The Nation: A Post-Capitalist Future is Possible

A Post-Capitalist Future is Possible

By Doug Henwood
March 13, 2009


Socialism's all the rage. "We Are All Socialists Now," Newsweek declares. As the right wing tells it, we're already living in the U.S.S.A. But what do self-identified socialists (and their progressive friends) have to say about the global economic crisis? In the March 4, 2009, issue, we published Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher Jr.'s "Rising to the Occasion" as the opening essay in a forum on "Reimagining Socialism." TheNation.com will feature new replies to their essay over the coming weeks, fostering what we hope will be a spirited dialogue.


It's great to see The Nation trying to rehabilitate socialism. It's too bad that it takes a massive financial and economic crisis to prompt the forum, though. There's a tendency on the radical left to look to crisis to do a lot of the political heavy lifting. Sure, people may be more likely to consider systemic overhauls when the system isn't working very well. But that's not a certainty. Fear can also make people hunker down. The economic troubles of the 1970s benefited the right more than the left.

Socialism needs more than foul-weather friends. Most of the time, the system works more or less well by its own standards. GDP grows, people go to work every day and make money for the boss, and no one really rocks the political boat. Yet many features of capitalism's "working well" are fairly appalling. In the United States, one in eight are poor, by a very undemanding official definition. Downsizing and a million personal bankruptcies a year came to be the new normal. Globally, a billion get by on a dollar a day or less. Whole regions of cities, nations, continents are written off as hopeless. We've come to live with a daily sense of impending environmental catastrophe. And that was in the good years.

Now, we see capitalism's gravediggers eagerly hoping the thing will kill itself and allow us to perform the burial. That could always happen, but it probably won't. The system has faced massive crises before and recovered. It emerged from fifteen years of Great Depression and world war to embark on its greatest run, the golden age of the 1950s and 1960s.

I also want to dissent from another prescription: Rebecca Solnit's contention that the revolution is already happening, via "gardens and childcare co-ops and bicycle lanes and farmers' markets and countless ways of doing things differently and better." While many of these things are very nice, they're well short of a transformative vision. The package draws heavily on an ancient American fantasy of self-reliance and back-to-the land escapism. It's no model for running a complex industrial society. Such a system couldn't make computers or locomotives, and it probably couldn't feed 6 billion earthlings either. Maybe Solnit wants to give all that up. If so, she should tell us. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090330/henwood?rel=hp_currently