Is Socialism Still an Alternative

Studies in Political Economy 86 A U T U M N 2010 167

I S S O C I A L I S M S T I L L

A N A L T E R N A T I V E ?John S. Saul1

What I’ve 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 moreeasily asserted than proven—not least, on one hand, in light of the notoriousfailures of various attempted “socialisms” throughout the last century, and,on the other, the apparent vitality, despite its current “crisis,” of globalcapitalism’s stranglehold on the poorest of the world’s poor. What can wesay in defense of a socialist project, especially for the global South? I willbegin, in the first section, by interrogating two recent attempts to refuse(or ignore) a socialist possibility, and then, in a second section, look moreclosely at some of the claims that might continue to be made, with a straightface, on socialism’s behalf, especially with reference to Africa, the region ofmy own most intensive focus.

Gabriel Kolko and John Gray, for ExampleGabriel Kolko Even as I read the page proofs for Revolutionary Traveller,another new book came across my desk that made me pause. It is writtenby Gabriel Kolko, a respected “Lefty” (and former colleague at YorkUniversity). Kolko has written many effective anti-imperialist books ofcourse, yet the title for this new one, After Socialism, is presented in theintroduction as a kind of exemplary coda to his vast corpus.3 What is goingon here?

Make no mistake: Kolko and I seem to be in agreement as to the extremecosts of capitalist hegemony. As he phrases it, “capitalism is an irrationaland humanly and physically destructive basis for organizing societies, much

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less international affairs.” The statistical and human indices of this failureof capitalism are legion and well summarized, particularly for the “ThirdWorld,” in his sixth chapter “Capitalist Realities: The Way the World Lives.”In sum, under capitalism, “greed and stupidity...erode the integrativefunctions of the ruling system and those who guide it”: capitalism and warthus 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 largeself confident Left existed. But as the upheavals after 1917 showed there areindefinable but decisive limits to the blunders existing elites can make. It isthis endemic incapacity to get things right that must be addressed, and whilethe Left’s historic failure makes the task much more difficult, those who stillwish to save our civilization from committing more follies must embark innew directions if mankind is to escape the destructive fate which awaits it ifits rulers continue to base their politics on the primacy of individual profit,war, and the maintenance of those social and economic conditions whichmake superstition and irrationality flourish...In the most general and strategicsense, the only defense—if there be any—against illusions and failure isconstant, critical thinking.4

“Critical thinking”? We shall see about this below. Here, I hasten to notethat I would also not quarrel with much of Kolko’s accompanying extendedcritique of “socialism” (and of “the Left’s historic failure”) as it has “actuallyexisted,” 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 ofits previous forms, as he seems inclined to do. In particular, I disagree withKolko’s attack on Marx and Marxism, the latter presented by Kolko as beingthe crudest and most half-witted of reductionisms. This bears almost norelationship to what I understand that analytical framework to represent asan essential foundation stone for progressive theory and practice (and theiressential unity). But I have argued this case regarding such theory andpractice extensively elsewhere, and here will repeat only a crucial formula-tion of Gavin Kitching’s as a kind of antidote to Kolko’s writing in thisparticular vein:

Marx simply was not an economic reductionist. He did not believe that allforms 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 difficultto find any evidence in his writing that he did...Marx was often concernedwith those aspects of politics, or culture, or social conflict that had class oreconomic dimensions. But he certainly would not have thought that, forexample, all classical Greek culture (which he loved) or all of the politics ofthe French Second Empire (by which he was fascinated) could be explainedby or reduced to economic or class factors.5

No, for this and other reasons, I would argue simply that Marx’s theoriesstill provide by far the best “entry-point” for social analysis, whateveradditional issues (and there are certainly many) also remain to be thoughtthrough.6

But socialism as practice? No doubt Marx had fewer answers, and fewergood questions too, on this topic than he had when identifying howcapitalism actually functions (and continues to function). Still, once again,the essential entry point—resistance from below by those exploited by thiscruel system—is sound (although not, in this case, unique to Marx), evenif who and what such resistance might have to encompass is also problem-atic in important ways. Granted, too, that both Leninists and SocialDemocrats made a hash of things historically, and granted, finally, that itis 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 controlover the production process, with such social control to be democraticallyarticulated (rather than, as has come to be the case, seeing most apparentattempts at democratic control of the production process largely negatedby the preeminence of various privileged class interests, whether these be ofpolitical/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 andcollective control over the production process. This is not a goal to bedismissed glibly; no more so, of course, than the goal of “democracy” itself—a concept with which Kolko apparently has less trouble as an essentialaspiration. And yet, where have we seen forms of “democracy” in placewithout fairly direct control over outcomes being asserted through theexercise of class power? Hasn’t any very meaningful democracy been as


elusive as “socialism” thus far in human history? But this doesn’t mean thatwe should abandon it—either the word or the practice—as an aspiration.Instead, in my opinion, we must work to make both democracy andsocialism real.

But what does Kolko offer as his alternative—an alternative, in short, toglobal capitalism and to the wasting wars we have known in recentcenturies—that might be worth striving and struggling for? Unfortunately,any argument he may make is swamped by his ferocious attack uponMarxism; there remains almost nothing in his text to suggest how a capitalistproductive system might be transformed to negate the rule of capital andthe bourgeoisie—a rule that has become, in his own eloquent description,hegemonically destructive, yet “commonsensically” predominant, bothnationally and globally. In sum, for all the strength of his critique of bothcapitalist reality and prior socialist practice, his positive programme tendsto boil down to an oft-reiterated invocation of “justice and rationality” asthe 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 theypossibly mean in practice? How might we begin, “rationally,” to tame andtransform such a rancid system of production (let alone all the other evilsattendant upon it) without the assertion of collective and democratic controlover the production process? Surely we need a clear and concrete programmefor an ongoing attempt to replace capitalist and bureaucratic greed and itsattendant arrogance of power and wealth with humane, willed purpose. Weneed, in short, a better system. Will this come about “after socialism” (toevoke Kolko’s title)? I doubt it; better put: “socialism or barbarism.” RosaLuxemburg 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 hopeto those who do not wish capitalism well—for good and concrete reasons,reasons fully apparent in so much of the Global South. There is no roomhere 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 includedan article by British professor and writer John Gray, subtitled “The [Present]Financial Crisis has seen an Entire Model of Government and the EconomyCollapse.” Consider the opening paragraph of this article: “Our gaze mightbe on the markets melting down, but the upheaval we are experiencing ismore than a financial crisis, however large. Here is a historic geopolitical shiftin 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 wasfollowed by the rise of another utopian ideology. In the United States andBritain, and to a lesser extent in other Western countries, a type of marketfundamentalism became the guiding philosophy. The collapse of U.S. powerthat is underway is the predictable upshot. Like the Soviet collapse, it willhave large geopolitical repercussions. An enfeebled economy cannot supportthe 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. Theyare swift and chaotic, with rapidly spreading side effects.

Nonetheless, to again quote Gray, “this is far from being the end ofcapitalism. The frantic scrambling that is going on in Washington marks thepassing of only one type of capitalism— the peculiar and highly unstablevariety that has existed in the United States over the past 20 years. Thisexperiment in financial laissez-faire has imploded.” In Gray’s view, “whilethe collapse will be felt everywhere, the market economies that resisted U.S.style deregulation will best weather the storm.” For, “in the present circum-stances, an unprecedented expansion of the government is the only meansof averting a market catastrophe.”

Perhaps more is at stake than Gray deigns to admit, for it is capitalismitself, not merely the feckless “free-market” capitalism that we have beenenduring in recent years, which may have been placed in question. At least,that possibility exists more forcefully than has been true for some time: thepossibility to make a noncapitalist, even socialist, outcome feasible and todo so on a global scale. After all, even Newsweek can banner its 16 February


2009 issue with the cover headline “We Are All Socialists Now.” I kid younot! Of course the magazine inserts a subtitle immediately below thatstartling headline: “The Perils and Promise of the New Era of BigGovernment.” So that’s it: Big Capital vs. Big Government. Nothing, notsurprisingly, about genuine democracy, the systematic empowering frombelow of the people themselves. That kind of democracy, that kind ofsocialism, remains pretty much unthinkable in many circles, I’m afraid.

Moreover, as Gray attests, there is also space for some kind of capitalistrecovery, and space, too, for many even less savoury outcomes (a faint odourof resurgent fascism, for example) to emerge from the current, and contin-uing, situation of chaos. Much will depend on the ability of theLeft—battered and bruised though it may be—to seize the day and occupythe spaces of opportunity. Yes indeed, we have work to do—in the spheresof both our analysis and our practice. Of course we need a richer, moreopen (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,socialism—exemplifying popular initiatives to seize control of the produc-tion process—will have to be a big part of the solution to its depredations.

The Struggle (for Socialism) Continues? What, then, can be said moreconcretely about any such struggle for socialism—one that can claim, paceKolko, to be both meaningful and important? My own chief sphere ofinterest and active engagement has been Africa (especially southern Africa),a continent comprised of national sites very different from those of Canadaand other bastions of the G8 and the Global North (and East). Of course,national sites throughout the world—North, South, East, and West—aresubject to the pressures of globalization (read, more concretely, the pressuresof the global capitalist production/marketplace and the workings of what Ihave termed elsewhere to be the “Empire of Capital”9), although in markedlydifferent ways. For example, I myself am perfectly confident, for reasonsalluded to earlier, that some form of socialism (alongside the fruits of otherattendant struggles: for greater racial and gender equality, for more firmlydemocratic political practices, and for a deeper concern for the environ-

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ment, for example) is necessary to restore the social health of the currentlyoverweeningly dominant (Northern and Eastern) locations in the world.How much more important to the Global South, so deeply scarred bycapitalism and imperialism, is the kind of healing that only the realizationof social justice and self consciously collective activity can promise? I willconcentrate on Africa, the continent I know best, in what follows, althoughI 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 theeconomic strength, selfishness, and deeply engrained ruthlessness of theGlobal North and East that the future of the Global South—including thevery availability of room within which it can begin to breathe socially andeconomically—can occur only if progressive changes occur first in the presentcentres of the global economy, thereby lifting the weight of Northerneconomic and military power from off the backs of their Southern counter-parts. Just the other day, for example, a letter came from a friend, a comradeof vast African experience, replying, in private correspondence (and henceunnamed here), to my cry for help in the framing of a related argument ina text of mine:

I am no clearer than you say you are about how to move forward. I don’t seehow the South can ever liberate itself in the absence of a new socialist projectbecoming powerful in the North and I don’t see that happening until peopleare hurting and see no prospect of meeting their personal needs underglobalized neoliberalism, and until a new left movement with a serious attitudeto organization and democracy (to both, that is) emerges to displace thesocial democratic collaborators with capital. And the trouble with that isthat the right are more effective in the present situation, having resources,including the state’s security apparatus, that the left will not have without adramatic revival of militant trade unionism and a new left party. The rapidlydeteriorating environmental situation will aggravate the problem, not help.All of which means that very much against my will and my nature I feel verypessimistic.10

Well, yes, and no. How indeed, I ask myself, can one hope, with anydegree of realism and credibility, to confront such “pessimism of the intel-ligence” (about Africa and about the world more generally) with an


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“optimism of the will”—which I take to characterize my own response tothe grim realities of global inequality and exploitation—that goes beyondmere romanticism to ground itself in genuine possibilities of liberation? Itis true that, for socialists of the Global South, the task ahead will be adaunting one. Yet, as I have argued for some decades, it is not an impos-sible one—even if, as is also true, any attempted socialist transformation inthe South would be much reinforced by any serious effort to transform “theNorth” too; yet resident “Southerners” cannot afford to wait.

Let’s be clear, however, about the limited claims of the present article. Evenif 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 northe wisdom to elaborate detailed directives as to how socialists in the GlobalSouth (and elsewhere) can begin to give more concrete meaning to theirentirely appropriate aspirations. Let me offer a few conceptual windows,synthesizing earlier hints from my own body of writing over the years, whichoffer a less bleak prospect than Kolko seems to imagine to be possible alongthese lines. I will also give some clues as to how those engaged in socialistpractice, particularly in Africa, might expect, more clearly, to think and tonavigate their way forward. What is to be done, and how? I touch on threeareas in responding to this challenge. They concern the questions of “revolu-tionary agency,” “socialist accumulation,” and “revolutionary/structuralreform” as it also implicates the more meaningful democratization of futuresocialist practice.

Beyond the “Working Class,” Towards “Radical Agency” BroadlyDefined: Expanding the Constituency Marx had good reason to empha-size the role of the working class in divining potentially revolutionarycontradictions within an emerging capitalist mode of production: they werethe most exploited (at least in the technical sense in which he deployed theword) and were also brought together as a potentially self-conscious class bythe very capitalist dynamic of concentration and centralization that alsodefined its exploitation. It is not surprising that this formulation has servedas 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 hierarchiesand divisions (along lines of race, ethnicity, and gender, to go no furtherafield) that impede its self consciousness and its praxis—as we well knowand to which we will have to return. As Leo Panitch affirms (albeit almostapologetically), “To speak of strategy for labour needs some justificationtoday...Class, we have been reminded so often, is not everything.” Still, hefeels 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 thenecessity to think “outside the box” of rigid class identities, especially inanalyzing the realities of the Global South. There are, indeed, other thingsout there that are also “not nothing” and they are things entirely germaneto 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 impactof capitalism, the roster of those exploited (and potentially available forclass-based action) is far wider than narrow “classist” categories can hopeto elucidate—and this is not just to speak of all those peasants out there!Here I have found—and several times in previous writings deployed —theformulation of Ken Post and Phil Wright to be particularly instructive. Iquote it again here:

The working out of capitalism in parts of the periphery prepares not onlythe minority working class but peasants and other working people, women,youth and minorities for a socialist solution, even though the politicalmanifestation 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 associatedwith that new order) capitalism has still so permeated the social relationswhich determine their existences, even though it may not have followed thewestern European pattern of “freeing” their labour power, that to be liberatedfrom it is their only salvation. The objective need for socialism of theseelements can be no less than that of the worker imprisoned in the factoryand disciplined by the whip of unemployment. The price [of capitalism] ispaid in even the most ‘successful’ of the underdeveloped countries, and othersadditionally experience mass destitution. Finding another path has...becomea 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 Barkerhas 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 mostconventional of Marxisms, as Post and Wright urge us to do, and look forour systemic contradictions where we can find them. Then, more imagi-natively than ever before, seek—in terms of clear principle and by meansof compromise and assiduous political work—to draw the best of suchclaims and assertions as arise from such contradictions into effectivelycounterhegemonic projects, that represent the “highest common factor” oftheir social location and that defy, collectively, the rule of capital (on this,see the subsection “Democratizing the Struggle: Revolution by “StructuralReform” and Popular Empowerment,” below).

But we cannot stop at a more expansive class definition of agency. Wemust make a positive force in our struggle for liberation of other tensionsin society that can be wedded to claims and assertions advanced in the nameof class-defined redress, if we are imaginative enough to do so. As my oldteacher and friend Ralph Miliband has noted, capitalism’s grossly unevendevelopment around the world has produced “extremely fertile terrain” forthe kind of “pathological deformations”—predatory authoritarianisms andthose “demagogues and charlatans peddling their poisonous wares...of ethnicand 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 ready-to-hand identities, often with fundamentalist fervour. And yet, despite this,progressives committed to class struggle can and should continue to viewsuch identities as contingent in their sociopolitical implications and as notbeing, in many cases, in contradiction with socialist purposes. We should,when possible, invite the bearers of such identities—alongside feminists,environmentalists, antiracists, activists around issues of sexual orientationand the like—to join us within a broader community-in-the-making andwithin a universalizing democratic project of global, anticapitalist trans-formation.

In fact, as Miliband continues:



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Everywhere there are common goals and aspirations—for democratic formswhere they are denied and for more democratic forms where these are nomore than a screen for oligarchic rule; for the achievement of a social orderin which improvements in the condition of the most deprived—often amajority of the population—is the prime concern of governments; for thesubordination of the economy to meeting social needs. In all countries, thereare people, in numbers large and small, who are moved by the vision of anew social order in which democracy, egalitarianism and cooperation—theessential values of socialism—would be prevailing principles of socialorganization. It is in the growth of their numbers and in the success of theirstruggles that lies the best hope for humankind.15

But the corollary of this position is equally compelling: we on the Lefthad better learn to operate in our complex world of diverse faiths, races,and ethnic belongings, and to unite such “belongings” to our cause of classliberation, or they will continue to return to haunt us—as “merely” divisive“identifiers” and claims that can, at their worst, turn rancid and dangerousto humane purpose. So, too, must gender-defined and environmentallyconcerned projects be ever more assertively articulated as being not reducibleto, but coequal with and enlarged by, class considerations.16

In short, one of our key goals must be to define “agency” not only interms of some rather abstractly defined “working-class interest.” That appar-ently simple slogan—correct, but excessively schematic—has presented fartoo open an invitation to arrogance and high handedness (in the interest ofthe “working class,” don’t you know) and to essentialist vanguards of allkinds, ever quick to assert arrogantly just what “the class” must and shoulddo. Instead, we need to reach towards embrace of the range of shades ofidentity within and beyond strict class boundaries that can be won to revolu-tionary praxis. Not that tensions between diverse goals and purposes willsimply disappear, of course. Yet seeking to realize such an enlarged projectof “class struggle” also underlines the requirement of much more democraticmethods of negotiation of both the means and the ends of revolutionarywork than has characterized most past socialist undertakings—both inmobilizing the forces to launch revolutionary change and to sustain theprocess of socialist construction in the long run.


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Grounding the Delinking Imperative: Globalization and the Socialismof “Expanded Reproduction” It would be naïve to think that the increasedglobalization of the capitalist economy can be ignored by advocates of asocialist alternative. Not only is the “free” global market a major point ofreference for efforts by global capital (including those of its enforcers, likethe World Bank and the IMF) to effect its writ, by force and/or by theseduction of Southern elites. But the overbearing weight and lure of theglobal marketplace can also have its seductions, as a smorgasbord of sparklinggoods on offer and as an apparent source of quick and relatively easy profitsand of the inflow of “foreign capital”—albeit capital most often pegged tothe production and overseas sale of mineral and other resources, and to suchlimited additional production as meets the consumer needs of resident elites.How, then, to balance—on some kind of national developmental balance-sheet of Left provenance—costs and benefits? How to factor in new andessential kinds of democratic control over such linkages as are being estab-lished? Only some such control can expect to make countries of the GlobalSouth the beneficiaries, rather than the victims, of global embrace. Withoutthis, there is no intrinsic “magic of the market,” no equal exchange betweenrich and poor; there is only, with the market left unchecked, the upwardredistribution of resources from poor to rich.

Small wonder that Samir Amin can point a way forward only throughan ever more radical decolonization of central capitalist control: in hisdramatic word, an actual “delinking” of the economies of the Global Southfrom the Empire of Capital that otherwise holds the South in its sway.17

For Amin, delinking is defined as “the submission of external relations [tointernal requirements], the opposite of the internal adjustment of the periph-eries to the demands of the polarizing worldwide expansion of capital” andit 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 verylong transition” (with a self conscious choice for delinking from the worldof capitalist globalization as an essential first step) beyond the present globalpolarization will suffice.

Yet, as Amin readily admits, there is no realistic haven of “autarky” thatone 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 recoloniza-tion with an alternative that tilts effectively towards “delinking” as a notionalgoal—invoking an autocentric socioeconomic alternative that is at onceeffective, efficient and productive. What would the programme of a nationalstrategy erected on the premise of a strong tilt towards radical delinkingfrom the presently existent and profoundly cancerous global capitalist systemlook like? The answer to this question could begin to be found only in a newproject of genuine socialist planning —established on a national or regionalscale —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 theformulations of Clive Thomas) embodies “the progressive convergence of thedemand structure of the community and the needs of the population”18 —this being the very reverse of the market fundamentalist’s global orthodoxy.One could then ground a “socialism of expanded reproduction” —one thatrefuses the dilemma that has heretofore undermined the promise of themany “socialisms” that have proven prone to falling into the Stalinist trapof “violently repressing mass consumption” in the name of the supposedrequirements of accumulation. Far from accumulation and mass consump-tion being warring opposites, the premise would now be that accumulationcould be driven forward precisely by finding outlets for production inmeeting the growing requirements, the needs, of the mass of the population.

An effective industrialization strategy would thus base its “expandedreproduction” on ever increasing exchanges between city and country,between industry and agriculture, with food and raw materials moving tothe cities, and consumer goods and producer goods (with the latter definedto include centrally such modest items as scythes, iron ploughs, hoes, axes,fertilizers, and the like) moving to the countryside. Collective saving gearedto investment could then be drawn essentially, if not exclusively, from anexpanding economic pool. Note that such a socialism of expanded repro-duction makes the betterment of the people’s lot a short-term rather thanlong-term project and thus promises a sounder basis for an effective (ratherthan merely rhetorical) alliance of workers, peasants, and others, and for ademocratic road to revolutionary socialism.


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It is important to note that this emphasis is not intended to underem-phasize the potential importance of South-South relations, or of thoselinkages, as foreshadowed in the World Social Forum, that seek, multina-tionally, to sponsor a redefinition of the workings of the global economy.Nor, on another level, is it a call for the extirpation, within the nationaleconomy, of any and all market relations—dangerous though these undoubt-edly can be in terms of the possible generation of class differentiation thatthey 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 egali-tarian, collectively premised and popularly centred, it can more thancounterbalance the costs of any judicious deployment of the market, whilealso avoiding the risk of overburdening public enterprise and the planningmechanism unduly. Yet a self-consciousness about societal transition awayfrom market power and entrepreneurial class interest is obviously crucial.Quite simply, the bourgeoisie, foreign or domestic, plays no role that couldjustify any long-run claim to have inordinate wealth or superordinate power.

Democratizing the Struggle: Revolution by “Structural Reform” andPopular Empowerment One final term that we need to interrogate hereis the word “revolution” itself. It is a tempting word because we know justhow big and aggressive is the capitalist enemy that must be overcome inorder to realize anything even proximate to a socialist alternative. But perhaps,despite this, it is just a bit too tempting, and somewhat too romantic, anotion. What we have seen so far suggests that the “socialist revolution”will not spring easily from some sudden social paroxysm nor be consoli-dated quickly or well, even (or perhaps especially) under the leadership ofsome unusually beneficent and wise vanguard.

It is in rethinking along such lines—particularly about southern Africa,but also more broadly—that I’ve been drawn, over the years, to writingabout “structural reform” by such authors as André Gorz and BorisKagarlitsky.19 The point of their argument is relevant to both the phase ofbuilding a successful movement of revolutionary intent and to “buildingsocialism” 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 reformson the one hand [and] reformism of a neo-capitalist or ‘social-democratic’type” on the other. He writes that ”If [most often] immediate socialism isnot possible, neither is the achievement of reforms directly destructive ofcapitalism. [Yet] those who reject all lesser reforms on the grounds that theyare merely reformist are in fact rejecting the whole possibility of a transitionalstrategy 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 liesin the insistence that any reform, to be structural, must not be comfortablyself-contained (a mere “improvement”), but must, instead, be allowed self-consciously to implicate other “necessary” reforms that flow from it as partof an emerging and ongoing project of structural transformation in a coher-ently Left-ward direction. Secondly, a structural reform cannot come fromon high: it must root itself in popular initiatives in such a way as to leave aresidue of further empowerment—in terms of growing enlightenment/selfconsciousness and in terms of organizational capacity—for the vast mass ofthe population who thus strengthen themselves for further struggles, furthervictories. “The emancipation of the working class [and its allies] can becomea total objective only if in the course of the struggle they have learnedsomething about self management, initiative and collective decision—in aword, 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 criti-cism from the likes of Alex Callinicos (a noted “big bang” theorist of socialistrevolution) in a subsequent issue of NLR.21 The latter chose to see myadvocacy 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 actuallyeven bolder than Callinicos suggests and I would stand by it as an appro-priate amendment to much conventional Left language.

Quite specifically, I argued that there is very good reason to insist thata 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 ofrevolution itself, and that that’s a good thing too. It suggests a model ofsocialist activity that can force the most unromantic reading of the oddsagainst any very immediate transformation of existing capitalist circum-stances, and yet permit a definition of sites and modes of real struggle anda concretization of tactics and strategies that opens up the possibility ofmoving towards just such a transformation. Moreover, it promises to under-score the saliency of substantive issues (rather than vague revolutionarynostrums) in terms of which leaderships can most effectively be held todemocratic account by their constituencies, and these very constituencies canbecome ever more conscious of their very “classness” —not as some theoret-ical 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 thelessons articulated above, to abandon reasoned strategy in favour of militantrhetoric, and to abandon, in favour of vanguardist self righteousness, processesof negotiation as between and among comrades. The slow, negotiated accre-tion of a culture of socialist “common-sense,” within which conflicting claimson the Left—as to specific issues or as to overall direction—can be democ-ratically debated and resolved, is key. As distinct from a liberal consensus asground for political contestation, we need to work towards establishing anemerging socialist consensus, not at the expense of politics and difference,but as the ground for their fullest expression and debate: for real debate andstruggle, in short, but on the increasingly agreed grounds of shared socialistand democratic premises, not capitalist and liberal ones.22

Callinicos flags many dangers in such an approach. Certainly, one mustn’tbe naïve: the side of resistance to revolutionary change—the dominant class,its military, and its external backers (as in many of the struggles againstwhite power during the initial years of liberation struggle in southern Africa)—will often play pretty violent hardball indeed.23 Then the escalation ofconfrontation may sometimes, of necessity, pass beyond the boundaries ofanything like “structural reform” —though with long-term costs to socialistand democratic outcomes that can be very severe. After all, the cost, humanand political, of such necessary escalation is one of the main reasons whymany 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 ourgovernments on the wrong side of struggles for freedom in the GlobalSouth—and continue to do so.

Yet to simultaneously caricature the claims (and virtues), under manyconditions of revolutionary endeavour, of structural reform and the creativetensions that it can promise, seems to mean, by definition, no opposingleaders, no conflicting political organizations or popular initiatives, no differ-ences of opinion about strategy and tactics—in effect, no politics— withinthe broader movement that claims to be seeking a transition to socialism.Indeed, when a thinker like Callinicos comes up against the complexitiesthat real politics can reveal, he tends to back away and merely invoke thatmagic talisman “mass struggle” to outrank competing arguments. If we havelearned nothing else from the history of “socialism,” it is that substitutingthe pure flame of “revolutionism” for the hard calculation and subtle politicsof structural reform is a recipe for disaster.

As Boris Kagarlitsky concludes in a text that emphasizes the crucial poten-tial importance of “structural reform” to the struggle for socialism, Marxhimself:

Was convinced that reforms prepare not only for revolution but also forsocialism. In other words, for Marx the value of reforms was not in that theyundermined the old system—sometimes they even strengthen it—but intheir creation of elements of the new system within the framework of theold society. This theme in Marx’s theory has been completely ignored byrevolutionaries and reformist social democracy alike.24

But such a silence cannot be allowed to continue if success in a long, wearingstruggle for socialism is to become a real possibility.

It would be naïve to think that all would then be clear sailing, even if wewere to get our questions more “right” than we have and were to begin toact 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 accidentthat, as I have quoted on several occasions elsewhere and do so again here,Adam Przeworski could dourly conclude of the present global conjuncturethat: “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 genuinelyliberatory socialism is not actually as “unfeasible” as all that. Difficult torealize, certainly; risky for those who try to do so, definitely; but it will bewell worth the candle when, in its full and expansive meaning, it ultimatelysucceeds in coming to pass.

Notes

1. John S. Saul, Professor Emeritus of Social and Political Science at York University and aContributing Editor of Studies in Political Economy (SPE), was also, in 1979, a foundingeditor 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 20books 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): “Thereason is that, if nothing else, Marx was an extremely intelligent man, and economic deter-minism is an extremely silly, not to say incoherent, idea in which to believe.” Kolko’s 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 myDevelopment After Globalization: Theory and Practice for the Embattled South in the NewImperial Age (Delhi, London, & New York, Halifax and Durban/Pietermaritzburg: ThreeEssays Collective, Zed Press, Fernwood Press, and University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006)pp. 53–68.

7. John Gray, ”America’s 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 ofWitwatersrand Press, 2007). What follows in this section, as in this article as a whole, is asynthesis of my own conclusions about the most relevant socialist themes to presently pursuein 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 manydecades 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, thestruggle 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. 151–152.13. 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 relationshipsthat have more than economic meaning to people,” p. 13. Elsewhere, Barker speaks of the

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existence, in Africa and beyond, of “thousands of activist groups addressing the issues ofhousing, functioning of local markets, availability of local social services, provision andstandard of education and abusive and damaging working conditions” (in his “DebatingGlobalization: Critique of Colin Leys,” Southern Africa Report 12/4 (September, 1997)).

14. Ralph Miliband, Socialism in a Sceptical Age (London: Verso, 1995), p. 192.15. Miliband, Socialism, pp. 194–195.16. Material in this paragraph is drawn from my book Development after Globalization, especially

chapter 3 (“Identifying Class, Classifying Difference”), where this overall argument is spelledout at much greater length.

17. I have cited Amin’s concept of “delinking” in preparing the essay “The Empire of Capital,Recolonization and Resistance: Rethinking the Political Economy of Development in theGlobal South,” included in my Revolutionary Traveller, pp. 354–367. Here, I have only mildlyrecrafted that argument for present purposes.

18. I first cited Thomas’s formulation in the book that I edited, Mozambique, A Difficult Road:The Transition to Socialism in Mozambique (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985), andevoked it to complement Amin’s concept of “delinking” in the essay cited above (inRevolutionary Traveller).

19. 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, “SouthAfrica: Between ‘Barbarism’ and ‘Structural Reform,” and chapter 5, “Structural Reform: AModel for the Revolutionary Transformation of South Africa.” They form the basis for thepresent argument.

20. See, as quoted several times in these paragraphs, André Gorz, Socialism and Revolution (NewHaven: Anchor, 1973).

21. See Alex Callinicos, “Reform and Revolution in South Africa: A Reply to John Saul,” in NewLeft Review 195 (1992), as well as my reply in the same issue, under the title “John Saulreplies” (upon which I draw here).

22. Of course, as argued above, democratic means will be necessary not only to facilitate “negoti-ation” 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,” withwhatever benign excuses they may make for being so) to the humane purposes that theyostensibly seek to help advance. In fact, genuine democracy in the realm of political poweris every bit as important as “socialist structures” in the productive realm (although these, asexplicit in any meaningful definition of “socialism,” can and should be democratic as well).

23. Gorz himself keeps returning to this crucial point as well, noting that “the bourgeoisie willnever relinquish power without a struggle and without being compelled to do so by revolu-tionary 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 “struc-tural reform” will ignore this at their peril. As I emphasize in the present paragraph, this isone of the grim realities (the other side is trying too!) that has helped distort revolutionarymovements throughout history; even a movement that is more democratic and more opento the full range of possibilities that a “structural reform” sensibility permits will be challengedby such a fact.

24. Boris Kagarlitsky, The Dialectic of Change (London: Verso, 1998).25. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991),

p. 122.


Is Socialism Still an Alternative

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