S.O.S. Alternatives to Capitalism. Richard Swift
or not, at their peril. But the history of business is dotted with ways in which capital has turned on them, driving them into bankruptcy, crisis, war or some other disaster. Many captains of industry and finance dwell under the illusion of their mastery of capital but it remains just that: an illusion. They have made a Faustian pact or devil’s bargain and given capital its freedom to roam wherever it wishes, regardless of consequence. This is perhaps the most profound danger of capital on the loose in the current age: in its increasingly desperate quest for profit, capital is driving us over the ecological edge, endangering the very possibility of sustainable human life on the planet.
1 Daniel Cohn-Bendit, ‘Enough with the European leaps of faith’, opendemocracy. net 21 Mar 2013.
2 Jeff Madrick, ‘US financial regulations; Plugging holes in a faulty dam’, triplecrisis.com
3 Bob McGuire, ‘Widening labour and peasant revolts threaten Chinese rulers’, newsandletters.org Jan/Feb 2012.
4 Eli Friedman, ‘China in Revolt’, Jacobin, nin.tl/1fZpIyj
7 Wendy Brown, ‘Neo-liberalism and the end of liberal Democracy’, Theory and Event, 7.1, 2003.
8 Capgemini and Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, 2009.
9 corporations.org/system/top100.html
In practice, most alternatives to capitalism are seen as some form of socialism, which now has a checkered history stretching back over two centuries. The early stirrings of socialist thought eventually crystallized into two main forms: communism and social democracy, both of which are flawed and seem to have largely capitulated to the forces they once resisted.
‘If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him with absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.’
Mikhail Bakunin
Socialism organized through the state has been the main way in which humanity has tried to build an alternative to capitalism. We now have a couple of centuries of experience of this so it should be possible to build a balance sheet of positives and negatives. From the beginning, the state – or, if not the actually existing state, some idealized version of its socialist reformation – has been for most socialists a source of coherence and justice in opposition to the squalor and instability of the capitalist market. This view has drawn sustenance from the thinking of a wide variety of 18th- and 19th-century political philosophers, including Rousseau’s notion of the ‘general will’ and Hegel’s idea of the state as the high point of human rationality. The Left’s allegiance to the state has been further reinforced by the unity of the state with the nation (the idea of the nation-state), which has allowed it the political luxury of dressing in the same patriotic clothes as the Right. While there have been competing currents of leftist opinion, it is this notion of a rational state as opposed to an irrational market that has until recently carried the day. This is the background needed for any understanding of what has been a largely uncritical view of the potential of the state to install and oversee a socialist alternative. The legitimacy of the political state and the way it exercises power remains one of the Left’s major intellectual blind spots.
From its very beginnings there has always been a strain of socialism that has had about it an élitist and technocratic cast. This derives from its birth as a blueprint for reform issuing from the minds of social reformers such as the German activist and philosopher Ferdinand Lassalle and the French aristocrat Saint-Simon. Much of their politics was based on gaining access to the ear of those in power to convince them to implement schemes of social reform. Lassalle is credited with a certain amount of influence on Otto von Bismarck, one of Germany’s most famous (and autocratic) chancellors, who laid down the beginnings of that country’s welfare state. Other early socialist reformers, including the British factory manager Robert Owen, combined influence for progressive legislation with the establishment of utopian communities. Most such endeavors have had a slightly condescending attitude to the moral reform of wayward working-class personalities.
Another source of the original socialist impulse was popular movements of workers, particularly more educated craft workers but others as well, who saw economic democracy as an extension of radical republican goals. This tendency reached its first moment of decision at the time of the French Revolution, when there was a tension between a spontaneous revolutionary movement with radical egalitarian politics and its crystallization into a centralized political party in the shape of the Jacobins. It was the Jacobins who installed a dictatorship in Paris, supposedly to preserve and extend the revolution. They faced (or at least believed they faced) a tragic dilemma – how to preserve their revolution without betraying its radical democratic ideals. Arguably the Jacobins failed to do either. Since then, most revolutionary projects have been faced with a similar choice as to whether or not to be seduced by the temptation of deploying dictatorial means to impose social change from above. The Jacobin state under Robespierre used the citizens’ army and the guillotine to dispatch those perceived as enemies of the revolution. In the end, the Jacobins created through such ruthless means the conditions for their own destruction, lashing out first against supporters of the ancien régime and then against radicals of the sans-culottes movement and other dissidents who were in favor of a more egalitarian republic. The Jacobins were left in a position of political isolation that set them up for defeat by the more moderate Girondins and ultimately allowed the rise of an emperor in Napoleon Bonaparte.1
This pattern reverberated through the revolutions of the 20th century. Lenin was inspired by the Jacobins when he created his own disciplined ‘democratic centralist’ Bolshevik party to spearhead the Russian Revolution. In doing so, he also created the dictatorial conditions that eventually condemned his Bolshevik comrades to death at Stalin’s hand (although he didn’t live to see it). Nemesis ruled, just as it did when Robespierre lost his head to the guillotine. With no freedom or power rooted in working-class society outside the Party, once the old Bolsheviks lost their power struggle to the ruthless Stalin there was nowhere for them to turn and they were murdered or executed.
Almost all revolutionary projects have been faced with this Hobson’s choice in one way or another: either destroy their own revolution internally by the use of dictatorial means (Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia is just the most dramatic example) or have it destroyed externally (as in Allende’s Chile) by an alliance of powerful and ruthless enemies. Today, overt partisans of secular revolutionary dictatorship are rare – the odd Leninist or Trotskyist groupuscule, or mediagenic but politically isolated intellectuals such as the Slovenian Slavoj Žižek2 or the French philosopher Alain Badiou. But these issues still haunt attempts to build a ‘21st-century socialism’, notably in Latin America where the tension between democratic initiative and bureaucratic fiat remains – although at least now it is recognized as such and debated as never before.
Democratic roots in the 19th century
After their defeats in the French Revolution, partisans of an alternative to emerging 19th-century capitalism had a hard row to hoe. Throughout Europe, reactionary aristocratic and monarchical power did its best to smother or at least severely limit the democratic impulse. While economic space for business was allowed, political space – particularly the right of assembly and to form radical organizations – remained severely restricted. The goal of a socialist republic was, for movements of the Left, just the logical