Protest the G20 Summit! Nov 14th & 15th in DC

The G20 is holding a summit on the Financial Crisis and the World Economy in Washington, DC on November 15, the first in a series of closed door summits, with the people who brought you the IMF, the World Bank, and the recent global financial crisis.

We know that capitalism is the disaster and the newly formed GLOBAL JUSTICE ACTION is planning to protest these meetings and show alternative visions for the future.

For a full schedule of events and logistical info, visit http://globaljusticeaction.wordpress.com

Schedule of Actions

Friday, November 14th

4-5pm, DC Students for a Democratic Society will be at the Department of Education for the Student Power for Accessible Education Day of Demands. They’ll be rallying outside it with hopscotch and jump rope and showing the world how student debt is connected to the credit crunch, as well as delivering a letter to the Department of Education with representatives from DC area high schools and universities.

5-7pm, People’s Banquet in Lafayette Park - While Bush is hosting a gala dinner for the G20 delegates at the White House, we will be holding a People’s Banquet, a feast for those left hungry and out in the cold by US economic policies. We’re also planning a Really Really Free Market and a rally to show how mutual aid can overcome local neoliberalism.
Co-Sponsored by Global Justice Action, Casa de Maryland, the Washington Peace Center, Jobs with Justice, the Democratic Left @ GWU, and Students for a Democratic Society

Saturday, November 15th

10am-12pm, Rally @ Murrow Park (at the intersection of 18th St, H St, and Pennsylvania Ave NW, across from the World Bank)
Co-sponsored by Global Justice Action, the Institute for Policy Studies, Jobs with Justice, Students for a Democratic Society, and USAction

12-1pm, Mass March to Luther Place for a People’s Forum (details below)

1-2pm, lunch at Luther Place, 1226 Vermont Ave NW

2pm-8:30pm, Global Justice Action presents a People’s Forum.
While the G20 holds their summit to try and resuscitate their dying ideas, join us to learn about how the financial crisis happened and how it effects your local community, discuss new ideas and alternatives to capitalism, and come together as a movement to organize.
Co-sponsored by Global Justice Action, the Bank Information Center, the Institute for Policy Studies, Jobs with Justice, Students for a Democratic Society, the Democratic Left @ GWU and USAction

11:55pm, G20 Going Away Party
Join Global Justice Action for a rowdy march to bid farewell to the G20. Meet at Dupont Circle

Sunday, Nov 16th

12-3pm, Post-Election Strategy & Inauguration Planning Meeting with the DC Activist Coalition, for more info go to - http://www.washingtonpeacecenter.net/civic/node/1155

There is significant cause for concern that the death toll from these strikes could rise as more rubble is uncovered. The United States military however still states officially that it believes that 25 militants and 5 civilians were the only causalities, despite UN and Afghan reports to the contrary.

There has been no response from either the McCain or the Obama campaign. Barack Obama wants to shrink the war in Iraq through a cautious “phased withdrawal” that will leave thousands of troops and mercenaries in Iraq indefinitely, but has repeated his desire to continue the legacy of American belligerence and escalate US involvement in Afghanistan.

It is estimated by RAND that $100 per capita is the minimum required to stabilize a country evolving out of war. Bosnia received $679 per capita, Kosovo $526, while Afghanistan received $57 per capita in the key years, 2001-2003.
When the United States installed the Hamid Karzai government, Afghanistan ranked 172nd out of 178 nations on the United Nation’s Human Development Index. It has the highest rate of infant mortality in the world, a life expectancy rate of 44-45 years, and the youngest population of any country. In 2005, 95 percent of Kabul’s residents were living without electrical power.

So far this year the most modest of UN estimates puts the civilian death toll in Afghanistan well above one thousand dead.

So much for the good war…

It would be foolish to not acknowledge that Russia, like the rest of the powers of the West, is a capitalist and imperialist state. The Georgian people were forcibly annexed into the Russian Empire in the waning days of the 18th century and admittedly the great majority of Georgians are proud of their independence and will fight tooth and nail to preserve it. They have endured economic pressure from the Russian oligarchy, but have attempted to maintain their autonomy. Yet Georgia is not a homogeneous country and just as ethnic Georgians fear domination from Moscow, the people of South Ossetia and the Abkhazians fear cultural assimilation and political domination from Tsibilisi. During “Communist” rule South Ossetia was an autonomous region of Soviet Georgia, sporting its a local government and its own official language. During the disintegration of the Soviet Union the leadership of the 65,000 natives of South Ossetia and the Abkhazians, who live in a Georgian province bordering the Black Sea, launched campaigns to join Russia and maintain their former statuses as a autonomous regions. Media reports that portray the separatist movements as purely concoctions of Moscow ignore the fact that South Ossetians overwhelmingly supported independence in a referendum held in 2006 that asked whether or not South Ossetia should preserve its present status of a de facto independent state. Furthermore, over 80 percent of residents of South Ossetia, which was separated from the North following the dismantling of the USSR, have voluntarily taken Russian citizenship.

This present conflict started when the Georgian government initiated a sudden and unprovoked aerial and artillery attack on South Ossetia’s capital, Tskhinvali. The attack was an unwarranted and idiotic miscalculation by the U.S.-backed Saakashvili. The right-wing Saakashvili’s dream of “reuniting” Georgia and the Western support for the “territorial integrity of Georgia” are mere code words for the reactionary, nationalist desire of Georgian nationalists to subjugate the non-Georgian minorities in Ossetia and Abkhzian and the Western desire to deal yet another defeat to their Russian rivals.

Similarly, the Russian ruling-classes’ response to Georgian aggression, its invasion of Georgia, is not a purely humanitarian mission like they profess it to be, but rather a familiar tactic in a centuries-old game, imperialism. Russia, of course, had no concern for the rights of ethnic minorities when they were brutally suppressing a mass movement for independence in Chechnya. The Russian rulers are however acutely aware that they themselves are under attack from a power far mightier than Georgia only, the United States. The relentless expansion of the NATO alliance, an organization that should have been dissolved along with the Warsaw Pact, and the placement of US military bases and client-states around Russia has been a grave concern for Russian elites who have attempted to counter the West with their own brand of imperialism. Just as NATO members fed the flame of nationalism across the former Socialist Republics of Yugoslavia and used the movement of ethnic Albanians to establish a client-state in Kosovo, the Russians seek to use the legitimate sovereignty struggles of the Ossetians’ and the Abkhazians to stop NATO from expanding into Georgia. This is all happening within the broader context of the United States placing missile defense shields in Eastern Europe to attempt to marginalize Russian power in their own natural sphere of influence.

The role of economics in shaping this quagmire cannot be ignored either. The Caucasus is a region well-bestowed with natural resources and a strategic location, a blessing that has placed the region at the center of conflicts in the past. Georgia borders Turkey and Armenia, a supporter of Iran, and resource rich Azerbaijan. The country’s locations is the reason why many oil and gas pipelines pass through it, like the Baku-Tabilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, and even more are planned. All of these pipelines use pro-Western Caucasus states to bypass Russia, a country that fulfills most of the energy needs of Eastern and Central Europe. We must not succumb to the simplistic notion that the rivalry between the United States and Russia is merely a relic of the Cold War, but instead we must show that the conflict has its roots in competition between rival power-blocs for both political and economic supremacy.

The response of US politicians and the Western media to the crisis surpasses the bounds of hypocrisy and leaps boldly into the grounds of self-delusion. There is plenty of attention to Russian “aggression”, but there is no mention of the US engineered Ethiopian invasion of Somalia (today alone, US-backed Ethiopian soldiers killed 37 civilians who were riding in passenger buses in the town of Arbiska and killed more in another incidient in Mogadishu), there is no coverage of 1.25 million dead and 4 million displaced in Iraq, the continued occupation of Afghanistan, the generous American tax-payer support for the apartheid state, or our continued support for a paramilitary-linked, anti-labor government in Colombia. War and repression are used by the United States and its client states across the world to preserve American interests and the rights of capital. This is the true nature of Pax Americana. And dating back to its conception this has been the true nature of the Empire.

Imperialism is a game played by the ruling-classes of great powers, but it is a game in which the working-classes will always lose. Today, it is the duty of the sons and daughters of the middle and lower stratum of society to carry the guns, rebuild the cities and bury the dead. Tomorrow, it will be the charge of these same sons and daughters to bury capital and the plight of imperialism along with it.

Since 2001, the Florida-based Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and their partner the Student Farmworker Alliance (SFA) have worked tirelessly to fight for the rights of immigrants and tomato pickers. Their battle for an extra penny per pound of picked tomatos. Although the battles have been hard fought, they’ve won several huge campaigns against powerful corporations like Yum!Brands, McDonald’s, and Burger King. The CIW and SFA now turn their attention towards Whole Foods, Subway, and Wal-Mart. The Young Democratic Socialists have stood with our partners in their work over the past few years. We not only want to continue to do so, but we want to amplify our work as well.

YDS contributed to CIW’s struggle in modest ways. Our University of Chicago chapter spoke at a town hall meeting to show solidarity with the university coalition that kicked Taco Bell off campus. In the spring of 2007, YDS members from around the country rallied in Chicago celebrating CIW’s victory over McDonald’s. In the fall, YDS chapters hosted talks about connecting corporate globalization and migration, and emphasized corporate exploitation of farmworkers.

It was the in the spring of 2008 that YDS’s participation in farm worker solidarity reached its high water mark. During the Student Labor Week of Action (SLWoA), YDS chapters like the College of Wooster and Wichita State University (WSU YDS) and members like Alyssa Cundari (herself on the SFA Coordinating Committee) helped obtain hundreds, if not over a thousand, signatures for SFA’s petition against modern-day slavery directed at Burger King. WSU YDS’s Day of Action with Farmworkers event was highlighted by Jobs with Justice in their coverage of the 2008 SLWoA. In many ways, however, our work as socialists was incomplete.

U.S. democratic socialists have always played an important role in farm worker solidarity. From organizing sharecroppers during the New Deal and Great Depression, working with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in the grape boycott, to addressing racial injustice in the farm worker struggle, American socialists have been in and around the movement for justice in the fields. YDS views our activism with CIW and SFA as a continuation of that tradition of labor solidarity.

However, labor solidarity by itself is not enough to transform society and protect worker rights. Agreements between workers and business will not change labor laws that curtail farmhand collective bargaining rights. Such contacts can not undo the racist legacy of excluding farm workers (like domestic workers) from the National Labor Relations Act because many of them are people of color. It is the role of socialists in the United States to do public education on capitalism’s systemic exploitation of farm workers, the need for legal protections for farm workers, and address the underlining bigoted nature of existing labor laws.

YDS will do the following:

• YDS Coordinating Committee and National Office will develop talking points for chapters and members to discuss why we should support the Coalition of Immokalee Workers campaign as democratic socialists. This specifically calls upon YDS developing literature as to why capitalism has exacerbated exploitation of farmworkers in the U.S. both socially and economically.

• YDS Coordinating Committee and National Office will coordinate actions similar to the events of the past year emphasizing YDS’s national commitment and energy around farm worker rights.

Activist Agenda Proposal: Access to and Quality of Education

Horace Mann once said, “Education, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of man, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.” Democratic socialists must confront the offensive inequality that plagues our country’s K-12 public education systems if we are to close the gross disparity of income and overall welfare between a thriving ruling elite and an ever poorer working-class. Furthermore, we and other progressive forces must confront the barricades that block women and communities of color have from higher education and the burdensome cost of a college education that students from working and middle-class backgrounds suffer.

The United States is home to some the best and some of the worst public schools in the developed world. Vouchers and more cutbacks, will not bridge the achievement gap between successful schools and those that struggle, particularly the ones that are concentrated in low-income communities. Instead we must increase resources for public schools and replace standardized tests with achievement benchmarks that can more accurately measure students’ progress. The current “No Child Left Behind” program is both under funded and counter-productive as it forces teachers to narrow their curriculums and fails to identify and improve struggling schools. Democratic socialists must articulate that “No Child Left Behind” and the political establishment are not addressing low-income schools’ needs.

A higher-education degree, once considered an exclusive privilege for the children of the well to do, is now a prerequisite for competition in today’s volatile job market. Regardless, numerous students are falling victim to the twin afflictions of predatory lending and skyrocketing tuition rates. Students are sinking deeper and deeper into a chasm of debt even if they earn a diploma. Moreover, the quality of education that students receive is dependent on the finances of their parents. Community colleges are attended mostly by students from working class backgrounds. Even if a working class high school student manages to beat an SAT test shown to favor more affluent students, chances are he or she will attend a less influential institution for financial reasons. These problems are caused by a system that under-funds education at all levels.

In other advanced industrialized nations where students are better mobilized to combat predatory lenders and pressure their respective governments, higher education is considered not a privilege, but a fundamental right for all students, regardless of race, gender, or class. Yet in the United States of America, government financial aid and scholarship grants have been slashed while the government subsidizes of many of the predatory corporate lenders that prey on the hopes and dreams of working-class and minority students.

Practically three times as many African-Americans and Latinos go to sleep in prison cells than in college dorms. This incriminating statistic illustrates not only the injustice and racism of the capitalist police, court, and prison systems, but also showcases the lack of access to high quality, affordable education for minorities. Attacks on affirmative action have also prevented people of color from gaining access to higher education. Eight years after California banned affirmative action through the adoption of proposition 209, a 2005 study showed a substantial decrease in admission of people of color to UC schools.

YDS must renew its commitment to fight for the right of every American to have access to high quality pre-K, primary, secondary, and higher education without having to worry about crippling student debt.

Here are several activities YDS chapters and activists can do to fulfill this commitment:

1) Educate fellow students and community members. Organize teach-ins and outreach efforts on campuses to highlight how for-profit lenders, budget cutbacks, and privatization are exacerbating the student debt crisis and how misdirected public-sector cuts are jeopardizing our vulnerable public education system.

2) Build a coalition. Reach out to other clubs on campus, the student government association and community allies, to protest tuition hikes, education cuts and predatory lenders.

3) Pass legislation. Team up with national organizations such as the United States Student Association, Campus Progress and members of the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition to pass legislation, such as the reauthorization of the “Higher Education Act”. Connect with local teachers’ unions and community groups to help combat the right wing, neoliberal assault on our public sphere.

4) Connect the dots. Host public events and discussions illustrating how student loan profiteering and the under-funding of schools are part of our government’s diversion of resources towards war and the larger right-wing assault on the public sphere and our standards of living. Make the case for the socialist alternative: universal high-quality public goods financed though progressive taxation.

Participants befriended one another and gained valuable experiences about organizing tactics. The conference focused on encouraging young activists to become leaders on their respective campuses and communities’ capable of rallying other students to fight in solidarity with workers and other exploited people.

The conference wasn’t all talk. Like true activists, participants boldly took to the streets to march on the Rhode Island State House. Member organizations demonstrated against Rhode Island’s reactionary immigration policy, which has effectively turned hard-working state law enforcement and social service providers into immigration enforcements agents.

Coalitions such as Jobs with Justice demonstrate the power of unity. Diverse coalitions bound together under the common banner can build progressive movements better than they ever could have done alone. YDS is proud to be a part of the struggle for social justice and dignity for all. In the coming years we hope to only increase our visibility and participation in this struggle.

The Alienation of Labor and the Humanism of Marx

In his early writings Karl Marx spends an enormous amount of time examining the effects of capitalism on the individual. Throughout his 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in particular, Marx blasts capitalism for what he views as its inhumane, alienating effect on labor:

What constitutes the alienation of labor?
Firstly, the fact that labor is external to the work—ie, does not belong to his essential being; that he, therefore, does not confirm himself in work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. Hence, the worker feels himself only when he is not working: when he is working, he does not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and not at home when he is working. His labor is, therefore, not voluntary, but forced, it is forced labor. It is, therefore, not the satisfaction of a need but a mere means to satisfy needs outside itself.

What Marx is getting at is that human beings in our “natural state” produce for our own benefit and thus we reap the rewards of our own labor. Yet under capitalism legions upon legions of workers produce like machines for a handful of capitalists. In return most workers get just enough wages to eke by and are still relegated to living paycheck by paycheck. Since workers are removed from the objects they produce (they produce for capitalists, not for themselves) they are alienated from the product of their labor. They thus are inherently removed from the process of labor themselves, because for them work is just an exercise in which their minds, spirit and energy are drained by capitalists in the pursuit of profits. Reformers who work within the system can achieve gains such as higher wages, but in the eyes of Marx this does not solve the real problem:

A forcing-up of wages (disregarding all other difficulties, including the fact that it would only be by force, too, that the higher-wages, being an anomaly, could be maintained) would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not conquer either for the worker or for labour their human status and dignity.

The problem remains, as discussed earlier, that a minority controls the means of productions, while a majority have the conditions and terms of their livelihood determined by others. Through this lens we can see capitalism as an anathema to real democracy. Once the workers have real democratic control over what they produce and are able to produce according to their own needs and the needs of their fellow human beings, labor will become less alienating and humanity will able to march towards social emancipation. Democratic production, not production for a coordinating class OR a capitalist class, characterizes the socialist epoch of historical development.

Another example of Marx’s concern for the welfare and development of his fellowman is showcased not in one of his more obscure early writings, but in his magnum opus Das Kapital he writes about the directors of “Cyclops Steel and Iron Works” arguing with the Factory Commission that twelve-year old boys should be able to work twelve-hour shifts throughout the night. The owners tell the commission that boys need to work those hours, because they can’t find adult men who will work that night shift. They explain that most of the boys are physically able to do the work and that they are easy to control and mold into expert workers. Why not move all production to the daytime? Why have a night-shift at all, the commission asks? Sanderson, an owner, replies, “But then there would be the loss from so much expensive machinery, lying idle half the time, and to get through the amount of work which we are able to do on the present system, we should have to double our premises and plant, which would double the outlay.” Marx shows us here that for the capitalists the needs of workers are subordinate to the bottom line. The ignorance of Sanderson would be almost uproarious if it was not so tragic. He can only see profit lost by not using children to operate his machines at night; he cannot see how much can be gained by allowing children enough sleep to function properly, enough free-time to play and creatively develop, or perhaps freedom from servitude and a chance to improve their lot in life through an education.

For Marx and for real socialists there is more to human beings than just surplus-value. Stalin and the Soviet coordinators wanted to direct the workers’ labor in order to help forge a new society (supposedly for the betterment of mankind), while Sanderson wanted to “soak up [this] surplus value” in order to maximize his profits, but neither bothered to ask the workers what they wanted do with their own contributions to society; neither bothered to entrust the creators of the wealth of society with the reigns of society. But the real Karl Marx, free of Soviet-dogmatism and Marxist-Leninist “orthodoxy,” did. As Marx wrote in the first sentence in the rules written for the First International, “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”

In order to discuss what real socialism is we must first examine the injustice, exploitation and alienation that permeates throughout capitalist (and bureaucratic collectivist) societies from the standpoint of its effect on–as Kautsky puts it–“[…]human self esteem.”

Beginning in their early landmark writing, The German Ideology, Marx and Engels developed the concept of historical materialism. They argued that the only way that society could be properly understood was by scientifically examining the material forces that constituted it. The truly materialist way to examine how society is formed is to examine how a society organizes its production. According to Marx, the organization of production is comprised of two important elements, forces of production and social relations of production. Forces of production include land, raw materials, technology, skills and knowledge, while social relations of production refer to who controls the forces of production and how they control it.

Marx believed that there are points when the social relations of production become incompatible or contradictory with the forces of production, retarding growth and human development until the old social relations of production are replaced by new ones. This is what happened to feudalism when it was superseded by the awesome productive power of capitalism and this is what will eventually happen to capitalism when workers gain class consciousness and emancipate themselves from capitalism. Capitalism, according to Marx, is “…the last antagonistic form of social process of production”–he had this hope, because he saw through capitalism the development of “…productive forces [that] create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism.” In other words, capitalism is unjust, but necessary, because it develops productive forces to a point where socialism becomes possible.

But what is capitalism? Why is it inherently exploitative and why does it offer humanity a way out into a Shangri-La of cooperation and solidarity? According to Marx, throughout history social relations of production have been the site of class struggle:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freedman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Capitalism continues this legacy of antagonistic class relations as it is a system characterized by the dependency of the worker on the capitalist via the mechanism of wage labor. Although there are gradients to the mold, humanity during the epoch of capitalist development is largely separated into two groups of people. Marx describes these two contending groups as the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The proletariat, or working class, is a class of people that is unable to survive without selling its labor power–its ability to work–to the bourgeoisie, or capitalist class, the stratum of society that owns the means of production as their private property. The worker produces products by using the capitalist’s mean of production and that the bourgeois goes on to exchange these products of labor for a profit. In return the worker is given a portion of the wealth he or she creates in the form of a wage. In short, the workers create the wealth of society while the capitalists undemocratically control how that wealth is created.

Capitalism is often referred to as the “free-enterprise” system, but through an examination of the basis of this system it is clear that in certain respects capitalism is not so far removed from feudal or slave societies. In feudal societies peasants were tied to the noble landowners (noble by deeds of conveyance and not by virtuous deeds), just like workers today are effectively tied to specific capitalism firms. And just like slaves, proletarians can eek out an existence by laboring for their master and in return getting an allowance of food and shelter. This example can even be taken even to the criminal underworld of modern society. Proletarians has nothing to sell but their own labor power, their physical body, and just as the prostitute sells her body to survive, the working class must prostrate itself day in and day out, hour upon hour, toiling for the benefit of its capitalist “pimps.” It may appear that labor has a choice to work or not, but what kind of choice is really presented–indenture yourself to a capitalist, waste the primacy of your life producing for another’s profits, or starve? There is in actuality no choice at all–all wage-labor is thus forced labor. Of course labor has the “freedom” to choose which capitalist they want to sell their labor power to, but in reality what kind of prize is this? Does granting a slave its choice of master or a prostitute its choice of procurer really help alleviate the mental and physical denigration of the exploited?

The advocate of modern bourgeois-democratic society would argue that perhaps our economic relations are less than perfect, but this only constitutes one part of our social order. But as Marxism explains, the economic base of society shapes its political and legal superstructure. The class that controls the economic sector will have a disproportional control over the political state and will use this control to protect that is truly important, its economic stake in society. The power goes even further, as the controllers of the economic sphere also consciously or unconsciously protect the status quo through the propagation of bourgeois ideology. The mass media along with elements of the education system and organized religion serve as agents of control that foster social integration. Social integration enables bourgeois society to ameliorate or completely remove open conflicts on the basis of class, gender, or ethnic grounds, promoting hegemonic rule. Through the mass corporate media the capitalist class can more easily project its class-perspective on the world to the masses who will accept its perspectives as “common sense.” Proof at how effective not only this ideological hegemony can be seen by the fact that modern American newspapers have a “Business” section but not a “Labor” section. It seems commonsense to the majority of Americans that what is good for business is invariably good for them. Some wage-laborers even possess shares in companies that they don’t even work for, so they are indirectly profiting off the extraction of surplus labor value from their fellow workers.

Yet after a century of socialists decrying it and working towards its downfall, capitalism has proven both dynamic and persuasive enough to keep itself alive and to persuade the working class that it is the only feasible economic system. Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci proposed fighting this ideological hegemony by erecting a counter-hegemonic project to disseminate working-class values like cooperation and solidarity, ideas that could make socialism commonsense and capitalism seem nonsensical.

That said, we would be remiss in suggesting that the capitalism is purely an instrument of evil; compared to previous modes of production it is actually quite progressive! Marx, in brilliant prose, explains the great productive power of capitalism has reshaped the world unimaginably (and he was writing in 1848!):

Constant revolutionizing of productions, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions. Everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, as swept away, all new-form ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.

Market competition and labor exploitation all in the name of pursuing greater and greater profits have had unintended side effects. Populations are urbanized; former titles of nobility are cast away; a global market is developed in which racism and old prejudices are impediments to profit maximization; local and regional markets are enveloped; religions and old beliefs are torn asunder. Only one thing remains–the economic imperative of dominating market share. The downside of this development is that is it based intrinsically on exploitation and inequality, so capitalism can only take humanity only so far. As Marshall Berman puts it, “The irony of bourgeois activism, as Marx sees it, is that the bourgeoisie is forced to close itself off from its richest possibilities, possibilities that can be realized only by those who break its power.”

Capitalists are only concerned about their profits; any benefits of capitalist development are merely unintended after-effects. So even in the most advanced capitalist nations–like the United States–gross examples of human deprivation exist (and are largely ignored). In the U.S. over three million people are homeless, forty million people experience hunger regularly and fifty million are without health insurance. Why don’t we build more houses for the three million plus homeless Americans? We certainly have enough raw materials and enough unemployed persons to do the labor, but there simply is not enough of a profitable incentive. On the other hand there is pressure from the owners of capital to limit housing programs, to keep housing prices high, and even to abolish safeguards like rent controls and stabilization.

Fortunately for humanity, capitalist development however creates a new type of laborer, and the key to the next epoch of historical development, the (urban) proletariat. A social-being used to working in close-proximity with his/her fellow laborers that has the power to erect agencies like unions and political parties promulgating the interest of labor and contesting the primacy of capital. Once workers realize the “real conditions of life and [their] relations with [their] kind,” and cast aside their chains, reclaiming the surplus labor stolen from them and moving to revolutionize production once again, this time producing democratically to meet their common needs, society is advanced towards the classless society: communism.

However, as Marxism as a movement and theory drifted into economic determinism, it ignored a key aspect of the Marxian worldview: a respect for the soul and the vitality of the exploited proletariat. Capitalism regards labor as a mere tool used for the extraction of surplus labor and the reproduction of more labor, just as “orthodox” Marxism–divorced from Marx’s intended humanism and epicureanism–came to regard labor as a mere tool for the revolutionary reconstitution of society. I will discuss this in the next section.

i. An Introduction

Winston Churchill’s famous diatribe, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries,” is firmly entrenched in the psyche of the modern western worker. Certainly the attempts at the revolutionary reconstitution of society in the 20th century seemed to prove Churchill right. Yet there was a time when socialism seemed not only as a pragmatic program for human governance, but an inevitable one. Struggles for national liberation from colonialism and the triumph of Lenin’s Bolsheviks and Mao’s Red Army seemed to herald the revolution that Marx portended a century earlier. In a burst of rhetorical splendor, Marx, near the conclusion of the first volume of his epic Das Kapital, asserts that the self-evident contradictions of the bourgeois capitalist system would sweep it into the trash heap of history and bring about its replacement by a new epoch, that of the classless socialist society. Marx promulgates that “the centralization of production and the socialization of labor reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist husk. The husk is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.”

In the early stages of the 21st century it appears that it is socialism, not capitalism, that has been thrown into the dustbin of history; the expropriators, it would seem, have managed to impart to the working-class more wealth, more freedom and more prosperity than societies based upon economic collectivism. As such, most commentators on both the left and the right wings of the political spectrum saw the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union and the subsequent capitalist counterrevolution as the death-knell of socialism. In his 2000 article “Renewals,” Perry Anderson, a major figure in the 1960s New Left and editor of the New Left Review echoed this belief that capitalism had been triumphant:

For the first time since the Reformation, there are no longer any significant oppositions–that is, systematic rival outlooks–within the thought-world of the West; and scarcely any on the world stage either … Whatever limitations persist to its practice, neo-liberalism as a set of principles rules undivided across the globe: the most successful ideology in world history.”

Anderson continues his virtual eulogy for Marxism, the same movement that had so potently captured the imaginations of multitudes and terrified the ruling class decades earlier, proclaiming ominously that “Little short of a slump of inter-war proportions looks capable of shaking the parameters of the current consensus.” Some commentators were even more blunt in their appraisal of the future for socialism. In his 1990 work Reflections on Revolution in Europe, Ralph Dahrendorf proclaims that, “The point has to be made that socialism is dead, and that none of its variants can be revived from a world recovering from the double nightmares of Stalinism and Brezhnevism.”

The problem with these arguments is that they equate the Eastern Bloc and the ideologies that dominated it, namely Stalinism and Brezhnevism, with socialism, and thus the fall of these bureaucratic police-states with the demise of socialism. Yet the cynic would argue that whether or not these states were indeed socialist in nature or not is not of much significance since the modern working-class’s vision of socialism is inexorably linked to these so-called workers’ states. Hence, in order to exorcise the “specter of communism” from the phantom that was Soviet “socialism” it will take a deeper analysis into Marx’s philosophical writings and a commitment to abandoning large chunks of so-called “Marxist-Leninist” theory in order to resolve socialism’s “crisis of theory” and successfully promote a new form of society to save humanity from both the unsustainable excesses, inequalities and institutionalized exploitation of capitalism and the dystopia of bureaucratic collectivist states.

To quote an old Soviet-era joke murmured in the streets of Eastern Bloc capitals, “What is the difference between capitalism and communism? Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Communism is the opposite.” This essay will examine the nature of 20th century state -socialism, its shortcomings, and its effect on the workers that it claimed empower. This examination of early attempts at socialism will be contrasted by the writings of Karl Marx, particularly his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in addition to more contemporary Marxist thought. TIt will address deficiencies in democracy in both modern liberal, bourgeois democracy and in Soviet-style bureaucratic collectivist states based upon Marx’s writings on the alienation of labor, the nature of capital, and epicurean thought. It will attempt show that through a society based upon solidarity and equality individuality would not be achieved “automatically,” but would rather be won.

John Reed, American socialist, journalist and author of the acclaimed account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World, is alleged to have said upon his first visit to the Soviet Union that he had “seen the future and the future is bright.” Yet as we embark on yet another millennium of human development the future seems to be devoid of not only the Soviet Union, but its self-proclaimed goal, socialism. For all its success in building strong and universal institutions of education, health and science, Eastern Bloc rule was punctuated by state-terror and the growth of a bureaucratic clique, the Communist Party, that merely replaced the capitalist class’s position atop society. Hal Draper once wrote, in The Two Souls of Socialism, that

These two self-styled socialisms [social democracy and bureaucratic collectivism] are very different, but they have more in common than they think. The social democracy has typically dreamed of “socializing” capitalism from above. Its principle has always been that increased state intervention in society and economy is per se socialistic. It bears a fatal family resemblance to the Stalinist conception of imposing something called socialism from the top down, and of equating statification with socialism.

Yet this sort of statification was never the intention of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. The party was merely meant to facilitate the seizure of the state by the working-class and the new state was merely meant as a device to suppress the old injust order and to help bring about a new era of historic development, one based not upon competition and exploitation, but rather upon solidarity and collective prosperity. In his important thesis State and Revolution, written just months before his Bolshevik Party seized power, Lenin expresses his view that the dictatorship of the proletariat should be a combination of the expansion of democracy for the working class and the suppression of the power of the dethroned capitalist class:

But from this capitalist democracy–that is inevitably narrow and stealthily pushes aside the poor, and is therefore hypocritical and false through and through–forward development does not proceed simply, directly and smoothly, towards “greater and greater democracy”, as the liberal professors and petty-bourgeois opportunists would have us believe. No, forward development, i.e., development towards communism, proceeds through the dictatorship of the proletariat, and cannot do otherwise, for the resistance of the capitalist exploiters cannot be broken by anyone else or in any other way.

And the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy. Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists. We must suppress them in order to free humanity from wage slavery, their resistance must be crushed by force.

Yet when Lenin come to power what became of the extension of democracy from merely the political into the economic sectors of life? Why did after a mere few years the power of the state trump the power of the soviets (workers’ councils) within the so-called Soviet Union?

The fact that even under the tutelage of Lenin the young Soviet republic was exhibiting characteristics of a typical dictatorship was not lost upon Lenin’s revolutionary contemporaries such as the esteemed Polish-born German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg. Luxemburg asserts that the creation of socialism must be the action of the whole working class and that it must not result in either in a faux democracy ripe with inequalities and exploitation, like that of capitalist states, or an autocratic collectivist state, but rather a true, participatory democracy:

Socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of socialist economy are created; it does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators. Socialist democracy begins simultaneously with the beginnings of the destruction of class rule and of the construction of socialism. It begins at the very moment of the seizure of power by the socialist party. It is the same thing as the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Yes, dictatorship! But this dictatorship consists in the manner of applying democracy, not in its elimination, but in energetic, resolute attacks upon the well-entrenched rights and economic relationships of bourgeois society, without which a socialist transformation cannot be accomplished. But this dictatorship must be the work of the class and not of a little leading minority in the name of the class — that is, it must proceed step by step out of the active participation of the masses; it must be under their direct influence, subjected to the control of complete public activity; It must arise out of the growing political training of the mass of the people.

Yet Luxemburg is enthusiastic about the great triumph of the Russian Bolsheviks and merely wishes to express her opinion that what Trotsky and Lenin were forced to implement due to historical circumstances unique to socialist revolution in a backwards, war-ravaged and semi-feudal country should not become the norm for future socialist revolutions and post-capitalist societies:

It would be demanding something superhuman from Lenin and his comrades if we should expect of them that under such circumstances they should conjure forth the finest democracy, the most exemplary dictatorship of the proletariat and a flourishing socialist economy. By their determined revolutionary stand, their exemplary strength in action, and their unbreakable loyalty to international socialism, they have contributed whatever could possibly be contributed under such devilishly hard conditions. The danger begins only when they make a virtue of necessity and want to freeze into a complete theoretical system all the tactics forced upon them by these fatal circumstances, and want to recommend them to the international proletariat as a model of socialist tactics. (emphasis added)

Lenin to a large extent can be forgiven. There was little history of political democracy in Russia. When he was writing State and Revolution he was theorizing about the revolution that he foresaw occurring one day in Western Europe, with its history of liberal democracy and more advanced economic development. Lenin needed in backwards Russia not merely to redistribute wealth, but also to create it; thus bureaucratic collectivism was borne out of necessity. Russia also had no democracy to begin with and little experience in participatory civil society, so who can blame Lenin for prioritizing the rebounding of the war-ravaged Soviet state over following his own theoretical models for advanced socialist construction?

Tragically, Lenin died unexpectedly early during the synthesis of the Soviet state and he was replaced by men less committed to the construction of genuine socialism. The rigid system of state management and control created by Lenin in order to resist invasion by imperialist nations, end perpetual famine and stave off counter-revolution became even more abrasive and entrenched under Stalin, and also became a model for export to oppressed peoples across the world. History has shown how ominous Luxemburg’s warning was. Lenin’s successors indeed made a virtue out of necessity.

The development of “socialism” within the Soviet Union was commanded by the Communist Party, not the working class itself. The voices of workers who actual created the wealth of Soviet society were marginalized. The relationship between labor and party authority within the Soviet Union was thus more analogous to labor and capital in capitalist society than to the radical democracy that Marxists sought to achieve. The staunch Stalinist would counter that perhaps the USSR’s “socialism” wasn’t perfect, but its centralized nature provided the only way that it could survive in a largely capitalist world and assure that its citizens the bare necessities, if not perhaps the finer luxuries, of life. Had there not been capitalist counterrevolution prosperity would have arisen in the USSR through state-led economic development, and then the state would begin to whiter away and a truly communist society would arise. To quote one of Marx’s view writings on what communist society would be like:

“In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”

Yet communism could never emerge from bureaucratic collectivism, because power unchecked is rarely willing to ever relinquish power and because in such a society workers are forced to work for the state. Yes, their “surplus value” is funneled back into the collective, but how can workers dependent on the state ever learn to freely associate and cooperate with one another? If history is any example, the state will only grow rather than wither away and a classless society can never arise under the rule of a coordinating bureaucratic stratum. Years before the Russian Revolution Rosa Luxemburg wrote about the experience that workers themselves got when they took collective action, even when they failed: “Even mistakes which a truly revolutionary labour movement commits are, in historical perspective, immeasurably more fruitful and valuable than the infallibility of the very best ‘central committee’.” Imagine the lessons and experiences the Russian working class would have been able to amass over the course of seventy-plus years in a democratic workers’ state. Yet this became impossible once the Stalinist clique had grabbed control of the Communist Party.

As Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution and a leader of the international Marxist opposition to Stalin, put it:

The revolution explodes the social lie. The revolution is true. It begins by calling things and the relations between things by their proper names But the revolution itself is not an integral and harmonious process. It is full of contradictions. The revolution itself produces a new ruling stratum which seeks to consolidate its privileged position and is prone to see itself not as a transitory historical instrument, but as the completion and crowning of history.

In the view of a true revolutionary Marxist, the seizure of power by the working class and the expropriation of private property is merely the beginning of the process of socialist construction, which culminates in a communist society in which “the full development of each would be the condition for the full development of all.” This was not the case in Stalinist states, states that tried to impose “communism” upon the working class, hoping through propaganda and exhortation to force them to adapt to totalitarian statism, instead of allowing workers to build communism themselves.

Yet the Soviet era had a laundry-list of often-ignored accomplishments. Russia went from a feudal society with serfs, royalty, tsars and court healers to a society that in a few tumultuous decades managed to propel a human being into the far-flung reaches of outer space! Soviet weapons and economic support aided oppressed people across the world in their fight against imperialism and colonialism and to this day Kalashnikov rifles sound off in all corners of the world, defying authority and challenging capitalist Empire. Yet how steep was the human price of these accomplishments? The veteran German Marxist Karl Kautsky, writing about the dictatorship in Russia, claimed that

Foreign tourists in Russia stand in silent amazement before the gigantic enterprises created there, as they stand before the pyramids, for example. Only seldom does the thought occur to them what enslavement, what lowering of human self-esteem was connected with the construction of those gigantic establishments.

What Kautsky does not directly say, but is alluding to is that something was lost in these collectivist societies–the soul and spirit of the human being, the individual. The Stalinist may counter that “it takes breaking a few eggs to make an omelet.” But human beings are not eggs and socialism is not an “omelet.” What socialism is, however, is the empowerment of the working class through the full democratization of politics and the extension of democracy to the economic sphere. As Kautsky describes in Is Soviet Russia a Socialist State?, the collectivism in Soviet Russia was the empowerment of a “party of the people” over the people; instead of emancipated labor guiding itself, labor was being guided permanently by party elites:

How can a ruling caste among whom such elements dominate in increasing measure the despotism from which they sprang, while ejecting progressively the influence of decent comrades, be animated by any readiness for high self-sacrifice in the name of a great human ideal? No doubt, they speak much of sacrifice, as do many German Nazis, they demand immeasurable sacrifices of others, but never of themselves. They themselves are quite comfortable as long as the Communist Party remains in power. The Russian Communist Party which is seeking to impose this road to “future welfare” upon 170,000,000 human beings embraces some 2,000,000 members. How many among them are spies, informers, careerists?

It can be asserted that some within the Soviet Communist Party had genuinely socialist principles and did their best to make socialism an actuality, to provide for their follow man, to support oppressed peoples abroad. But for every CPSU member in this mold, how many careerists and opportunists lurked? If socialism is the result of the dictatorship of the proletariat–the empowerment of the working class and the expropriation of the capitalist class–how could the end of the Soviet Union, ruled by an unaccountable party elite, be seen as cause to mourn the passing of socialism? It cannot. As Trotsky explains:

The Soviet Union emerged from the October Revolution as a workers’ state. State ownership of the means of production, a necessary prerequisite to socialist development, opened up the possibility of rapid growth of the productive forces. But the apparatus of the workers’ state underwent a complete degeneration at the same time: it was transformed from a weapon of the working class into a weapon of bureaucratic violence against the working class and more and more a weapon for the sabotage of the country’s economy. The bureaucratization of a backward and isolated workers’ state and the transformation of the bureaucracy into an all-powerful privileged caste constitute the most convincing refutation–not only theoretically, but this time, practically–of the theory of socialism in one country.

Whatever its intended effects were, Stalin’s autarkic policy of “socialism in one country” was anti-Marxist. It was at this point that the Soviet Union devolved from a workers’ state that might have someday become a true socialist democracy to a brutal police state that can be best characterized by the term “bureaucratic collectivist”. But human lives and democracy were not the only casualties of this degeneration; the creative spirit and romantic passions that ironically precipitated the first stage of the revolution, the seizure of the power by the Bolsheviks, were surrendered as well.

Writing about the effect that Stalin had on Soviet culture and art, Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote, “Now that ten years have gone by [Stalin died in 1953], I realize that Stalin’s greatest crime was not the arrests and the shootings he ordered. His greatest crime was the corruption of the human spirit.” Russian art was transformed from revolutionary pieces of creative self-expression to “revolution-approved” Socialist Realism: fanciful state-approved renderings that depicted how life should be in a “socialist” utopia (or perhaps how self-deluded party bosses actually thought life was like in the Soviet Union). Similarly, under the rigidity of Stalinism the true spirit and vision of Karl Marx was, along with his name, was dragged through the mud and molded to justify the unjustifiable. In order to attempt to wipe the slate clean and reclaim Karl Marx and socialism in the name of humanism and epicureanism we must reexamine the true meaning of Marxist socialism.