Revulsion and Disappointment
Time has passed since the collapse of what used to be referred to as “real existing socialism.” That was the Soviet model and the socialist-oriented nationalizations of industry attempted in many other countries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nationalizations_by_country
After reflection, a new New Left now talks more about cooperativization than statist expropriation, more about “market socialism” than national economic planning. New New Leftists talk about “starting over” … “rebuilding” … “re-envisioning.”
If we take a birds-eye view of the situation we can appreciate the conundrum the Left finds itself in.
Yes, the industrial-capitalist system produces Revulsion. It has since its ascendance during the 18th and 19th centuries. History since then has witnessed wave after wave of anti-capitalist ferment along with waves of Red-leftist rejuvenations under the banner: “A Better World Is Possible.”
But the socialist movement has produced Disappointment.
At this point we can say the movement is over two hundred years old:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_de_Saint-Simon
In 1817, in a treatise entitled L’Industrie, he began to propound his socialist views, which he developed further in L’Organisateur (1819), a periodical on which Augustin Thierry and Auguste Comte collaborated.
After two hundred years we can’t point to a single enduringly successful implementation of the full socialist vision:
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/08/bernie-sanders-five-year-war
Across the world, from Norway to New Zealand, as working-class parties of the Left have given way to their Brahminized descendants, the scope and the horizon of left-wing politics have changed. Less interested in transformative economic redistribution — and far less capable of delivering it, anyway — contemporary progressives have put their faith and their energy in a range of other projects, from environmentalism to questions of cultural representation.
Those, like Jacobin theorists, who are still working-class oriented, now have the idea that “socialization” will largely entail taking enterprises out of private hands and turning them over to a collective of the employees:
https://www.democracyatwork.info/
It’s a formula for more in the way of disappointment.
Industrial production under modern capitalism entails scales and complexities such that the idea of “taking over” is unappealing, to say the least. Elites are willing to coordinate production because such enterprise can yield great profit and/or great influence (power, aggrandizement).
Richard Wolff of Democracy at Work says there are reasons to believe that workers and citizens will prefer, politically fight for, and economically support WSDEs (Worker Self-Directed Enterprises). There is little
evidence of such. We don’t really see workers clamoring for the socialists’ ideals of collective ownership and democratic control of corporations, no less collective ownership and democratic control of the economy-as-a-whole.
So our re-thinking has to conclude: Neither Revulsion nor Disappointment. Neither Capitalism nor Socialism. Neither Right nor Left. Abandon the industrial paradigm entirely. Rather, in order to democratize … restore the human scale in all things … simplify, downscale and decentralize:
