IS SOCIALISM STILL A N A LT E R N AT I V E ? John S.

Saul1

[ What Ive written above] sounds to me like a call, to return to [seeking]

for a socialist alternative to the commanding global hegemony of capitalism. So I conclude a central section of my new book Revolutionary Traveller: Freeze-Frames from a Life.2 Yet the need to follow such a course is more easily asserted than provennot least, on one hand, in light of the notorious failures of various attempted socialisms throughout the last century, and, on the other, the apparent vitality, despite its current crisis, of global capitalisms stranglehold on the poorest of the worlds poor. What can we say in defense of a socialist project, especially for the global South? I will begin, in the first section, by interrogating two recent attempts to refuse (or ignore) a socialist possibility, and then, in a second section, look more closely at some of the claims that might continue to be made, with a straight face, on socialisms behalf, especially with reference to Africa, the region of my own most intensive focus. Gabriel Kolko and John Gray, for Example Gabriel Kolko Even as I read the page proofs for Revolutionary Traveller, another new book came across my desk that made me pause. It is written by Gabriel Kolko, a respected Lefty (and former colleague at York University). Kolko has written many effective anti-imperialist books of course, yet the title for this new one, After Socialism, is presented in the introduction as a kind of exemplary coda to his vast corpus.3 What is going on here? Make no mistake: Kolko and I seem to be in agreement as to the extreme costs of capitalist hegemony. As he phrases it, capitalism is an irrational and humanly and physically destructive basis for organizing societies, much
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less international affairs. The statistical and human indices of this failure of capitalism are legion and well summarized, particularly for the Third World, in his sixth chapter Capitalist Realities: The Way the World Lives. In sum, under capitalism, greed and stupidity...erode the integrative functions of the ruling system and those who guide it: capitalism and war thus move through recent history in lockstep. Moreover, as Kolko concludes:
The status quo has far more freedom to make errors than it did when a large self confident Left existed. But as the upheavals after 1917 showed there are indefinable but decisive limits to the blunders existing elites can make. It is this endemic incapacity to get things right that must be addressed, and while the Lefts historic failure makes the task much more difficult, those who still wish to save our civilization from committing more follies must embark in new directions if mankind is to escape the destructive fate which awaits it if its rulers continue to base their politics on the primacy of individual profit, war, and the maintenance of those social and economic conditions which make superstition and irrationality flourish...In the most general and strategic sense, the only defenseif there be anyagainst illusions and failure is constant, critical thinking.4

Critical thinking? We shall see about this below. Here, I hasten to note that I would also not quarrel with much of Kolkos accompanying extended critique of socialism (and of the Lefts historic failure) as it has actually existed, both in its Leninist and social-democratic forms. Perhaps, however, I would not go so far as to condemn the socialist impulse in almost any of its previous forms, as he seems inclined to do. In particular, I disagree with Kolkos attack on Marx and Marxism, the latter presented by Kolko as being the crudest and most half-witted of reductionisms. This bears almost no relationship to what I understand that analytical framework to represent as an essential foundation stone for progressive theory and practice (and their essential unity). But I have argued this case regarding such theory and practice extensively elsewhere, and here will repeat only a crucial formulation of Gavin Kitchings as a kind of antidote to Kolkos writing in this particular vein:
Marx simply was not an economic reductionist. He did not believe that all forms of politics, or culture, or social conflict were simply expressions of
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underlying economic or class interests, and it would be extremely difficult to find any evidence in his writing that he did...Marx was often concerned with those aspects of politics, or culture, or social conflict that had class or economic dimensions. But he certainly would not have thought that, for example, all classical Greek culture (which he loved) or all of the politics of the French Second Empire (by which he was fascinated) could be explained by or reduced to economic or class factors.5

No, for this and other reasons, I would argue simply that Marxs theories still provide by far the best entry-point for social analysis, whatever additional issues (and there are certainly many) also remain to be thought through.6 But socialism as practice? No doubt Marx had fewer answers, and fewer good questions too, on this topic than he had when identifying how capitalism actually functions (and continues to function). Still, once again, the essential entry pointresistance from below by those exploited by this cruel systemis sound (although not, in this case, unique to Marx), even if who and what such resistance might have to encompass is also problematic in important ways. Granted, too, that both Leninists and Social Democrats made a hash of things historically, and granted, finally, that it is far easier to define socialism in (future) practice than it is to realize it. Yet, surely it must involve, as a foundation stone, genuine collective control over the production process, with such social control to be democratically articulated (rather than, as has come to be the case, seeing most apparent attempts at democratic control of the production process largely negated by the preeminence of various privileged class interests, whether these be of political/bureaucratic- or private-sector provenance). Without such control, the power of capital, and of the capitalist class, cannot be stayed. At one level, the socialist project is as simple as that: democratic and collective control over the production process. This is not a goal to be dismissed glibly; no more so, of course, than the goal of democracy itself a concept with which Kolko apparently has less trouble as an essential aspiration. And yet, where have we seen forms of democracy in place without fairly direct control over outcomes being asserted through the exercise of class power? Hasnt any very meaningful democracy been as
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elusive as socialism thus far in human history? But this doesnt mean that we should abandon iteither the word or the practiceas an aspiration. Instead, in my opinion, we must work to make both democracy and socialism real. But what does Kolko offer as his alternativean alternative, in short, to global capitalism and to the wasting wars we have known in recent centuriesthat might be worth striving and struggling for? Unfortunately, any argument he may make is swamped by his ferocious attack upon Marxism; there remains almost nothing in his text to suggest how a capitalist productive system might be transformed to negate the rule of capital and the bourgeoisiea rule that has become, in his own eloquent description, hegemonically destructive, yet commonsensically predominant, both nationally and globally. In sum, for all the strength of his critique of both capitalist reality and prior socialist practice, his positive programme tends to boil down to an oft-reiterated invocation of justice and rationality as the keys to our very survival. No doubt these keys are indeed self-evident and entirely praiseworthy (I, for one, would be loathe to speak out against them), but what can they possibly mean in practice? How might we begin, rationally, to tame and transform such a rancid system of production (let alone all the other evils attendant upon it) without the assertion of collective and democratic control over the production process? Surely we need a clear and concrete programme for an ongoing attempt to replace capitalist and bureaucratic greed and its attendant arrogance of power and wealth with humane, willed purpose. We need, in short, a better system. Will this come about after socialism (to evoke Kolkos title)? I doubt it; better put: socialism or barbarism. Rosa Luxemburg was right the first time, and we have work to do. John Gray Perhaps there is not as much work as we might have feared. The sweeping economic crisis since late 2008 certainly has given some hope to those who do not wish capitalism wellfor good and concrete reasons, reasons fully apparent in so much of the Global South. There is no room here for elaborate analysis of this crisis, still unclear in its fall-out. Nonetheless, to take an example from my morning newspaper, it is
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comforting to note that the op-ed page of a recent Globe and Mail included an article by British professor and writer John Gray, subtitled The [Present] Financial Crisis has seen an Entire Model of Government and the Economy Collapse. Consider the opening paragraph of this article: Our gaze might be on the markets melting down, but the upheaval we are experiencing is more than a financial crisis, however large. Here is a historic geopolitical shift in which the balance of power is being altered irrevocably. The era of U.S. global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over.7 Gray then states:
The irony of the post Cold-War period is that the fall of communism was followed by the rise of another utopian ideology. In the United States and Britain, and to a lesser extent in other Western countries, a type of market fundamentalism became the guiding philosophy. The collapse of U.S. power that is underway is the predictable upshot. Like the Soviet collapse, it will have large geopolitical repercussions. An enfeebled economy cannot support the United States overextended military commitments for much longer. Retrenchment is inevitable and it is unlikely to be gradual or well-planned. [For] meltdowns on the scale we are seeing are not slow-motion events. They are swift and chaotic, with rapidly spreading side effects.

Nonetheless, to again quote Gray, this is far from being the end of capitalism. The frantic scrambling that is going on in Washington marks the passing of only one type of capitalism the peculiar and highly unstable variety that has existed in the United States over the past 20 years. This experiment in financial laissez-faire has imploded. In Grays view, while the collapse will be felt everywhere, the market economies that resisted U.S. style deregulation will best weather the storm. For, in the present circumstances, an unprecedented expansion of the government is the only means of averting a market catastrophe. Perhaps more is at stake than Gray deigns to admit, for it is capitalism itself, not merely the feckless free-market capitalism that we have been enduring in recent years, which may have been placed in question. At least, that possibility exists more forcefully than has been true for some time: the possibility to make a noncapitalist, even socialist, outcome feasible and to do so on a global scale. After all, even Newsweek can banner its 16 February
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2009 issue with the cover headline We Are All Socialists Now. I kid you not! Of course the magazine inserts a subtitle immediately below that startling headline: The Perils and Promise of the New Era of Big Government. So thats it: Big Capital vs. Big Government. Nothing, not surprisingly, about genuine democracy, the systematic empowering from below of the people themselves. That kind of democracy, that kind of socialism, remains pretty much unthinkable in many circles, Im afraid. Moreover, as Gray attests, there is also space for some kind of capitalist recovery, and space, too, for many even less savoury outcomes (a faint odour of resurgent fascism, for example) to emerge from the current, and continuing, situation of chaos. Much will depend on the ability of the Leftbattered and bruised though it may beto seize the day and occupy the spaces of opportunity. Yes indeed, we have work to doin the spheres of both our analysis and our practice. Of course we need a richer, more open (both deeply gender-sensitive and environmentally aware, for starters8), more essentially democratic, socialist-cum-Marxist praxis in order to do so. But if capitalism is indeed the enemy of human hope and promise, socialismexemplifying popular initiatives to seize control of the production processwill have to be a big part of the solution to its depredations. The Struggle (for Socialism) Continues? What, then, can be said more concretely about any such struggle for socialismone that can claim, pace Kolko, to be both meaningful and important? My own chief sphere of interest and active engagement has been Africa (especially southern Africa), a continent comprised of national sites very different from those of Canada and other bastions of the G8 and the Global North (and East). Of course, national sites throughout the worldNorth, South, East, and Westare subject to the pressures of globalization (read, more concretely, the pressures of the global capitalist production/marketplace and the workings of what I have termed elsewhere to be the Empire of Capital9), although in markedly different ways. For example, I myself am perfectly confident, for reasons alluded to earlier, that some form of socialism (alongside the fruits of other attendant struggles: for greater racial and gender equality, for more firmly democratic political practices, and for a deeper concern for the environ172

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ment, for example) is necessary to restore the social health of the currently overweeningly dominant (Northern and Eastern) locations in the world. How much more important to the Global South, so deeply scarred by capitalism and imperialism, is the kind of healing that only the realization of social justice and self consciously collective activity can promise? I will concentrate on Africa, the continent I know best, in what follows, although I trust that the implications will be seen to be more generally relevant. There are, of course, those on the Left who argue that such is the economic strength, selfishness, and deeply engrained ruthlessness of the Global North and East that the future of the Global Southincluding the very availability of room within which it can begin to breathe socially and economicallycan occur only if progressive changes occur first in the present centres of the global economy, thereby lifting the weight of Northern economic and military power from off the backs of their Southern counterparts. Just the other day, for example, a letter came from a friend, a comrade of vast African experience, replying, in private correspondence (and hence unnamed here), to my cry for help in the framing of a related argument in a text of mine:
I am no clearer than you say you are about how to move forward. I dont see how the South can ever liberate itself in the absence of a new socialist project becoming powerful in the North and I dont see that happening until people are hurting and see no prospect of meeting their personal needs under globalized neoliberalism, and until a new left movement with a serious attitude to organization and democracy (to both, that is) emerges to displace the social democratic collaborators with capital. And the trouble with that is that the right are more effective in the present situation, having resources, including the states security apparatus, that the left will not have without a dramatic revival of militant trade unionism and a new left party. The rapidly deteriorating environmental situation will aggravate the problem, not help. All of which means that very much against my will and my nature I feel very pessimistic.10

Well, yes, and no. How indeed, I ask myself, can one hope, with any degree of realism and credibility, to confront such pessimism of the intelligence (about Africa and about the world more generally) with an
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optimism of the willwhich I take to characterize my own response to the grim realities of global inequality and exploitationthat goes beyond mere romanticism to ground itself in genuine possibilities of liberation? It is true that, for socialists of the Global South, the task ahead will be a daunting one. Yet, as I have argued for some decades, it is not an impossible oneeven if, as is also true, any attempted socialist transformation in the South would be much reinforced by any serious effort to transform the North too; yet resident Southerners cannot afford to wait. Lets be clear, however, about the limited claims of the present article. Even if the South must find its own way forward (as some states in Latin America, if not many yet in Africa, have begun to do), I have neither the wish nor the wisdom to elaborate detailed directives as to how socialists in the Global South (and elsewhere) can begin to give more concrete meaning to their entirely appropriate aspirations. Let me offer a few conceptual windows, synthesizing earlier hints from my own body of writing over the years, which offer a less bleak prospect than Kolko seems to imagine to be possible along these lines. I will also give some clues as to how those engaged in socialist practice, particularly in Africa, might expect, more clearly, to think and to navigate their way forward. What is to be done, and how? I touch on three areas in responding to this challenge. They concern the questions of revolutionary agency, socialist accumulation, and revolutionary/structural reform as it also implicates the more meaningful democratization of future socialist practice. Beyond the Working Class, Towards Radical Agency Broadly Defined: Expanding the Constituency Marx had good reason to emphasize the role of the working class in divining potentially revolutionary contradictions within an emerging capitalist mode of production: they were the most exploited (at least in the technical sense in which he deployed the word) and were also brought together as a potentially self-conscious class by the very capitalist dynamic of concentration and centralization that also defined its exploitation. It is not surprising that this formulation has served as the staple of Left understanding and action since the nineteenth century.

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Of course, within that working class there are also fissures and hierarchies and divisions (along lines of race, ethnicity, and gender, to go no further afield) that impede its self consciousness and its praxisas we well know and to which we will have to return. As Leo Panitch affirms (albeit almost apologetically), To speak of strategy for labour needs some justification today...Class, we have been reminded so often, is not everything. Still, he feels moved to add immediately: But nor is class nothing.11 Fair enough, yet I sense that Marxists must make even more of a virtue than this of the necessity to think outside the box of rigid class identities, especially in analyzing the realities of the Global South. There are, indeed, other things out there that are also not nothing and they are things entirely germane to our revolutionary aspirations. For starters, our sense of class contradictions and of class belonging has to be markedly expanded, especially with respect to the Global South. For there, in societies profoundly altered but not transformed by the impact of capitalism, the roster of those exploited (and potentially available for class-based action) is far wider than narrow classist categories can hope to elucidateand this is not just to speak of all those peasants out there! Here I have foundand several times in previous writings deployed the formulation of Ken Post and Phil Wright to be particularly instructive. I quote it again here:
The working out of capitalism in parts of the periphery prepares not only the minority working class but peasants and other working people, women, youth and minorities for a socialist solution, even though the political manifestation of this may not initially take the form of a socialist movement. In the case of those who are not wage labourers (the classical class associated with that new order) capitalism has still so permeated the social relations which determine their existences, even though it may not have followed the western European pattern of freeing their labour power, that to be liberated from it is their only salvation. The objective need for socialism of these elements can be no less than that of the worker imprisoned in the factory and disciplined by the whip of unemployment. The price [of capitalism] is paid in even the most successful of the underdeveloped countries, and others additionally experience mass destitution. Finding another path has...become a desperate necessity if the alternative of continuing, if not increasing, barbarism is to be escaped.12
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This is one key, taking seriously all those struggles that Jonathan Barker has epitomized, in the title of a book he has edited, as Street-Level Politics.13 To grasp this, we must, quite simply, think outside the frame of the most conventional of Marxisms, as Post and Wright urge us to do, and look for our systemic contradictions where we can find them. Then, more imaginatively than ever before, seekin terms of clear principle and by means of compromise and assiduous political workto draw the best of such claims and assertions as arise from such contradictions into effectively counterhegemonic projects, that represent the highest common factor of their social location and that defy, collectively, the rule of capital (on this, see the subsection Democratizing the Struggle: Revolution by Structural Reform and Popular Empowerment, below). But we cannot stop at a more expansive class definition of agency. We must make a positive force in our struggle for liberation of other tensions in society that can be wedded to claims and assertions advanced in the name of class-defined redress, if we are imaginative enough to do so. As my old teacher and friend Ralph Miliband has noted, capitalisms grossly uneven development around the world has produced extremely fertile terrain for the kind of pathological deformationspredatory authoritarianisms and those demagogues and charlatans peddling their poisonous wares...of ethnic and religious exclusion and hatred that now scar the global landscape.14 As I would add, losing confidence in socialist and other humanely modern, humanly cooperative projects, people turn for social meaning to more readyto-hand identities, often with fundamentalist fervour. And yet, despite this, progressives committed to class struggle can and should continue to view such identities as contingent in their sociopolitical implications and as not being, in many cases, in contradiction with socialist purposes. We should, when possible, invite the bearers of such identitiesalongside feminists, environmentalists, antiracists, activists around issues of sexual orientation and the liketo join us within a broader community-in-the-making and within a universalizing democratic project of global, anticapitalist transformation. In fact, as Miliband continues:

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Everywhere there are common goals and aspirationsfor democratic forms where they are denied and for more democratic forms where these are no more than a screen for oligarchic rule; for the achievement of a social order in which improvements in the condition of the most deprivedoften a majority of the populationis the prime concern of governments; for the subordination of the economy to meeting social needs. In all countries, there are people, in numbers large and small, who are moved by the vision of a new social order in which democracy, egalitarianism and cooperationthe essential values of socialismwould be prevailing principles of social organization. It is in the growth of their numbers and in the success of their struggles that lies the best hope for humankind.15

But the corollary of this position is equally compelling: we on the Left had better learn to operate in our complex world of diverse faiths, races, and ethnic belongings, and to unite such belongings to our cause of class liberation, or they will continue to return to haunt usas merely divisive identifiers and claims that can, at their worst, turn rancid and dangerous to humane purpose. So, too, must gender-defined and environmentally concerned projects be ever more assertively articulated as being not reducible to, but coequal with and enlarged by, class considerations.16 In short, one of our key goals must be to define agency not only in terms of some rather abstractly defined working-class interest. That apparently simple slogancorrect, but excessively schematichas presented far too open an invitation to arrogance and high handedness (in the interest of the working class, dont you know) and to essentialist vanguards of all kinds, ever quick to assert arrogantly just what the class must and should do. Instead, we need to reach towards embrace of the range of shades of identity within and beyond strict class boundaries that can be won to revolutionary praxis. Not that tensions between diverse goals and purposes will simply disappear, of course. Yet seeking to realize such an enlarged project of class struggle also underlines the requirement of much more democratic methods of negotiation of both the means and the ends of revolutionary work than has characterized most past socialist undertakingsboth in mobilizing the forces to launch revolutionary change and to sustain the process of socialist construction in the long run.

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Grounding the Delinking Imperative: Globalization and the Socialism of Expanded Reproduction It would be nave to think that the increased globalization of the capitalist economy can be ignored by advocates of a socialist alternative. Not only is the free global market a major point of reference for efforts by global capital (including those of its enforcers, like the World Bank and the IMF) to effect its writ, by force and/or by the seduction of Southern elites. But the overbearing weight and lure of the global marketplace can also have its seductions, as a smorgasbord of sparkling goods on offer and as an apparent source of quick and relatively easy profits and of the inflow of foreign capitalalbeit capital most often pegged to the production and overseas sale of mineral and other resources, and to such limited additional production as meets the consumer needs of resident elites. How, then, to balanceon some kind of national developmental balancesheet of Left provenancecosts and benefits? How to factor in new and essential kinds of democratic control over such linkages as are being established? Only some such control can expect to make countries of the Global South the beneficiaries, rather than the victims, of global embrace. Without this, there is no intrinsic magic of the market, no equal exchange between rich and poor; there is only, with the market left unchecked, the upward redistribution of resources from poor to rich. Small wonder that Samir Amin can point a way forward only through an ever more radical decolonization of central capitalist control: in his dramatic word, an actual delinking of the economies of the Global South from the Empire of Capital that otherwise holds the South in its sway.17 For Amin, delinking is defined as the submission of external relations [to internal requirements], the opposite of the internal adjustment of the peripheries to the demands of the polarizing worldwide expansion of capital and it is seen as being the only realistic alternative [since] reform of the [present] world system is utopian. For history shows us that it is impossible to catch up within the framework of world capitalism; in fact, only a very long transition (with a self conscious choice for delinking from the world of capitalist globalization as an essential first step) beyond the present global polarization will suffice. Yet, as Amin readily admits, there is no realistic haven of autarky that one can look to, no way of avoiding some involvement in the broader market
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(as opportunity, though not, he argues, as seduction). What must occur, however, is the substitution of the present political economy of recolonization with an alternative that tilts effectively towards delinking as a notional goalinvoking an autocentric socioeconomic alternative that is at once effective, efficient and productive. What would the programme of a national strategy erected on the premise of a strong tilt towards radical delinking from the presently existent and profoundly cancerous global capitalist system look like? The answer to this question could begin to be found only in a new project of genuine socialist planning established on a national or regional scale that sought to smash, precisely, the crippling (il)logic of present market limitations upon development. This, in turn, suggests the need for a programme that (following the formulations of Clive Thomas) embodies the progressive convergence of the demand structure of the community and the needs of the population18 this being the very reverse of the market fundamentalists global orthodoxy. One could then ground a socialism of expanded reproduction one that refuses the dilemma that has heretofore undermined the promise of the many socialisms that have proven prone to falling into the Stalinist trap of violently repressing mass consumption in the name of the supposed requirements of accumulation. Far from accumulation and mass consumption being warring opposites, the premise would now be that accumulation could be driven forward precisely by finding outlets for production in meeting the growing requirements, the needs, of the mass of the population. An effective industrialization strategy would thus base its expanded reproduction on ever increasing exchanges between city and country, between industry and agriculture, with food and raw materials moving to the cities, and consumer goods and producer goods (with the latter defined to include centrally such modest items as scythes, iron ploughs, hoes, axes, fertilizers, and the like) moving to the countryside. Collective saving geared to investment could then be drawn essentially, if not exclusively, from an expanding economic pool. Note that such a socialism of expanded reproduction makes the betterment of the peoples lot a short-term rather than long-term project and thus promises a sounder basis for an effective (rather than merely rhetorical) alliance of workers, peasants, and others, and for a democratic road to revolutionary socialism.
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It is important to note that this emphasis is not intended to underemphasize the potential importance of South-South relations, or of those linkages, as foreshadowed in the World Social Forum, that seek, multinationally, to sponsor a redefinition of the workings of the global economy. Nor, on another level, is it a call for the extirpation, within the national economy, of any and all market relationsdangerous though these undoubtedly can be in terms of the possible generation of class differentiation that they imply. For if the predominant importance of the kind of planning (democratic and needs-focused) that we have suggested is maintained, thereby ensuring that the centre of gravity of the economy remains egalitarian, collectively premised and popularly centred, it can more than counterbalance the costs of any judicious deployment of the market, while also avoiding the risk of overburdening public enterprise and the planning mechanism unduly. Yet a self-consciousness about societal transition away from market power and entrepreneurial class interest is obviously crucial. Quite simply, the bourgeoisie, foreign or domestic, plays no role that could justify any long-run claim to have inordinate wealth or superordinate power. Democratizing the Struggle: Revolution by Structural Reform and Popular Empowerment One final term that we need to interrogate here is the word revolution itself. It is a tempting word because we know just how big and aggressive is the capitalist enemy that must be overcome in order to realize anything even proximate to a socialist alternative. But perhaps, despite this, it is just a bit too tempting, and somewhat too romantic, a notion. What we have seen so far suggests that the socialist revolution will not spring easily from some sudden social paroxysm nor be consolidated quickly or well, even (or perhaps especially) under the leadership of some unusually beneficent and wise vanguard. It is in rethinking along such linesparticularly about southern Africa, but also more broadlythat Ive been drawn, over the years, to writing about structural reform by such authors as Andr Gorz and Boris Kagarlitsky.19 The point of their argument is relevant to both the phase of building a successful movement of revolutionary intent and to building socialism itself once such a movement is in power. Right from the outset,
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Gorz makes a key distinction between a genuinely socialist policy of reforms on the one hand [and] reformism of a neo-capitalist or social-democratic type on the other. He writes that If [most often] immediate socialism is not possible, neither is the achievement of reforms directly destructive of capitalism. [Yet] those who reject all lesser reforms on the grounds that they are merely reformist are in fact rejecting the whole possibility of a transitional strategy and of a process of transition to socialism. What, within such a transition, will distinguish structural reform from mere reformism? There are two chief attributes of such reform. One lies in the insistence that any reform, to be structural, must not be comfortably self-contained (a mere improvement), but must, instead, be allowed selfconsciously to implicate other necessary reforms that flow from it as part of an emerging and ongoing project of structural transformation in a coherently Left-ward direction. Secondly, a structural reform cannot come from on high: it must root itself in popular initiatives in such a way as to leave a residue of further empowermentin terms of growing enlightenment/self consciousness and in terms of organizational capacityfor the vast mass of the population who thus strengthen themselves for further struggles, further victories. The emancipation of the working class [and its allies] can become a total objective only if in the course of the struggle they have learned something about self management, initiative and collective decisionin a word, if they have had a foretaste of what emancipation means.20 My initial proposal (presented some years ago in New Left Review (NLR), but still apposite I feel) of this approach to transformative/revolutionary/ socialist endeavour elicited some favourable response, but also sharp criticism from the likes of Alex Callinicos (a noted big bang theorist of socialist revolution) in a subsequent issue of NLR.21 The latter chose to see my advocacy of structural reform as being put forward as, yes, a detour on, rather than an abandonment of, the road to revolution but representing, nonetheless, a serious mistake on my part. And yet, my claim was actually even bolder than Callinicos suggests and I would stand by it as an appropriate amendment to much conventional Left language. Quite specifically, I argued that there is very good reason to insist that a strategy of structural reforms not be seen, at best, as some mere detour,
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but, rather, under most conceivable circumstances, as the very essence of revolution itself, and that thats a good thing too. It suggests a model of socialist activity that can force the most unromantic reading of the odds against any very immediate transformation of existing capitalist circumstances, and yet permit a definition of sites and modes of real struggle and a concretization of tactics and strategies that opens up the possibility of moving towards just such a transformation. Moreover, it promises to underscore the saliency of substantive issues (rather than vague revolutionary nostrums) in terms of which leaderships can most effectively be held to democratic account by their constituencies, and these very constituencies can become ever more conscious of their very classness not as some theoretical given, but as the practical content of their own lives and public activities. Of course, in the real world, there are many temptations to abandon the lessons articulated above, to abandon reasoned strategy in favour of militant rhetoric, and to abandon, in favour of vanguardist self righteousness, processes of negotiation as between and among comrades. The slow, negotiated accretion of a culture of socialist common-sense, within which conflicting claims on the Leftas to specific issues or as to overall directioncan be democratically debated and resolved, is key. As distinct from a liberal consensus as ground for political contestation, we need to work towards establishing an emerging socialist consensus, not at the expense of politics and difference, but as the ground for their fullest expression and debate: for real debate and struggle, in short, but on the increasingly agreed grounds of shared socialist and democratic premises, not capitalist and liberal ones.22 Callinicos flags many dangers in such an approach. Certainly, one mustnt be nave: the side of resistance to revolutionary changethe dominant class, its military, and its external backers (as in many of the struggles against white power during the initial years of liberation struggle in southern Africa) will often play pretty violent hardball indeed.23 Then the escalation of confrontation may sometimes, of necessity, pass beyond the boundaries of anything like structural reform though with long-term costs to socialist and democratic outcomes that can be very severe. After all, the cost, human and political, of such necessary escalation is one of the main reasons why many of us continue to fight so hard against those current imperatives of
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class and profit within our own western societies that have too often put our governments on the wrong side of struggles for freedom in the Global Southand continue to do so. Yet to simultaneously caricature the claims (and virtues), under many conditions of revolutionary endeavour, of structural reform and the creative tensions that it can promise, seems to mean, by definition, no opposing leaders, no conflicting political organizations or popular initiatives, no differences of opinion about strategy and tacticsin effect, no politics within the broader movement that claims to be seeking a transition to socialism. Indeed, when a thinker like Callinicos comes up against the complexities that real politics can reveal, he tends to back away and merely invoke that magic talisman mass struggle to outrank competing arguments. If we have learned nothing else from the history of socialism, it is that substituting the pure flame of revolutionism for the hard calculation and subtle politics of structural reform is a recipe for disaster. As Boris Kagarlitsky concludes in a text that emphasizes the crucial potential importance of structural reform to the struggle for socialism, Marx himself:
Was convinced that reforms prepare not only for revolution but also for socialism. In other words, for Marx the value of reforms was not in that they undermined the old systemsometimes they even strengthen itbut in their creation of elements of the new system within the framework of the old society. This theme in Marxs theory has been completely ignored by revolutionaries and reformist social democracy alike.24

But such a silence cannot be allowed to continue if success in a long, wearing struggle for socialism is to become a real possibility. It would be nave to think that all would then be clear sailing, even if we were to get our questions more right than we have and were to begin to act ever more clear-sightedly to answer them in practice. After all, as noted, the other side, the side of global capitalism, is trying, too. It is no accident that, as I have quoted on several occasions elsewhere and do so again here, Adam Przeworski could dourly conclude of the present global conjuncture that: Capitalism is irrational, socialism is unfeasible, in the real world
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people starve: the conclusions we have reached are not encouraging ones.25 Yet, once again, as argued above and pace Kolko and Przeworski, a genuinely liberatory socialism is not actually as unfeasible as all that. Difficult to realize, certainly; risky for those who try to do so, definitely; but it will be well worth the candle when, in its full and expansive meaning, it ultimately succeeds in coming to pass. Notes
1. John S. Saul, Professor Emeritus of Social and Political Science at York University and a Contributing Editor of Studies in Political Economy (SPE), was also, in 1979, a founding editor of SPE. His first article for the journal, entitled The Dialectic of Class and Tribe, appeared in Issue 1, Spring 1979; he is also the author and editor, over the years, of some 20 books on Africa and on development theory. 2. Revolutionary Traveller: Freeze-Frames from a Life (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2009), p. 367. 3. Gabriel Kolko, After Socialism: Reconstructing Critical Social Thought (New York: Routledge, 2006); I quote extensively from this text in the following two paragraphs. 4. Kolko, After Socialism, p. ???. 5. Gavin Kitching, Marxism and Science: Analysis of an Obsession (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 68. As Kitching continues (Kolko, please take note): The reason is that, if nothing else, Marx was an extremely intelligent man, and economic determinism is an extremely silly, not to say incoherent, idea in which to believe. Kolkos text, in contrast, is full of talk about the mechanistic fallacies of Marxist determinism (p. 19). 6. For further discussion of my take on the strength (and limitations) of Marxist theory, see my Development After Globalization: Theory and Practice for the Embattled South in the New Imperial Age (Delhi, London, & New York, Halifax and Durban/Pietermaritzburg: Three Essays Collective, Zed Press, Fernwood Press, and University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006) pp. 5368. 7. John Gray, Americas Global Fall from Grace, The Globe and Mail (1 October 2008). 8. On this subject, see again (as cited in endnote 6), my essay Identifying Class, Classifying Difference, which is chapter 3 in my book Development After Globalization. 9. For my take on the Empire of Capital, see John S. Saul, Decolonization and Empire: Contesting the Rhetoric and Reality of Resubordination in Southern Africa and Beyond (Delhi, London, & New York and Johannesburg: Three Essays Collective, Merlin Press, University of Witwatersrand Press, 2007). What follows in this section, as in this article as a whole, is a synthesis of my own conclusions about the most relevant socialist themes to presently pursue in the Global South, and so I feel forced to cite my own work more often than is customary, or indeed comfortable. Perhaps this article has a rather too elegiac feel to it as well, a kind of last will and testimony to the readership of a journal I was proud to help found many decades ago, and of which I remain proud to be on the Advisory Board. But elegies be damned. Me, I continue to be moved by the old Frelimo slogan of years ago: a luta continua, the struggle continues; and so say all of us. 10. Anonymous. 11. Leo Panitch, Reflections on Strategy for Labour in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, (eds.), Working Class, Global Realities/Socialist Register 2001 (London: Merlin Press, 2000), p. 367. 12. Ken Post and Phil Wright, Socialism and Underdevelopment (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 151152. 13. Jonathan Barker, Street-Level Politics (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1999). Barker sees this phenomenon as a social response to the expansion of market logic into social relationships that have more than economic meaning to people, p. 13. Elsewhere, Barker speaks of the

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SOCIALISM

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

existence, in Africa and beyond, of thousands of activist groups addressing the issues of housing, functioning of local markets, availability of local social services, provision and standard of education and abusive and damaging working conditions (in his Debating Globalization: Critique of Colin Leys, Southern Africa Report 12/4 (September, 1997)). Ralph Miliband, Socialism in a Sceptical Age (London: Verso, 1995), p. 192. Miliband, Socialism, pp. 194195. Material in this paragraph is drawn from my book Development after Globalization, especially chapter 3 (Identifying Class, Classifying Difference), where this overall argument is spelled out at much greater length. I have cited Amins concept of delinking in preparing the essay The Empire of Capital, Recolonization and Resistance: Rethinking the Political Economy of Development in the Global South, included in my Revolutionary Traveller, pp. 354367. Here, I have only mildly recrafted that argument for present purposes. I first cited Thomass formulation in the book that I edited, Mozambique, A Difficult Road: The Transition to Socialism in Mozambique (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985), and evoked it to complement Amins concept of delinking in the essay cited above (in Revolutionary Traveller). My principal writings on this theme are to be found in my Recolonization and Resistance: Southern Africa in the 1990s (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1993), especially chapter 4, South Africa: Between Barbarism and Structural Reform, and chapter 5, Structural Reform: A Model for the Revolutionary Transformation of South Africa. They form the basis for the present argument. See, as quoted several times in these paragraphs, Andr Gorz, Socialism and Revolution (New Haven: Anchor, 1973). See Alex Callinicos, Reform and Revolution in South Africa: A Reply to John Saul, in New Left Review 195 (1992), as well as my reply in the same issue, under the title John Saul replies (upon which I draw here). Of course, as argued above, democratic means will be necessary not only to facilitate negotiation between diverse players within and without the socialist camp, but also to hold leaders (important in their leadership function perhaps, but too often would-be vanguardists, with whatever benign excuses they may make for being so) to the humane purposes that they ostensibly seek to help advance. In fact, genuine democracy in the realm of political power is every bit as important as socialist structures in the productive realm (although these, as explicit in any meaningful definition of socialism, can and should be democratic as well). Gorz himself keeps returning to this crucial point as well, noting that the bourgeoisie will never relinquish power without a struggle and without being compelled to do so by revolutionary action on the part of the masses. Ultimately, what is at stake is a trial of strength, and those popular forces whose cumulative empowerment is so central to the project of structural reform will ignore this at their peril. As I emphasize in the present paragraph, this is one of the grim realities (the other side is trying too!) that has helped distort revolutionary movements throughout history; even a movement that is more democratic and more open to the full range of possibilities that a structural reform sensibility permits will be challenged by such a fact. Boris Kagarlitsky, The Dialectic of Change (London: Verso, 1998). Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 122.

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