See Chapter 2 and 3 of my above mentioned book (note 15).

17. Marx & Engels (1976) Selected Works (in 3 Volumes) Vol. 3. Moscow.

18. Benton, Ted: “Marxism and Natural Limits: An Ecological Critique and Reconstruction”, in
New Left Review, I_178, Nov–Dec. 1989.

19. Gandhi, Mahatma, quoted in
Bandyopadhyay, Jayanta and Vandana Shiva (1989) “Political Economy of Ecology
Movements”, in Ifda dossier 71, May/June.

20. Marx: Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In 
Marx-Engels: Selected Works, Vol. 1. Moscow. 1977.

21. Engels: Principles of Communism : Quoted from the internet:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

22. Benjamin, Walter , quoted in
Fetcher, Iring (1980) Überlebensbedingungen der Menschheit. Munich.P. 8).

23. Fromm, Erich (1979) To Have or to Be. London.P.196.

24. Toynbee, Arnold is the author of the monumental work A Study of History. (I have 
not read the 12 volumes, but some articles on his theory of history.)

6811 words

Note: The essay was first published in the online journal Radical Ecological Democracy

http://www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/redweb-anniversary-series-from-socialism-to-eco-socialism-turning-points-on-a-personal-journey-through-the-marxist-theory-of-socialism/