From: dlaibman@JJAY.CUNY.EDU
Date: Fri Jan 20 2006 - 09:11:05 EST
Dear OPE comrades,
I produced this little flight of fancy as part of the "Editorial
Perspectives" section in *Science & Society*, Vol. 70, No. 1, January
2006 (just out). If not optimism of the will, at least optimisism of
the imagination. What have we got to lose??
In solidarity,
David
David Laibman, Editor, S&S
www.scienceandsociety.com
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RED BUTTERFLIES FLAP THEIR WINGS:
A PARALLEL TWENTIETH CENTURY
Those of you who are coming of age in the early 21st century
need to know your world’s recent history, so you can build upon it and
meet the new challenges facing you. Here is a thumbnail sketch.
As you of course know, the October Revolution in 1917, born of
the carnage of the Great War, ushered in a new post-capitalist era --
the defining transition of our time. Surrounded by enemies determined
to crush it and saddled with centuries-old cultural and technological
backwardness, the Soviet Union nevertheless held its ground. The
Soviet Premier, V. I. Lenin, lived until 1933, when he died at the age
of 63. In the late 1920s he formulated a comprehensive vision for
socialist construction in insufficient conditions, with two main
pillars: first, the absolute importance of harnessing the religious
feelings and consciousness of the vast majority of peasants and workers
to the socialist project, and isolating the authoritarian upper levels
of the Church hierarchy; second, placing ground-level mobilization and
a culture of critical debate and controversy at the core of socialist
development.
The first of these led to the famous Red Priests movement in
the USSR, which captured the imagination of people in many parts of the
world and led to a Christian‒Marxist dialog in Western Europe, the USA
and Latin America, as well as the massive jami’a allah wa ijtamiya
(“Society of God and Socialism”) movement in the Islamic world. The
second was embodied in many aspects of early socialist construction,
including direct election of enterprise managers, team councils in both
industry and agriculture, continuous referenda and systems of
negotiated coordination in the political sphere, and the use of
television (first introduced in the USSR in the 1930s) for ongoing
debate and mandate formation in the preparation of annual and five-year
plans. The result was both rapid industrialization and social
transformation. While there were of course pressures from the old
authoritarian traditions ‒‒ one Georgian Party leader, J. V.
Dugashvili, tried to take control and turn the country in a
bureaucratic and repressive direction, but his bid for power was
thwarted ‒‒ the Soviet commitment to a participatory and critical
process kept socialist development dynamic and constructive. The
favorable intellectual environment and principled financial support for
research led many of the world’s scientists and intellectuals, among
them Albert Einstein, Norbert Weiner, Wassily Leontief and Marie Curie,
to emigrate to the USSR, where they formed Akademgorodok, the Siberian
Science City in Novosibirsk. This center of learning became the cradle
of major scientific advances and gave rise to the information
technology revolution of the 1940s and 1950s (about which more below).
All this, in turn, fired the imagination of working people
around the world. Although some sections of the socialist left in the
West had early misgivings and threatened to divide the working-class
movement, the most influential socialist leaders, such as Norman Thomas
in the USA, convinced their followers to pursue the socialist
commitment to individual liberty while supporting socialism in power.
The Socialist Party and the Workers (Communist) Party -- the latter
having been formed out of the Communist Labor Party and the Communist
Party of America in 1925 -- merged in 1928 to form the Peoples
Communist Party USA, an organization that became a mass movement and
embraced a diversity of socialist positions, from A. J. Muste and W. A.
Domingo to William Z. Foster, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and James P.
Cannon. Similar formations appeared in Western Europe and in the
southern hemisphere.
In October 1929 the stock markets of the advanced capitalist
countries crashed, ushering in what came to be called the Great
Depression. The massive chaos and suffering caused by this general
capitalist crisis of overproduction brought working-class forces into
power in several countries, and close to power in the major capitalist
centers. Fascist movements, which demagogically turned people’s anger
and fear against ethnic and religious minorities and inflamed national
passions, had taken power in Italy and in some central European
countries. When Adolph Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, he
encountered widespread opposition. Anti-Semitic atrocities, especially
the Krystalnacht rampage of the Nazi stormtroopers, forced the Nazis to
call an election in 1938. A Social Democratic‒Communist coalition
contested the election, and supported by massive street demonstrations
won power and forced the Nazis to retreat ‒‒ although not without
ushering in a period of violent rebellion, the German Civil War.
In the United States and Western Europe, the depression
triggered powerful political forces pressing for major relief and
reform. In the USA, this took shape as President Franklin Roosevelt’s
New Deal. Forced to retreat, the capitalist ruling classes sought
refuge in the only form of state intervention ultimately acceptable to
them: military spending. Seeking to demonize the Soviet Union for this
purpose, they unleashed a massive disinformation drive, but popular
support for the USSR stood in the way, and the people’s movement pushed
the New Deal forward, toward a point of qualitative transformation.
Similar developments occurred throughout Europe. In Spain, a
Republican electoral victory in 1936 spurred a fascist backlash and
civil war; however, with German and Italian fascism in crisis and about
to be deposed, external military support for Generalissimo Franco was
limited, and the Spanish Republicans, with the aid of international
volunteers from many countries, were able to prevail. Dolores
Ibarruri, “Las Pasionaria,” was elected President of the Spanish
Peoples Republic in 1939.
In 1940, the Baltic States ‒‒ Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia ‒‒
together with Finland and Sweden, voted to join the USSR. There was,
however, strong internal opposition in these countries, based mainly on
historically rooted national and cultural identities. In what
subsequently came to be seen as a watershed display of socialist
principle, the Soviet government rejected the application, and instead
urged the countries involved to form their own federation. Thus the
Alliance of Northern European Socialist Republics (ANESR) was born. In
the meantime, a low-intensity Civil War had been raging in China for
several years. Without significant Western support, the Chinese
Nationalists, under Chiang Kai-Shek, held their ground until 1941, when
the Communists took power. The federal principle increasingly took
shape worldwide, and within a few years developments elsewhere in Asia
brought about the South East Asian Socialist Alliance, consisting of
Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Phillippines.
SEASA, ANESR, USSR and People’s China held prolonged talks, and agreed
to form a global international agency, which came to be called the
United Nations (UN). To emphasize the intent to make this a truly
worldwide deliberative body, the founding convention was held in San
Francisco in 1945, over the opposition of powerful ruling class forces
in the United States but with the nominal support of the U. S.
government and true enthusiastic support from labor and community-based
popular movements there.
In the United States, capitalism, buttressed by similar forces
retreating and regrouping from Europe and Asia, held onto power, but
not without granting major concessions in the form of New Deal‒type
programs. The battle for the actual social content of these programs
defined the political process at mid-century. The various agencies of
the New Deal were progressively merged into two umbrella organizations ‒
‒ the Agency for Social Production (ASP) and the Industrial Recovery
Administration (IRA). These eventually merged into the (conveniently
acronymed) ASP-IRA. The drive for vertical trade union organization
crystallized into the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which came
to recognize the need to incorporate community and neighborhood forms
of working-class organization as well, thus becoming the Congress of
Workers’ Organizations (CWO). The old American Federation of Labor
withered and eventually disappeared, holding its last convention in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1949.
The embattled capitalist classes sought breathing space by
uniting with every manner of precapitalist oligarchy and despotism, in
all countries. Their base in the United States was in the south, where
racism and segregation kept an elite in power with historical links to
slavery. Under pressure from a region-wide anti-racist popular front,
led by Benjamin Davis, William Patterson and (later) Dr. Martin Luther
King, the worldwide reactionary “southern strategy” took form, as
capitalist elites formed alliances with landowners, latifundists,
oligarchs and dictators in South America, parts of Africa and Asia --
what came to be called the Second World. In the second half of the
20th century, the capitalist‒agrarian axis was able to find material
bases in some strata within the Second World, and from there to launch
a series of wars and conflicts, with the United Nations trying to
contain aggression and lend support to popular resistance. A
particular focus has been on the Islamic countries, especially in the
Middle East and Central Asia, where the dangers of “Second Worldism”
and reversion to precapitalist fanaticism and terror have loomed
large. These struggles continue today.
The South African Communist Party became a major force in the
African National Congress, which by 1952 was able to overcome the
apartheid regime, unify a number of countries under the banner of the
Southern African Peoples Union (SAPU). Nelson Mandela, a charismatic
young leader who had been imprisoned briefly by the apartheid regime,
was freed by popular pressure and became the first President of the new
Southern African Peoples Republic (SAPR). He was installed in an
inspiring ceremony that was televised worldwide; this was held in
Johannesburg in July 1963, with the father of the Pan-African Movement,
Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, on the platform with him, just weeks before Du
Bois’ death at age 95.
The most recent breakaway from Second World domination has been
the formation of the United States of Central America, a union of
Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, the Chiapas region of Mexico, and
Cuba. The latter country had a popular revolution and socialist
transition beginning in 1959, and the Second World axis had long sought
to strangle that revolution, but without success.
So today, the sphere of cooperation among socialist countries
and federations is slowly growing, amid considerable debate about the
proper balance between coordination and autonomy, between common social
goals and the enormous diversity of conditions, including those
involving earlier forms of property, income distribution, and so on.
As the new millennium commences, the process is advancing, although not
without major resistance and sabotage from the Second World powers.
Some of these powers have threatened to get ahold of thermonuclear
technology to deploy a massive bomb -- a weapon of mass destruction --
but so far, with the vigilance of the peoples of the United Nations and
socialist federations, this threat has not been realized.
One key goal at present is to maintain the base for massive
popular support for the Socialist Federations/UN. This requires firm
and increasing confidence that the material living standards of the
most advanced socialist countries can be achieved throughout the world
by a leveling-up process, within the constraints imposed by planetary
resources. This is by no means certain, but there are two factors that
permit us a cautious optimism. First, industrial development in the
progressive countries (the “First World”) has increased the scope of
the Demographic Transition ‒‒ the falloff of population growth as
people come to believe in and share the socio-political contract
guaranteeing medical, survivor and general retirement support
throughout an individual’s lifetime. While population pressure
continues, mainly in the Second World, with continued social progress
scientists now project that world population will stabilize at six
billion around the year 2015.
Second, the information technology revolution, centered at
Akademgorodok but subsequently spread around the world, continues to
open up new vistas for democratic planning and coordination. The
conflict between local autonomy and macro stability will never
disappear, but it is increasingly possible to use Internets and
Intranets to coordinate diverse production and creative activities,
without bottlenecks, cycles, waste, polarization, bureaucratism, and
the other evils long associated with either spontaneous capitalist
market coordination, or authoritarian planning from the center. The
new culture of participatory socialism was the subject of a major
symposium in one of the world’s leading theoretical journals, Science &
Society; this was called “Horizons of Democratic Mathematics,” and
appeared as the journal’s 75th anniversary issue (Vol. 75, No. 1,
January 2010; press run 200,000 copies).
So while capitalist power and exploitation have not yet been
uprooted everywhere in the world, there is good reason to hope that
this final dispensation will occur in the not-too-distant future. Your
generation, then, will be able to take major new steps in pursuit of a
principled, egalitarian and democratic society that promotes unlimited
human development, both material and spiritual, within the natural
resource constraints of Planet Earth.
****
Hey, we are entitled to dream, aren’t we?
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