Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

(Third in a series of posts on “Does Socialism Have a Future?”)

Samir Amin

Although world systems theorists are united in their opposition to capitalism and their preference for socialism, somehow the question of revolution tends to get lost in the shuffle. Furthermore, since the unit of analysis is the entire planet viewed from the geopolitical stratosphere rather than a specific country (why bother with such petty details), there is a tendency to use the discourse of hegemonic and subhegemonic nations/blocs rather than ruling class and ruled. Finally, the emphasis is on redressing imbalances between hegemons and subhegemons rather than figuring out ways to eliminate these categories entirely. While nobody would deny the Third World a larger slice of the pie, isn’t the job of socialists to think past such a schema?

Perhaps the most extreme form of this tendency was Andre Gunder Frank’s “Re-Orient”, the last book that this great dependency theorist wrote. It argued that finally after 300 years or so, China would emerge as a new hegemon and take the place of the United States, which leads me to wonder, as the old Peggy Lee song put it, “Is that all there is?”

In some ways, this approach overlaps with what Hugo Chavez has dubbed an “axis of good,” referring quite rightly to the alliance between Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia. For many, this might be extended to all those countries in Latin America that have remained willing to collaborate with the “axis of good”, including Brazil, Argentina and Chile. But why stop there? If the goal is to unite all those countries or blocs that can potentially be recruited to a global alliance that rejects the extreme violence and predation associated with the bogus “war on terror,” why not look toward India, Russia and China, countries that while clearly committed to capitalist growth appear less crazed?

That in essence is the argument found in Samir Amin’s “Beyond U.S. Hegemony: Assessing the Prospects for a Multiplural World.” As opposed to the hegemonic bloc constituted by the U.S. and Great Britain, Amin explains in his introduction that “other hegemonic blocs are possible”, a formulation that obviously owes something to “another world is possible” but dispensing with its ambitiousness. According to Amin, “Such alternative blocs will not necessarily be called upon to make a radical break with the requirements of capitalism, but they may very well force capitalism to adapt to certain demands that do not conform to its peculiar logic.” Not quite the stuff easily translated into a slogan, but certainly well-meaning.

Perhaps sensing the possibility that his ideas might be confused with those put forward by Hardt and Negri, Amin takes pain to disassociate himself from the two theorists of Empire, who he dismisses as putting forward alternatives that “are limited to a few segments of triad societies and are always subject to the dominant capitalist logic.” I am not sure that there is that much of a difference between Amin and Hardt-Negri, based on the evidence of a July 13, 2006 Nation Magazine Michael Hardt article titled “From Imperialism to Empire”, where he writes:

The internal dynamic of Empire is analogous to a collaboration between a monarch and a group of aristocrats. The monarch in most cases today is the US government, but in some cases it’s the IMF or other powers that act monarchically. The aristocratic powers in this analogy include the other nation-states of various levels, the corporations, the supranational institutions and various nongovernmental organizations. This analogy helps, first, to draw attention to the hierarchies among these powers in the ruling structure and, second, highlights the fact that the monarch cannot act unilaterally, depending constantly on the aristocrats, among other things, to finance its wars and pay its debts. The Bush Administration thought it could dictate the terms of global order unilaterally, but it was a monarch who failed to gain the support of the aristocrats and was thus doomed to failure.

This analogy also helps us understand the progressive strategic role of some of the regional alliances of nation-states that have emerged in recent years. The aristocrats can in many ways, especially when they band together, dictate to the monarch the terms of the imperial arrangement. One of the most visible and successful operations of this sort was carried out by the so-called Group of 22, led by Brazil, which blocked the 2003 WTO meetings in Cancún. The recent coalition of Latin American states that blocked the FTAA is another example. Indeed, the “Bolivarian” strategy of the Venezuelan government seeks to capitalize on the election of progressive governments in so many countries in Latin America by forming partnerships from Uruguay and Argentina to Brazil and Bolivia, and perhaps in the future also with Ecuador or Mexico. Acting alone, of course, none of these nation-states has the power to confront the United States or the IMF and transform the imperial arrangement. Acting together, emphasizing their strategic interdependence, they clearly can.

Stepping back some distance from both Amin and Hardt-Negri, one can gain some perspective and evaluate their respective recommendations in some ways as a recasting of Cold War polarities. Back in the 1950s, the USSR was the counter-balance to the USA but today it is Amin’s “alternative hegemonic blocs” or Hardt-Negri’s “aristocrats”. At least during the Cold War, one might embrace the Soviet side as standing for a more advanced social system. But today, the substitute players have very little to offer other than the fact that they are not the United States. Amin, like Hardt-Negri, finds Europe much more amenable to his purposes but I am afraid that his Europe is an idealized version of the real thing, which is dripping in blood. As he puts it:

Since the French Revolution, the political cultures of France and continental Europe, though existing within a perfectly capitalist framework, have been considerably different from the one we have just described. [U.S. racism, inequality, etc.] Here, the values of liberty and equality have from the beginning been placed on an equal footing, and this has required social management of the conflict between the two, and state action to regulate the deployment of capitalism in that light. This different approach opens up the possibility – if social struggles make it necessary – of making a start on participatory democracy. By their very nature, such moves accentuate the conflict with the inherent tendencies of capital accumulation, since a majority of citizens may then oppose the minority of ‘property-owners’ who alone count as real active citizens under the exclusive logic of capitalism. The way is thus opened to a recognition of positive social rights, which the American liberal model ignores in principle on the grounds that they require active intervention by the legislative and executive, as opposed to mere political and civil liberties that require the state only to refrain from impeding their use.

With all due respect to Samir Amin, who has written ground-breaking studies of the accumulation of capital on a world scale and whose dedication to social justice is second to none, this is sheer nonsense. Anything that is good in Europe owes more to the presence of long standing Social Democratic and Communist parties rather than “political culture”. “Positive social rights,” such as they are, were won through struggle not through persuasion. For example, Sweden’s generous social legislation came into existence not because the Swedish bourgeoisie has a sense of noblesse oblige, but because the Swedish workers waged a bitter struggle culminating in a general strike in 1931 and then the election of a Socialist government. Prior to that point, workers were gunned down just as brutally as in the U.S.

Even more shocking is Amin’s contrast between a supposedly racist America and the more enlightened Europe:

The other formative elements of American political culture – slavery and its racist legacy, the Indian genocide and the contempt for other peoples that it expressed – are equally specific and have no parallel in Europe. Whether based on slavery or not, Europe‘s colonies (though often associated with massacres) remained outside its own continent.

I am not sure that all the Congolese men and women who had hands hacked off as punishment for not working hard to tap rubber enough would have appreciated this distinction. Furthermore, it is somewhat of a moot point since the entire continent was Caucasian to begin with. If we extend the concept of racism, however, to include the persecution of religious and ethnic groups that are considered less than human, the Europeans have even less to be proud of. Many scholars view the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland and the reign of terror and plunder that succeeded it to be a model for the conquest of the American Indian. Furthermore, when every last Jew was expelled from Great Britain and Spain in the early capitalist epoch, one can hardly fault a Jew for questioning the merits of the European “political culture.”

For those who will probably not find themselves motivated to read “Beyond U.S. Hegemony,” I can recommend a briefer exposition of his ideas in an article titled ” Beyond Liberal Globalization: A Better or Worse World?” that appeared originally in Monthly Review.

In the conclusion, Amin tries to make clear that his anti-imperialism is different from that of the old left:

In its time, the third Leninist then Maoist International formed global alliances which–in theory and to some extent in practice–responded to an analogous challenge formulated within the conditions and limitations of the time. It is not a question of producing a remake of this chapter of history, which is definitively closed. The new structure of the anti-imperialist struggles in the North and South have still to be invented almost from A to Z.

As I stated in my last article in this series, it is a mistake to try to dismiss the lessons of the socialist movement, which were gained through blood and sweat. To speak in terms of a chapter of history being closed might make sense if you are speaking of the USSR or Mao’s China. Since Samir Amin was at one time a Maoist himself, one wonders if this attempt to close the chapter might reflect his own anxiousness to put his own past behind him. For the rest of us, the Soviet Union was much more about its promise rather than its achievements, impressive as they were. Looking back at that experience and trying to extract some meaningful lesson from it is not an exercise in “ostalgie” but rather a determination not to excise a memory that can serve to guide future action, especially in a time of deepening capitalist criss.

(Second in a series of posts on “Does Socialism Have a Future?”)

Gabriel Kolko’s “After Socialism” is a bitter diatribe against socialism drawn from ideas that were at one time much more fashionable among liberal intellectuals. In his acknowledgements, he singles out Bertrand Russell, Charles Peirce and Morris R. Cohen as writers who were “most congenial” when he began graduate work in the history of ideas and philosophy with an eye toward writing a Masters Thesis on progress. Cohen was at one time a major figure in American philosophy. From his roost at the City College of New York, he emphasized “the scientific method” and reason in a manner that while beyond reproach was unfortunately ignored by world history. Kolko, who first began kicking around the idea of an attack on socialism some 40 years ago, would pick up where Cohen left off and diagnose the problems of the socialist left as being rooted in a failure to be sufficiently reasonable.

Gabriel Kolko

Philosophy, however, is not the discipline that Kolko is most noted for. His reputation rests on a scholarly critique of American foreign policy associated with the “revisionist” trend that includes William Appleman Williams, Gar Alperovitz, Walter LeFeber, Howard Zinn and others. After reading his meretricious and cantankerous screed against socialism, one wishes that Kolko had stuck to what he knows best.

Like many critics of socialism in the academy, Kolko blames its failure on bad ideas. Oddly enough, his critique overlaps the one mounted by postmodernists in the 1970s and 80s who saw Marxism as sharing a susceptibility to imposing “grand narratives” on history. Going one step further, Kolko diagnoses the problem in terms of trying to theorize about society. Apparently, the 19th century was a time when all sorts of intellectuals tried to superimpose some kind of unified teleology on history under the influence of Hegel and other ambitious philosophers intoxicated by theory. The result of this bad thinking was bad social engineering once its proponents achieved any kind of political power. Kolko writes:

The nineteenth century produced many thinkers who believed in the idea of inevitable social progress and perfectibility, and their ideas have been the dominant influence on most social thought since then. Social theorists imagined few, if any, limits on reformers’ aspirations and pretensions or their ability to recast human institutions to fulfill their desires. Whatever their disagreements, both conservative and radical social concepts were consummately ambitious and shared grandiose, universalistic objectives. As each school articulated its notions of the foundations of the historical and social experiences, they created ideologies that ignored many dimensions of history. Both in substance and method, the dominant assumptions and pretensions of social ideas were, to varying degrees, both comprehensive and optimistic. They always emphasized their understanding rather than their ignorance, and their unifying premise was that increasing insight, even certainty for many schools of thought, lay within human grasp.

The idea of human overreach has a very ancient history. In a Greek myth, Dedalus presents his son Icarus with a set of wings but warns him not to fly too high. When Icarus foolishly decides to ignore him, the sun melts the wax that holds the feathers together and he falls to his death. In another cautionary tale involving hubris, Prometheus is punished for stealing the secret of fire from the gods and donating it to the human race. To punish him, the gods decree that his liver would be devoured by harpies over and over for no less than 30,000 years. Considering the enormous pain visited on countries that attempt experiments in socialism, ranging from the USSR to Allende’s Chile (it should be mentioned that Kolko hates revolution and electoral politics alike when it comes to achieving socialist goals), one can certainly understand the relevance of Greek mythology, part and parcel of a society that valued strict regimentation, up to and including slavery.

Marx had an entirely different attitude toward Prometheus. His doctoral dissertation in philosophy, devoted to a comparison of Democritus and Epicurus, saw Prometheus’s challenge to the gods as exemplary, particularly insofar as it elevated “human self-consciousness as the highest divinity,” a phrase that no doubt would make Kolko tear his hair out. In the preface to his dissertation, Marx quotes Aeschylus’s “Prometheus Bound”:

Be sure of this, I would not change my state
Of evil fortune for your servitude.
Better to be the servant of this rock
Than to be faithful boy to Father Zeus.

For Kolko, the search for immutable laws of history that might yield a path to social progress was as foolhardy as Icarus’s flight toward the sun or Prometheus’s theft of fire. “System-building” of Marxian, Comtean or Spencerian varieties would only lead its proponents to crash to the ground, dragging innocent people down with them.

Marxism was far more dangerous than its rivals since it had the uncanny ability to attract working people who were clearly open to any kind of theory that entailed the liquidation of the class that exploited it mercilessly. One can hardly blame them. In a chapter titled “The legacies of socialism: theory”, Kolko demonstrates a woeful unfamiliarity with Marx’s methodology (a term that far better describes his achievements than “theory”). Supposedly Marx was fixated on economic crisis, when war has had a far more galvanizing effect on the working class:

It is a fact that the working class finally became radicalized and a force for fundamental change, but almost wholly in connection with wars, when its leaders could no longer deceive many of them. While workers should, and indeed do, have a proclivity for certain assumptions and modes of action, Marx turned highly contingent possibilities into inevitable necessities and sacrificed the nuances which would have made his system of thought more relevant and durable. What workers have in fact done in the historical process, and their crucial significance as historical actors, played no part in Marx’s theory – he was purely wrong. But the readiness of the working class to act under certain circumstances is a fact, one difficult to predict in advance but nonetheless of decisive importance. The working class’s role in history is scarcely irrelevant because Marx got it all wrong, but there is no innate proletarian impulse to revolt at the time and place of a radicalized bourgeoisie’s – which includes Marx and most theorists who lionized him – choosing. Its potential is often aborted and distorted, but that it will act – given the appropriate circumstances – is a reality of which we cannot make too much, or too little. Why it behaves as it does, with social stasis being the outcome most of the time, and the parameters of its possible behavior, is a crucial and complex question that Marx simplified inordinately.

This passage is filled with so much nonsense that one hardly knows where to begin. To start with, it is simply beyond comprehension that Kolko would draw a distinction between economic crisis and war, as if WWI and WWII were not driven by fundamental contradictions in the capitalist economy. Indeed, it is axiomatic to Marxism that war is the system’s way of resolving crisis. As Rosa Luxemburg put it in “The Junius Pamphlet“:

The growth of capitalism, spreading out rapidly over a reconstituted Europe after the war period of the sixties and seventies, particularly after the long period of depression that followed the inflation and the panic of the year 1873, reaching an unnatural zenith in the prosperity of the nineties opened up a new period of storm and danger among the nations of Europe. They were competing in their expansion toward the non-capitalist countries and zones of the world.

Obscure Polish Jew

In keeping with the intemperate tone that pervades “After Socialism,” Kolko describes Luxemburg as a “hitherto obscure Polish Jew” who achieved some fame attacking Eduard Bernstein on the instigation of

an ambitious, doctrinaire local party newspaper editor and millionaire adventurer, Alexander Israel Helphand (whose pseudonym was ‘Parvus’ and in 1917 worked with the German government to spirit Lenin from Switzerland to Russia), and then August Bebel, the SPD’s Marxist leader. Consummately ambitious herself, she played with radical abstractions–a type of intellectual who has been the bane of the socialist movement since its inception.

If Kolko were not Jewish himself, one might say that this smacks of anti-Semitism. Who knows, maybe Kolko was influenced by Borat.

This portrait of Rosa Luxemburg is so grotesque that one wonders if it was drawn from the palette of anti-Communist literature. It is of course just as mean-spirited as Kolko’s portrayal of socialist professors, who allegedly seek to maintain power on campus in the way that Stalin sought to maintain power in the USSR. As he puts it, “whenever ideas involve bureaucracies, tenure and jobs, the consequences will always be threatening to truly creative freedom of thought”–no doubt as exemplified by his own reinterpretations of Morris R. Cohen.

In chapter four, Kolko addresses “the role and limits of social theories”. It basically warns against what postmodernists call “meta-narratives”:

No grand theory of any sort, religious or secular, has survived the ravages of human experience in an immensely complicated world which has undermined all highly structured propositions regarding the future of societies. Logical analyses of them have been even more devastating. Theories, and the assumptions they embody, rarely accord with social realities and they become in most instances articles of faith in which experience ceases to be a criterion for judging their relevance and truth. But we live in a profoundly troubled era which requires a great deal of intellectual innovation and originality appropriate for our contemporary social and human crises, and this demands that we discard most, perhaps all of the existing paradigms and conventions which are so fixed in the ideas of all ideological persuasions.

In reflecting a bit more deeply on this assertion, one might see similarities not just with postmodernism but with earlier attempts to discredit grand theories. When I was an undergraduate at Bard College in 1961, Heinrich Blucher would lecture us about the dangers of 19^th century theorizing. Blucher was married to Hannah Arendt who incorporated such ideas in her “Origins of Totalitarianism.” They could also be found in Camus’s writings, especially “The Myth of Sisyphus”. All that was evil in the current century can be blamed on 19^th century system-building. From Hegel you get Marx and from Marx it is just one small step to Stalin’s concentration camps. What I got out of these brainwashing sessions was a need to stay away from grand theories, and especially the Commies who espoused them–even though none could be found at Bard College back then, despite Walter Winchell’s characterization of the school as the “little red whorehouse on the Hudson.”

Daniel Bell: another enemy of grand theories

In the 1950s, this was drummed to your head wherever you went to school. If it wasn’t the trendy pop existentialism of a Camus or Hannah Arendt’s warnings against utopian schemas, it was Daniel Bell in “The End of Ideology“:

But the seed of the corruption was the hubris of the “possessed.” Generous of impulse, it sought the end of injustice, but in the single vision the dogmatism grew hard and the moral sense cynical, so that, when reality proved the vision false, all that was left was the hardness, or the despair.

The lesson to be drawn is this. Overly ambitious schemas to restructure society based on a grand theory will only backfire. The only recourse to people of good will who hate injustice and seek a better world is to remain free of political groups that have such overweening ambitions. In other words, you have to oppose capitalism–a system that Kolko clearly rejects–but you cannot posit a systemic overhaul. Despite the fact that capitalism itself involves an all-encompassing set of assumptions about the way that society operates and what kind of historical goals must be pursued, people on the left are doomed to failure if they also begin to think in such terms.

Kolko in effect recommends a political approach that puts conditions on itself in the face of a task that demands exactly what he forbids. He is for revolutionizing society, but is opposed to the creation of a revolutionary theory. He puts it this way:

What is crucial is the sufficient transformation of those essentially capitalist institutions and precedents -those material or ideological forces that led to atavism, conflict, and war -that traditional socialists failed to alter when in a position to affect history. The term “socialism” itself is scarcely sacrosanct and warrants being replaced wherever a better definition is articulated.

However, there is absolutely nothing in “After Socialism” that points in the way toward such a “transformation”. For a work that is driven by a kind of hatred toward capitalism and every serious attempt in the past 150 years or so to redress the ills it creates, there is not the slightest hint as to what should be done. If one is not allowed to construct socialist parties, then what kind of party does Kolko advocate?

In the final analysis, one gets the sense that Kolko is not only opposed to people coming together under the banner of sweeping theories such as socialism, but getting together at all. Except for a one sentence reference to the Green Parties that emerged to “expand the scope of a political dialogue in a very partial but nonetheless positive manner,” there is no indication that Kolko has any use for radical politics in any form, socialist or otherwise. The 1960s were a disaster in his eyes:

On the whole, when one adds together the secular adventurist revolutionary notions, the Christian-pacifist cult of innocence, uncritical Third World-ism – the belief that most movements in the developing nations are somehow automatically radical – and synthetic, eclectic varieties of wish-fulfillment that thrived from about 1960 to 1975, little of permanent value emerged from the so-called New Left experience.

Although I will have more to say on this topic in later posts, my outlook is exactly the opposite of Kolko’s. Rather than trying to discredit socialism (or the New Left for that matter) as bad seeds planted in the 19^th century that have sprouted monstrously misshapen growths in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, I believe that this history is our history and must be absorbed for its positive lessons as well as pruned of weeds. This legacy is not so much the creation of intellectuals as Kolko puts it, but much more the collective memory of the working class in struggle. Without working class resistance, it is doubtful that Karl Marx or Frederic Engels would have ever developed their “grand theories”. It is exactly this working class memory that Kolko would extirpate in the name of the “scientific method” and reason.

When Fidel Castro was stricken with what appears to be a terminal illness, it prompted many commentators to muse about the imminent collapse of Cuban socialism. This is a theme that finds new ways of expression based on periodic upheavals both within and outside Cuba. After the Soviet Union evaporated in the early 1990s, pundits wrote countless words about how Cuba would be next. But socialism finds ways to keep rolling along on the island, just like the American jalopies that the inventive Cubans find ways to keep on the road with chewing gum and baling wire. In every respect, socialism has the appearance of being out of sync with a world that is either openly capitalist or that like China wraps private property relations in a thin tissue of socialist rhetoric.

With its frenzied obsession with technical innovation, joined at the hip to planned obsolescence, the capitalist system puts novelty on a throne. Spalding Gray, the brilliant performance artist and writer who threw himself off the Staten Island ferry after battling bad health and depression for a number of years, had a wonderful story about visiting the Soviet Union in the 1980s. He said that despite being the butt of jokes about its backwardness, he found something alluring about the country. He noted that on Soviet warships captains still communicated acoustically with the men in the engine room through a pipe that ran through the ship’s innards. He found something more human about that process.

Are socialists condemned to be followers of kitschy symbols of the past? Are those of us in the West who became socialists in the 1960s and still retain such beliefs the equivalent of the aging East Europeans who traffic in Ostalgie, a term coined for those foolish souls who think that something was lost when East Germany was swallowed up by its more aggressive and wealthy cousin to the West?

The war in Iraq has now lasted longer than World War Two and is rapidly approaching the Vietnam War in longevity, a conflict that radicalized tens of thousands of youths, including me. Since the U.S. was waging a war against “Communism,” it was inevitable that those of us who were called upon to kill or be killed would begin to ask what that system was all about. If nothing else, the heroism of the Vietnamese people led us to investigate the ideas that they supposedly held dear. For a small minority, the ideas actually made sense. In the West, especially during the “cool” and disaffected 1950s, no idea seemed worth dying for.

There is no such phenomenon at work in the war in Iraq, despite the obvious dedication of the Sunni fighters and Sadr’s militias at times to rid their country of occupiers. Although it is very difficult to get word about the beliefs that motivated fighters in a place like Fallujah, we can assume that socialism was not part of the mix. The fighting spirit of the Iraqi resistance, the elan of the Hezbollah, and the irrepressible militancy of the Iranian government has engendered a certain sense of camaraderie on the Marxist Left in the West. If socialism has few adherents in the Middle East, should we throw in our lot with those who have the muscle to stop the imperialists in their tracks?

Furthermore, to make ourselves attractive to them, perhaps it might make sense to downplay our stubborn emphasis on class, especially since Islam purports to unite owner and employer on the basis of faith. It was probably symptomatic of such barely concealed desires that Counterpunch ran an interview with Hezbollah’s leader Hasan Nasrallah in which he says, “You will witness how our people have embraced Chávez and Ernesto Che Guevara. Nearly in every house, you will come across posters of Che or Chávez.” A red-faced Counterpunch had to admit some days later that the interview was a fraud.

In Latin America, there have been expressions of sympathy for Che Guevara that are genuine and which would seem to indicate a revival of interest in the socialist project. Evo Morales, the newly elected President of Bolivia, told interviewers that “I’m not only a follower of Chávez, but a follower of Castro and a follower of Che.” However, in the next breath he added, “This does not mean I am going to implement their programmes here because Bolivia is not Cuba.” This would seem to mean that Cuba serves more as an inspiration than an actual model to be followed for the new Latin American left.

In Venezuela itself, socialism is openly defended as a kind of official ideology but it is a ‘sui generis’ twenty-first century socialism that is open to varying interpretations, it would seem. For the ultra-orthodox Trotskyists of the In Defense of Marxism Web site, Hugo Chávez is a standard-bearer of their own particular ideas about socialist revolution, even if he is not aware of that himself. By the same token, Chávez is claimed by Joseph Stiglitz as a practitioner of his own version of New Deal economics. Oddly enough, in a world that puts dog-eat-dog competition on a pedestal, it is both socialism and the New Deal that seem like relics from a bygone era.

Tariq Ali, the well-known British Marxist, goes one step further and synthesizes socialism and the New Deal. In an interview with Doug Henwood on the New York Pacifica station, here’s how it plays out:

Tariq Ali: So the reforms which he has pushed through of using the oil money to create… You know people in the states sometimes get shocked when I say this but look he is very radical in attacking imperialism and all that but the internal reforms which are taking place in Venezuela today are a combination of Roosevelt’s New Deal and social democratic reforms which were pushed through in every European country after the Second World War. [Presumably, Ali is referring to Western Europe.]

Doug Henwood: So this is what he means by 21st century socialism?

Tariq Ali: Yeah, that’s what he means. It is left social democratic reforms. And he has said that to me a number of times that we are not living in an epoch of proletarian revolution. It is just crazy to think you can just jump over everything and do that.

Over the next couple of weeks, I plan to examine some of these questions in greater depth. Is socialism a worthwhile theory that can only lead to chaos and disaster if it is implemented anytime in the foreseeable future — a “crazy” ambition, in Tariq Ali’s words? Is the best thing we can hope for a realignment of world superpowers that would put China and Russia in a stronger position to resist US savagery? Is there some other economic system in between capitalism and socialism that can combine the dynamism of the former system and the egalitarianism of the latter? These are questions that should matter to every thinking person on the planet.