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Randall Stokes makes some interesting points in his critique of my
comments. In particular, he writes:
"Rationalizing the collapse of every socialist experiment as
somehow "not counting" will get us nowhere. This critique has to be made
from within, and not by people who are convinced that Adam Smith had it right."
A reasonable point. But then again, there have only been two serious
socialist experiments. Both were in trouble within a few decades. How many times
did capitalism have to struggle, again and again, over the centuries, before it
displaced the feudal and pre-feudal systems and attained world dominance?
A bad predictor of the future might have said that the failure of Cromwell, for
example, was proof that capitalism would never replace feudalism.
I think it does come down to Weber versus Marx. It is too easy to accuse
Marxism of economic reductionism and leave out the PSYCHOLOGICAL REDUCTIONISM
that is inherent in a view that says that humans will always strive to have
unequal wealth and power over others. Especially when that is often based on a
limited set of circumstances. Stokes has a good point about completely
centralized power. I would expect that there would have to be some kind of
leadership -- call it a party or whatever. In some ways, it might be
similar to what Lenin or Mao experimented with. But it clearly would have to
have not just a leadership, but a rank and file, and most important, a general
populace, intensely committed to the struggle against exploitation and
inequality.
Stokes is correct insofar as he (agreeing with Lenin!) says that it would
be enormously difficult. But to say, as some do, that we need "a little bit of
market to provide democracy to keep the totalitarian centralists in place"
is to simply opt for another kind of centralism -- one with a proven
history of viciousness and violence that is difficult to comprehend sitting
in front of a computer screen.
Finding ways to plan an economy without having an elite dominate and
exploit -- now that's the tough one. It seems to me that there was still TOO
MUCH CAPITALISM in those societies, which made it easier for those elites to
consolidate power. How can a little more capitalism stop elitism, unless one
thinks that elitism is some kind of structure inherent in the human brain?
There is no question that capitalism has processes that inexorably move it
towards concentration, conflict, oppression and war, and no amount of attempt to
humanize it can stop those processes. No kind of capitalism can ever be
the solution to why socialism/communism has not yet succeeded. We have to
find ways to practice BOTH parts of Marx' statement:
"From each according to ability, to each according to need."
The emphasis of most Marxists has been on the second, the distributive
part. But it is in the first half of that statement that the possibility of
preventing new capitalism-elitism from arising can be found. Putting it into
practice -- now there's the problem. But if it were easy, it would have been
done already.
Alan Spector
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