From Red to Green 

From Red to Green

On the New Jersey Greens’ discussion list I made comments critical of socialism and someone responded:

> Unless you define the “socialism” which you
> find unacceptable, we can only
> assume you are talking about the “Soviet”
> socialism which Marxists reject.

Here was my reply:

OK - let’s start out with essential definitions:

Capitalism is a modern industrial system characterized by economic relations where the bulk of the major means of production are privately owned.

Socialism is a modern industrial system characterized by economic relations where the bulk of the major means of production are publicly owned.

The fact that I am critical of socialism does not mean that I favor capitalism. The latter is exploitative and ruinous. All capitalist societies suffer from obscene concentrations of wealth and power.

Seeing that, the socialist movement had its heart in the right place in its endeavor to create a classless and truly democratic alternative. But no manifestation of socialism ever moved very far in the direction of a classless or participatory society (and it was tried to various degrees in countries as diverse as Russia, China, Cuba, Yugoslavia, East Germany, Great Britain, Sweden, Ghana, etc.).

Under conditions of mass industrial society, socialism turned out to be statist, bureaucratic, and conformist, with just as much drone work, resource exploitation, and ecological indifference as capitalism - and racked by power elitism almost to the same extent.

After 150 years of socialist movements all over the world doing their best to transform society, I, for one, am convinced that the experiment failed. I understand that it faced enormous resistance from the capitalist elites, but its inability to win long-term mass allegiance anywhere means to me that the ideology was flawed.

If I had no other choice than the two systems of the modern era, I would choose socialism, but we can do better. I consider the Green movement a post-socialist movement. We have to shift the debate entirely away from the old “public vs. private” (Left vs. Right) ideological spectrum.

When I refer to capitalism and socialism I am talking about modern large-scale industrial systems. Industrialism and mass society are proving to be unsustainable - not long-range viable, not conducive to democracy or ecology or community.

Economic and social relations were always and everywhere community-based until a few dozen generations ago. They must become that way again. Within the context of local community there can be participatory democracy. A community could choose to base its economy on privately owned local enterprises or publicly owned local enterprises or a mixture of both. Only local enterprises can be true creatures of the community, regulated and monitored re: social and ecological impact.

What must be avoided is the fostering of large-scale, remote, impersonal mega-enterprises (and mega-states) which have little connection to (and therefore no responsibility toward) people, communities, or the earth.

Marx had little sensibility of this. He viewed capitalist industrial modernism as a “higher stage” of progressive development from which the ultimate, final stage - communism - could emerge. I think this is an erroneous view of history and all of Marx’s errors flow from it.

For the above reasons I think our era will be characterized by an ideological transition from Red to Green.

SW

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