S.O.S. Alternatives to Capitalism. Richard Swift

threatened the idea of a fully evolved democracy. Among their most treasured goals was the expansion of the franchise, given that the vote was then restricted largely to males with property. The main alternative in which those opposed to the system invested their hopes was a socialism brought about in one way or another through the democratic transformation of the state. In those days no-one doubted that the triumph of socialism meant more, not less, democracy. Opponents of socialism were staunchly opposed to such an expansion of democracy, seeing it as a form of threatening mob rule.

      Along with other pioneers of socialism, Karl Marx saw the state as the fulcrum that could leverage a fundamental redirection of economic life. Marx, though, had very ambivalent feelings about the state. He thought of it as a transitional phase in the achievement of a stateless form of communism based on the democratic self-rule of producers. He was deeply suspicious of the bourgeois form of the state and saw a radical democratic transformation of it as a necessary precursor to socialism. For Marx, the Paris Commune, which saw leftists take over Paris between March and May 1871, was an example of the initial form of this socialist democratization of the state, with all its leveling features and directly democratic assemblies. His brilliant Civil War in France, which charted the ill-fated course of the Commune, was one of his finest pieces of writing.³ This was the closest Marx came in his lifetime to seeing the self-emancipation of the workers to which he had dedicated himself.

      In his writings on the state Marx chose to use the unfortunate phrase ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ to describe this transitional phase. The word ‘dictatorship’ had a far different and more limited definition in the 19th century than it has today. It meant a kind of directed control that would resist the challenges of the partisans of capitalism (particularly those that profited from the private control of the means of production) to reverse what Marx saw as a primarily democratic transition. But Marxism (not unlike the Bible and the Qur’an) can and has been used to support many different and competing viewpoints and interests. This is certainly true of the notion of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ that was picked up by Lenin and other Bolsheviks to justify whatever draconian police-state measures they deemed necessary to protect their notion of socialism.

      This blind spot about using state power to install socialism from above is common to the social democratic as well as the communist Left, and it has proved the undoing of the socialist hopes that were so strong in the 19th century. It has been consistently challenged by the advocates of change from below, be they anarchists or other libertarians of the Left. The debate has waxed and waned over the course of the last two centuries, with the ‘practical’ advocates of state power holding the upper hand for most of the time. However, the notion of an alternative from below has never entirely disappeared and, given the eclipse of the Leninist ethos and politics embedded in the communist world, it has become again the principal source of opposition to the tepid reformism of the center-left tradition.

      Communism and social democracy

      Few would today argue that over-reliance on a centralized state played a key role in the undoing of both the politics and economics of orthodox communism. The consequence was an alternative to capitalism that was decidedly unattractive, as it squeezed popular democracy and personal freedom while at the same time failing to deliver on the promise of economic prosperity. A highly centralized planning mechanism undermined any effective feedback from below on which to base decisions as to what and how much to produce. The result was a combination of shortages and oversupply that became a notorious feature plaguing state communist economies. The system was able to achieve a forced-march industrialization that enabled first the Soviet Union (and, much later, China) to survive in the face of aggression from Hitler’s fascism and other enemies. A certain level of initial equality and security in daily life was eventually undermined by a growth in popular aspirations for a freer life with a wider range of opportunity and economic possibility. These systems have now been transformed back into a kind of autocratic capitalism where economic growth (spectacular in the Chinese case) has replaced stagnation but at the cost of galloping inequality. The usual, if limited, political freedoms associated with ‘advanced’ capitalism remain atrophied under these new forms of state capitalism. Undoubted advances in the general level of prosperity have not been accompanied by an opening up of the rights of assembly and independent organization that would allow trade unions and social movements to resist exploitation and inequality effectively.

      In retrospect it could easily be claimed that orthodox state communism was not really an alternative to capitalism at all but merely a transitional form of it that allowed certain large ‘backward’ societies, hitherto blocked in their developmental path, to move towards their own peculiar model of autocratic capitalism. Today, both Russia and China, once the two centerpieces of world communism, have evolved into models of authoritarian capitalism in which a political élite, mostly made up of former communists, rules in alliance with a corporate and financial oligarchy. The ideological glue that sustains these regimes is no longer based on elusive communist ideals of equality or producer self-rule but instead on Great Power nationalism and individual self-enrichment.

      The other strain of state socialism that has competed with orthodox communism is that of social democracy. This form of moderate socialism gradually separated itself from the (mostly European) revolutionary movements as it became a significant parliamentary force in the latter part of the 19th century. During the early years it rallied around issues such as trade-union rights and extending the franchise to include women and those without property – as has already been mentioned, in the 19th century it was almost always assumed by both proponents and foes that socialism meant greater democracy. The divisions on the Left were less about democracy than about the speed and scope of the necessary changes, and about whether tactics should involve direct action by popular movements or be restricted to elected representatives of the working-class movement fighting for reform in parliaments. While there were many who were critical of the parliamentary path (believing, not unreasonably, that electoral victory gave one the right but not necessarily the power to govern), the bloody defeats endured by revolutionaries gave the parliamentary argument a growing credence. Initially, those committed to the electoral arena claimed an almost slavish devotion to Marxist orthodoxy – Germany’s Socialist Party theoretician Karl Kautsky was a classic example. But gradually there was a slippage as the give-and-take of parliamentary maneuvering and the difficulty of enacting reform in the face of bureaucratic and often military resistance led to a narrowing of political aims.

      For the great social democratic parties of Europe (most prominently the German, French and British), World War One proved a watershed. Here was exactly the kind of conflict (a capitalist war fueled by nationalist posturing and the fight for markets and imperial influence) that socialism claimed to oppose. Yet party after party rallied around the flag, supporting a war that resulted in millions of young working-class soldiers dying or being maimed in the mud of the trenches. It was a shocking betrayal of the most fundamental socialist principles. The Bolsheviks in Russia, despite their increasing authoritarian tendencies, gained respect from socialists throughout Europe for their unflinching anti-war stand. Voting for the credits to fund the war became a kind of litmus test that shook up the world of socialists, provoking splits and resignations in many national parties. Anti-war activist James Ramsay Macdonald quit as head of the British Labour Party while the anti-war French socialist leader Jean Jaures was assassinated in 1914 by a militant French nationalist. The remaining leaders of the French socialists, including such previously uncompromising militants as Jules Guesde, were enlisted into the war effort.