Socialism Reconceived
In the last issue of Green Horizon (#34), Jon Olsen’s article — “Green Party and Socialism: Engagement, but Marriage?” — discussed a newly-adopted plank in the Economic Justice and Sustainability section of the national Green Party platform. In that article Jon offered some interesting thoughts about renewing and reconceptualizing socialism. Here I’d like to expand on his ideas.
It’s known that I’m a firm believer that the ideology embodied in the Ten Key Values has more affinity with the communitarian left than with the socialist left — Gandhi rather than Marx; Mumford rather than Harrington. I view the Green Party as the electoral expression of an eco-communitarian movement for a new society. The end-goal of that movement is not socialism, but rather a decentralized society characterized by regionalism and diversity.
I’ve been critical of old-style leftists who come in to the Green Party saying: “The Greens need to be radicalized. They need to recognize that the problem is capitalism and the solution is socialism.” Well, that sounds straightforward and (to them) enlightening. But I believe they’ve been failing to appreciate that the perspective of the Greens is not less radical, it’s just more sophisticated. For example, it rightfully makes a distinction between corporate capitalism and local private enterprise. And it justifiably avoids universalist prescriptions.
Traditional socialist theory was deficient in regard to its interpretation of history, its delusion about the proletariat being the agency of social change, and its vision of a “democratically owned and controlled” large-scale planned economy (it should be clear by now how much of a chimerical notion that turned out to be). Having said that, I nonetheless think it’s possible that socialism might have a role to play in our strategizing about how to get “from here to there.”
FIRST: WHY GREENS SHOULD NOT BE SOCIALISTS
Among the Ten Key Values of the Greens, most could be espoused by the vast majority of progressive organizations and tendencies. Regarding the special value Ecological Wisdom, it’s a credit to our patient explication over the last forty years that it’s now widely embraced. But three other of the values, in particular, distinguish us — and have the potential to transform the left: Decentralization, Community-based Economics, and Respect for Diversity.
Most progressives would be inclined to say that there’s commonality in regard to “respect for diversity,” but I think there’s a deep meaning of that concept that goes to the essence of the distinctiveness of the Green paradigm. It can, and should, imply more than just respect for racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity. In a world of humanly-scaled, decentralized (perhaps bioregional) polities, a realistic and healthy vision would include diversity in regard to all the solutions adopted to address the myriad issues and challenges of human lifeways — education of the young, sexual relations, dealing with sociopathology, healthcare provision, etc. So in a Green world we would expect to see the “communities” (the various forms of decentralized entities) handling the issue of economic relations in diverse ways.
A problem with socialism is that it prescribes one way — collective ownership of means of production — a supposedly best system, advocated for universal application. Such was typical of the modernist ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They anticipated that the “end of history” would be characterized by universal agreement about and adoption of one or another best way, either Keynesian liberalism or socialism or free market capitalism. Relative to this misguided and unrealistic expectation, Green politics is post-modern, recognizing that it’s unnatural and even unhealthy, to envision universalism in regard to systems, institutions, and lifeways. Moreover, that’s why post-modern should mean post-socialist — in the sense of rejecting the idea that socialism is a panacea or an end-goal.
NONETHELESS: WHY GREENS MIGHT WANT TO ADVOCATE SOME SOCIALISM
The immediate reality we face is that the extant globalized industrial-capitalist system is socially and ecologically ruinous. And an immediate question we face is: how to de-fang it?
In trying to answer that question, progressives debate about whether the dominant multinational corporations should be tightly regulated or socialized. Greens have tended to be wary of the bureaucratic monstrosities that can result from the traditional socialist prescription. But we must consider the possibility that regulation could prove to be inadequate. For that reason, some are proposing that the transition to a decentralized Green society may initially require socializing many of the large corporations.
A reconceptualization of socialism might view it as a stage of history, but not the ultimate or “highest” stage as the Marxists propose. What we ultimately should be striving for is liberation from the distortions, dependencies, and bureaucracies of the industrial state, recognizing how it is problematic in both its private-ownership and public-ownership manifestations. We ultimately want to re-allocate social resources away from it, back toward local communities and regional economies. Can socializing its “major means of production” hasten that process?
It should be acknowledged that attempts in that direction have, to date, been disappointing. After two hundred years of theorizing and experimenting, it still remains to be seen whether or not an extensively socialized economy can be viable. It may be that capitalism will simply implode before any “next system” is able to replace it (thus forcing the issue of re-localization).
We can’t know, but we have to try to conjecture the most promising road forward. It’s difficult, to say the least — because human history has arrived at an unprecedented state of crisis. What’s clear is that the establishment parties and ideologies have no idea how to address this crisis. Ecosocialists are proposing a two-pronged strategy of striving to collectivize the extant economy “at the top” while replacing it from below. On that basis I could support an advocacy of socialism in the Green Party platform — but only if it’s a reconceived kind of socialism concordant with the advancement of a communitarian left and an ultimate vision of a diverse and decentralized Green world.
(this article appeared in the Fall 2017 issue of Green Horizon Magazine)
