I posted the article partly, to get your response. I thought that he said
over and over again that his point was that real socialism means that the
workers own the means of production, not the state.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roger Loran
Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81@xxxxxxx" for DMARC)
Sent: Sunday, June 28, 2015 9:59 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Socialism Means Abolishing the Distinction
Between Bosses and Employees
Like I said, if you call everything socialism then the word socialism means
nothing. I do note, however, that after distinguishing state capitalism from
socialism this author goes right ahead and accepts that if a group calls
itself socialist it is socialist and then what does he get? Socialists have
captured state power in France?
On 6/28/2015 9:43 PM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
Socialism Means Abolishing the Distinction Between Bosses andNews Analysis
Employees Saturday, 27 June 2015 00:00 By Richard D. Wolff, Truthout |
An enterprise only qualifies as "socialist" once the distinctioneconomies.
between employers and employees within it has been abolished. (Image:
Jared Rodriguez / Truthout) The support of readers like you got this
story published - and helps Truthout stay free from corporate
advertising. Can you sustain our work with a tax-deductible donation
today?
Regulated private capitalism. State capitalism. Socialism. These three
systems are entirely different from each other. We need to understand
the differences between them to move beyond today's dysfunctional
With confidence waning in whether modern private capitalism can trulysocialism.
be fixed, the debate shifts to a choice between two systemic
alternatives that we must learn to keep straight: state capitalism and
State capitalism exists when the state apparatus - rather than a groupbusinesses.
of private citizens - positions state officials to function as
capitalist employers. Thus, under state capitalism it is state
officials placed in charge of enterprises who hire employees, organize
and supervise their activities within enterprises, sell the resulting
outputs (goods or services), receive the sales revenues and thus
realize any profits. State officials occupy the key directorial
positions within such state capitalist enterprises.
In contrast, in private capitalist enterprises, shareholders assign
these positions instead to private individuals - not state officials -
within structures such as corporate boards of directors. Hybrid
capitalist enterprises (part private and part state) also exist. Goods
and services produced in state capitalist enterprises are often sold
in markets alongside those produced by private capitalist enterprises.
Likewise, state capitalist enterprises typically buy their inputs in
markets alongside parallel purchases made by private capitalist
The Difference Between State Capitalism and Socialism In all countriestoo.
today, state capitalist enterprises coexist and transact in markets
with private capitalist enterprises. The proportions of the different
types of capitalist enterprise vary from country to country. Only in
some countries are state capitalist enterprises the socially dominant
kind of enterprise. In the United States, state capitalist enterprises
are definitely not socially dominant, but they do exist: Amtrak, TVA,
public colleges and universities, the post office, the Bank of North
Dakota, public power companies owned and operated by thousands of US
municipalities, and the New York City subway system are all examples.
Some state capitalist enterprises in the US obtain subsidies from the
government, but then many private capitalist enterprises obtain subsidies,
The state directly regulates state capitalism. It does this throughthe multiple forms that socialism will take.
the state officials it assigns to direct state enterprise activities.
The state indirectly regulates private capitalism. It does this by
means of rules and laws that limit the enterprise-directing decisions
made by private capitalists.
AN ENTERPRISE ONLY QUALIFIES AS "SOCIALIST" ONCE THE DISTINCTION
BETWEEN EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYEES WITHIN IT HAS BEEN ABOLISHED.
The fact that the state regulates private capitalist enterprises and
operates state capitalist enterprises does not reduce the capitalist
structure of an economy. So long as employers, private or state, hire
laborers to produce commodities and generate profits that the
employers exclusively receive, the economy has a capitalist structure.
So long as it is exclusively the employers (whether private, state or
hybrid; whether more or less regulated) who decide how to use those
profits, it is a capitalist structure.
An enterprise only qualifies as "socialist" once the distinction
between employers and employees within it has been abolished. When
workers collectively and democratically produce, receive and
distribute the profits their labor generates, the enterprise becomes
socialist. Such enterprises can then become the base of a socialist
economy - its micro-level foundation
- supporting whatever ownership system (public and/or private) and
distribution system (planning and/or market) constitute that economy's
macro level.
Actual large-scale socialism would thus predominantly entail worker
cooperative enterprises such as these. Like the capitalist enterprises
that once emerged from European feudalism, these new cooperative
enterprises would seek to solve problems such as how to organize their
interdependencies with one another and with the public, how to relate
to private and public property, and how to manage transitions from
smaller- to larger-scale enterprises. Different forms of societal
socialisms will emerge: some with markets, private property and large
corporations, and others with centralized and/or decentralized
planning systems, socialized property, constraints on enterprise size
etc. Debates, experiments and choices among them will likely characterize
Previous economic systems likewise often displayed coexistences amongcombinations of private and state enterprises.
more or less regulated private enterprises and state enterprises. In
slave societies, for example, alongside the private masters of slaves
working on plantations, states often owned and operated slave
plantations. In feudal societies, private feudal manors interacted
with the feudal manors operated by kings, to take a European example.
In short, slavery and feudalism, like capitalism, display varying
Historical Debates Within Socialismpolitical decisions.
The European socialism that emerged in the19th century was not
initially much concerned with issues of state versus private. It began
and evolved - especially with the work of Marx and his followers - as
a systemic critique of capitalism, not of regulation or the balance
between state and private enterprises. Socialists wanted to go beyond
capitalism to an altogether different system, one that fundamentally
rejected the basic division between employers and employees.
Socialists generally favored organizing society as "classless" where
all would be workers who democratically made society's basic economic and
During the 19th century, as the socialist criticism of capitalism grewstate to secure class divisions.
and spread globally alongside capitalism itself, socialists debated
how to accomplish the transition from capitalism to socialism. The
debate fixed upon the state as the key means to make that transition.
If capitalism's critics could capture the state, state power could
then be utilized for the subsequent transition to socialism. The state
could, under socialists, usher the new system into being.
A transition to socialistically reorganized enterprises, once
accomplished by a state, would also transform the state as an
institution. With capitalists' power over the state removed, that
power would be wielded instead by the workers controlling the
socialized enterprises. Ending classes would end the need for a repressive
Both Marx's early and important association with the anarchist Mikhailpowers.
Bakunin and Lenin's later concept of the "withering away of the state"
shared presumptions that any state apparatus remaining in socialism
would
(a) be reduced to coordinating socialized enterprises' interactions,
and (b) depend on workers' socialized enterprises for its resources and
AS SOME PUT IT, SOCIALISM EITHER SHOULD OR COULD ONLY BE ACHIEVED BYsocialism.
MEANS OF EVOLUTION, NOT REVOLUTION.
Some socialists have believed in and strategized for a revolutionary
seizure of state power from capitalists and their associates. They
have sought to replicate the action of revolutionaries in 1789 France
who took state power from the feudal lords, the feudal king and their
associates. Where the French revolutionary state enabled and
facilitated the transition from feudalism to capitalism, a socialist
revolution would proceed similarly for a transition from capitalism to
Other socialists have disagreed and argued instead for awhy).
parliamentary/electoral strategy. They have argued that socialists
should form political parties and win elections as the way to capture
the state. As some put it, socialism either should or could only be
achieved by means of evolution, not revolution. As socialism became a
powerful global movement, socialists pursued one or the other or both
strategies depending on the specific conditions in each place and time.
Since 1900, proponents of both strategies claimed some victories. In
Western Europe, socialists built political parties that eventually
captured state power such as socialists in France possess today. In
Russia, China and Cuba, revolutions brought state power to socialists.
However, neither socialist strategy took the next step. Socialists in
power could not or would not make transitions to socialism (and ever
since have furiously debated whether that is what happened and if so,
Looking back now, it seems clear that socialists in power moved toand Cuba.
economic systems that mixed state capitalism with more or less
regulated private capitalism. That is, they used state power to
construct larger or smaller state capitalist sectors alongside often
heavily regulated private capitalist sectors. In Western Europe, the
state capitalist sectors tended to be smaller than those in Russia, China
Stalin Spreads Confusioncapitalism from state capitalism from socialism.
Shortly after the 1917 Soviet revolution, Lenin described the Bolsheviks'
achievement as having constructed "a state capitalism" that he
applauded as a necessary step toward a transition to socialism. By the
early 1930s, the subsequent leader, Stalin, made a pointedly different
declaration: Socialism had been achieved in the USSR. Yet precisely
what Lenin had named state capitalism remained the Soviet industrial
reality; indeed, Stalin extended state capitalism into Soviet agriculture.
CONCEPTUAL CONFUSIONS SET IN ABOUT WHAT EXACTLY SEPARATED
STATE-REGULATED PRIVATE CAPITALISM FROM STATE CAPITALISM FROM SOCIALISM.
In effect, Stalin had pronounced a new and daring definitional equation:
State capitalism was socialism. Many other socialists, including those
who otherwise denounced Stalin and reviled Stalinism, sooner or later
agreed with this new definition. So too did most of socialism's
enemies. In practice, when socialists achieved state power, they
either could not or would not use that power to go beyond varying
mixtures of regulated private and state capitalism. Yet socialists and
their enemies increasingly defined those mixtures as socialism
(although some socialists always disagreed and promoted other
formulations of what the key terms meant). Conceptual confusions set
in about what exactly, if anything, separated state-regulated private
For most of the last century those confusions proliferated across theprivate capitalism.
statements of workers, capitalists, politicians, academics, media
personalities and the broad general public. For example, the term
"socialism" was often applied to almost anything done by or through
state power (such as President Obama's Affordable Care Act or the
IRS's efforts to increase tax collection). In much of Europe and
beyond, socialism refers mostly to the broad social welfare results
(national health insurance, pensions etc.) of using government power
to regulate, control and tax what are still largely private capitalisms.
A similar concept of socialism is more or less embraced by US
presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Thus, he seeks higher mass
consumption levels and better working conditions through state
regulatory policies that redistribute power and wealth from
corporations and the rich to the rest of the society. Yet Sanders'
celebration of worker cooperatives suggests some interest in going
further toward a non-capitalist system. Definitions of socialism in
places like China and the USSR specified socially dominant state
capitalist sectors with only marginal allowances for heavily regulated
The Limitations of State Capitalism and Regulated Private Capitalismcapitalisms did.
Many socialists struggled and eventually succeeded, often at great
costs, to construct regulated private capitalisms that delivered
public services, wealth and income redistribution, and social welfare
far beyond what less regulated private capitalisms had done. Other
socialists went further to implement state capitalisms that prevailed
in their countries. Those could and often did deliver public services
and social welfare beyond what even worker-friendly regulated private
Yet socialists in power who presided over combinations of regulatedsocial consequences.
private capitalisms and state capitalisms suffered two severe
limitations. First, they could not prevent capitalist crises with profound
Second, they could not build sufficient confidence in or loyalty tosocialism.
the systems they constructed to prevent those crises from provoking
reversions from state to private capitalism and from more to less
regulated private capitalism. The capitalist crises of the 1970s thus
led to neoliberalism and the crises of the late 1980s, to the
implosions in Eastern Europe. Even the deep global crisis since 2008
could not stop that reversion as many socialists and socialist parties
embraced austerity policies while failing seriously to reregulate.
Because the mixtures of highly regulated private and state capitalisms
were often run by socialists and called socialism, their decline over
recent decades has been widely and mistakenly understood as the "end" of
The workers in state capitalisms that were defined as socialism (therich.
USSR, China etc.) almost never themselves collectively and
democratically directed state capitalist enterprises. That key
function was reserved for state officials who had replaced the
corporate boards of directors. In state capitalist enterprises, the
workers did not have command of and responsibility for their
enterprises' performances. In the aftermath of their crises, the
"actually existing socialisms" of the late 20th century exhausted the
political and historical possibilities of such state capitalisms.
Similarly, the welfare-state-regulated private capitalisms have shown,
through their periods of neoliberalism since the 1970s and then
post-2008 austerity policies, that they were fundamentally insecure
and thus temporary. The New Deal in the US and social democracies in
Europe proved unable to reproduce the political alliances that once
forced their states to enable and facilitate their emergence. They
were rolled back in a determined counterattack by corporations and the
Securing social democratic reforms of the sort won in the 1930s (suchcapitalism.
as taxation of corporations and the rich to support mass social
services and
jobs) requires much more than mere state regulation of private capitalism.
The forces behind private capitalism mobilized to retake full control
of the state in ways designed to preclude any repeat of New Deal or
social democratic responses to crises. Socialist parties and movements
failed to preserve the New Deal and social democracy, and failed to
prevent or destroy austerity policies after 2008. They thereby
exhausted the political appeal and foundation of socialisms based on
state regulation of private capitalism as utterly as the experiences
of the USSR and China largely exhausted the socialisms based on state
Does Socialism Have a Future?social movements and social critics.
If socialism is to have a future, it will likely have to cut its
residual ties to both state-regulated private capitalism and state
capitalism. It will have to come full circle in the 21st century to
rediscover and update its 19th century differentiation from capitalism
as a fundamentally different mode of organizing the production and
distribution of goods and services.
Self-criticism by socialists must account for the decline of socialist
parties in Western Europe as well as the collapse of state capitalisms
("actually existing socialisms"). Doing so culminates in new
definitions of socialism for the 21st century focused increasingly on
democratizing the workplace - at the micro-level. That is the key
change that was missing from previous socialisms. It must be added to
old definitions that were over-focused on substituting socialized for
privately owned means of production and substituting planning for
markets. This is the significance of the remarkable recent Cuban
policy decision to refocus its economic development strategy
relatively more on worker cooperatives and relatively less on state
enterprises. This is likewise the significance of the remarkable surge
of interest in workers' self-directed enterprises among anti-capitalist
Capitalism is relocating from its old centers in Western Europe, Northcan.
America and Japan, to new centers in China, India, Brazil and so on.
This relocation is also generating a vast new global criticism of the
private capitalism that proclaimed its absolute victory in the
aftermath of the USSR's implosion in 1989. Workers in the old centers
are slowly grasping that capitalism's relocation will no longer offset
their rising exploitation with rising consumption. They are feeling
abandoned by capitalism and raising increasingly critical voices. They
do not want a socialism defined in terms of Soviet or other state
capitalisms that had serious problems and imploded. They do not want a
private capitalism whose regulations proved reversible and whose
qualities of decline they deeply resent. A new socialism built around
democratized workplaces appeals to them in ways old socialisms no longer
Socialism in and for the 21st century must now define itself in cleardemocracyatwork.info.
distinction from both regulated private capitalism and state capitalism.
Only then can we begin our strategic debates over precisely which
socialist goal to set and pursue.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
RICHARD D. WOLFF
Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of
Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He
is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in
International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. He
also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan.
Earlier he taught economics at Yale University (1967-1969) and at the
City College of the City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994,
he was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Paris
(France), I (Sorbonne). His work is available at rdwolff.com and at
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Socialism Means Abolishing the Distinction Between Bosses and
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. An enterprise only qualifies as "socialist" once the distinction
between employers and employees within it has been abolished. (Image:
Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)
. http://truth-out.org/members/donateThe support of readers like you
got this story published - and helps Truthout stay free from corporate
advertising. Can you sustain our work with a tax-deductible donation
Regulated private capitalism. State capitalism. Socialism. These threeeconomies.
systems are entirely different from each other. We need to understand
the differences between them to move beyond today's dysfunctional
With confidence waning in whether modern private capitalism can trulysocialism.
be fixed, the debate shifts to a choice between two systemic
alternatives that we must learn to keep straight: state capitalism and
State capitalism exists when the state apparatus - rather than a groupbusinesses.
of private citizens - positions state officials to function as
capitalist employers. Thus, under state capitalism it is state
officials placed in charge of enterprises who hire employees, organize
and supervise their activities within enterprises, sell the resulting
outputs (goods or services), receive the sales revenues and thus
realize any profits. State officials occupy the key directorial
positions within such state capitalist enterprises.
In contrast, in private capitalist enterprises, shareholders assign
these positions instead to private individuals - not state officials -
within structures such as corporate boards of directors. Hybrid
capitalist enterprises (part private and part state) also exist. Goods
and services produced in state capitalist enterprises are often sold
in markets alongside those produced by private capitalist enterprises.
Likewise, state capitalist enterprises typically buy their inputs in
markets alongside parallel purchases made by private capitalist
The Difference Between State Capitalism and Socialism In all countriestoo.
today, state capitalist enterprises coexist and transact in markets
with private capitalist enterprises. The proportions of the different
types of capitalist enterprise vary from country to country. Only in
some countries are state capitalist enterprises the socially dominant
kind of enterprise. In the United States, state capitalist enterprises
are definitely not socially dominant, but they do exist: Amtrak, TVA,
public colleges and universities, the post office, the Bank of North
Dakota, public power companies owned and operated by thousands of US
municipalities, and the New York City subway system are all examples.
Some state capitalist enterprises in the US obtain subsidies from the
government, but then many private capitalist enterprises obtain subsidies,
The state directly regulates state capitalism. It does this throughthe multiple forms that socialism will take.
the state officials it assigns to direct state enterprise activities.
The state indirectly regulates private capitalism. It does this by
means of rules and laws that limit the enterprise-directing decisions
made by private capitalists.
An enterprise only qualifies as "socialist" once the distinction
between employers and employees within it has been abolished.
The fact that the state regulates private capitalist enterprises and
operates state capitalist enterprises does not reduce the capitalist
structure of an economy. So long as employers, private or state, hire
laborers to produce commodities and generate profits that the
employers exclusively receive, the economy has a capitalist structure.
So long as it is exclusively the employers (whether private, state or
hybrid; whether more or less regulated) who decide how to use those
profits, it is a capitalist structure.
An enterprise only qualifies as "socialist" once the distinction
between employers and employees within it has been abolished. When
workers collectively and democratically produce, receive and
distribute the profits their labor generates, the enterprise becomes
socialist. Such enterprises can then become the base of a socialist
economy - its micro-level foundation
- supporting whatever ownership system (public and/or private) and
distribution system (planning and/or market) constitute that economy's
macro level.
Actual large-scale socialism would thus predominantly entail worker
cooperative enterprises such as these. Like the capitalist enterprises
that once emerged from European feudalism, these new cooperative
enterprises would seek to solve problems such as how to organize their
interdependencies with one another and with the public, how to relate
to private and public property, and how to manage transitions from
smaller- to larger-scale enterprises. Different forms of societal
socialisms will emerge: some with markets, private property and large
corporations, and others with centralized and/or decentralized
planning systems, socialized property, constraints on enterprise size
etc. Debates, experiments and choices among them will likely characterize
Previous economic systems likewise often displayed coexistences amongcombinations of private and state enterprises.
more or less regulated private enterprises and state enterprises. In
slave societies, for example, alongside the private masters of slaves
working on plantations, states often owned and operated slave
plantations. In feudal societies, private feudal manors interacted
with the feudal manors operated by kings, to take a European example.
In short, slavery and feudalism, like capitalism, display varying
Historical Debates Within Socialismpolitical decisions.
The European socialism that emerged in the19th century was not
initially much concerned with issues of state versus private. It began
and evolved - especially with the work of Marx and his followers - as
a systemic critique of capitalism, not of regulation or the balance
between state and private enterprises. Socialists wanted to go beyond
capitalism to an altogether different system, one that fundamentally
rejected the basic division between employers and employees.
Socialists generally favored organizing society as "classless" where
all would be workers who democratically made society's basic economic and
During the 19th century, as the socialist criticism of capitalism grewstate to secure class divisions.
and spread globally alongside capitalism itself, socialists debated
how to accomplish the transition from capitalism to socialism. The
debate fixed upon the state as the key means to make that transition.
If capitalism's critics could capture the state, state power could
then be utilized for the subsequent transition to socialism. The state
could, under socialists, usher the new system into being.
A transition to socialistically reorganized enterprises, once
accomplished by a state, would also transform the state as an
institution. With capitalists' power over the state removed, that
power would be wielded instead by the workers controlling the
socialized enterprises. Ending classes would end the need for a repressive
Both Marx's early and important association with the anarchist Mikhailpowers.
Bakunin and Lenin's later concept of the "withering away of the state"
shared presumptions that any state apparatus remaining in socialism
would
(a) be reduced to coordinating socialized enterprises' interactions,
and (b) depend on workers' socialized enterprises for its resources and
As some put it, socialism either should or could only be achieved bysocialism.
means of evolution, not revolution.
Some socialists have believed in and strategized for a revolutionary
seizure of state power from capitalists and their associates. They
have sought to replicate the action of revolutionaries in 1789 France
who took state power from the feudal lords, the feudal king and their
associates. Where the French revolutionary state enabled and
facilitated the transition from feudalism to capitalism, a socialist
revolution would proceed similarly for a transition from capitalism to
Other socialists have disagreed and argued instead for awhy).
parliamentary/electoral strategy. They have argued that socialists
should form political parties and win elections as the way to capture
the state. As some put it, socialism either should or could only be
achieved by means of evolution, not revolution. As socialism became a
powerful global movement, socialists pursued one or the other or both
strategies depending on the specific conditions in each place and time.
Since 1900, proponents of both strategies claimed some victories. In
Western Europe, socialists built political parties that eventually
captured state power such as socialists in France possess today. In
Russia, China and Cuba, revolutions brought state power to socialists.
However, neither socialist strategy took the next step. Socialists in
power could not or would not make transitions to socialism (and ever
since have furiously debated whether that is what happened and if so,
Looking back now, it seems clear that socialists in power moved toand Cuba.
economic systems that mixed state capitalism with more or less
regulated private capitalism. That is, they used state power to
construct larger or smaller state capitalist sectors alongside often
heavily regulated private capitalist sectors. In Western Europe, the
state capitalist sectors tended to be smaller than those in Russia, China
Stalin Spreads Confusioncapitalism from state capitalism from socialism.
Shortly after the 1917 Soviet revolution, Lenin described the Bolsheviks'
achievement as having constructed "a state capitalism" that he
applauded as a necessary step toward a transition to socialism. By the
early 1930s, the subsequent leader, Stalin, made a pointedly different
declaration: Socialism had been achieved in the USSR. Yet precisely
what Lenin had named state capitalism remained the Soviet industrial
reality; indeed, Stalin extended state capitalism into Soviet agriculture.
Conceptual confusions set in about what exactly separated
state-regulated private capitalism from state capitalism from socialism.
In effect, Stalin had pronounced a new and daring definitional equation:
State capitalism was socialism. Many other socialists, including those
who otherwise denounced Stalin and reviled Stalinism, sooner or later
agreed with this new definition. So too did most of socialism's
enemies. In practice, when socialists achieved state power, they
either could not or would not use that power to go beyond varying
mixtures of regulated private and state capitalism. Yet socialists and
their enemies increasingly defined those mixtures as socialism
(although some socialists always disagreed and promoted other
formulations of what the key terms meant). Conceptual confusions set
in about what exactly, if anything, separated state-regulated private
For most of the last century those confusions proliferated across theprivate capitalism.
statements of workers, capitalists, politicians, academics, media
personalities and the broad general public. For example, the term
"socialism" was often applied to almost anything done by or through
state power (such as President Obama's Affordable Care Act or the
IRS's efforts to increase tax collection). In much of Europe and
beyond, socialism refers mostly to the broad social welfare results
(national health insurance, pensions etc.) of using government power
to regulate, control and tax what are still largely private capitalisms.
A similar concept of socialism is more or less embraced by US
presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Thus, he seeks higher mass
consumption levels and better working conditions through state
regulatory policies that redistribute power and wealth from
corporations and the rich to the rest of the society. Yet Sanders'
celebration of worker cooperatives suggests some interest in going
further toward a non-capitalist system. Definitions of socialism in
places like China and the USSR specified socially dominant state
capitalist sectors with only marginal allowances for heavily regulated
The Limitations of State Capitalism and Regulated Private Capitalismcapitalisms did.
Many socialists struggled and eventually succeeded, often at great
costs, to construct regulated private capitalisms that delivered
public services, wealth and income redistribution, and social welfare
far beyond what less regulated private capitalisms had done. Other
socialists went further to implement state capitalisms that prevailed
in their countries. Those could and often did deliver public services
and social welfare beyond what even worker-friendly regulated private
Yet socialists in power who presided over combinations of regulatedsocial consequences.
private capitalisms and state capitalisms suffered two severe
limitations. First, they could not prevent capitalist crises with profound
Second, they could not build sufficient confidence in or loyalty tosocialism.
the systems they constructed to prevent those crises from provoking
reversions from state to private capitalism and from more to less
regulated private capitalism. The capitalist crises of the 1970s thus
led to neoliberalism and the crises of the late 1980s, to the
implosions in Eastern Europe. Even the deep global crisis since 2008
could not stop that reversion as many socialists and socialist parties
embraced austerity policies while failing seriously to reregulate.
Because the mixtures of highly regulated private and state capitalisms
were often run by socialists and called socialism, their decline over
recent decades has been widely and mistakenly understood as the "end" of
The workers in state capitalisms that were defined as socialism (therich.
USSR, China etc.) almost never themselves collectively and
democratically directed state capitalist enterprises. That key
function was reserved for state officials who had replaced the
corporate boards of directors. In state capitalist enterprises, the
workers did not have command of and responsibility for their
enterprises' performances. In the aftermath of their crises, the
"actually existing socialisms" of the late 20th century exhausted the
political and historical possibilities of such state capitalisms.
Similarly, the welfare-state-regulated private capitalisms have shown,
through their periods of neoliberalism since the 1970s and then
post-2008 austerity policies, that they were fundamentally insecure
and thus temporary. The New Deal in the US and social democracies in
Europe proved unable to reproduce the political alliances that once
forced their states to enable and facilitate their emergence. They
were rolled back in a determined counterattack by corporations and the
Securing social democratic reforms of the sort won in the 1930s (suchcapitalism.
as taxation of corporations and the rich to support mass social
services and
jobs) requires much more than mere state regulation of private capitalism.
The forces behind private capitalism mobilized to retake full control
of the state in ways designed to preclude any repeat of New Deal or
social democratic responses to crises. Socialist parties and movements
failed to preserve the New Deal and social democracy, and failed to
prevent or destroy austerity policies after 2008. They thereby
exhausted the political appeal and foundation of socialisms based on
state regulation of private capitalism as utterly as the experiences
of the USSR and China largely exhausted the socialisms based on state
Does Socialism Have a Future?social movements and social critics.
If socialism is to have a future, it will likely have to cut its
residual ties to both state-regulated private capitalism and state
capitalism. It will have to come full circle in the 21st century to
rediscover and update its 19th century differentiation from capitalism
as a fundamentally different mode of organizing the production and
distribution of goods and services.
Self-criticism by socialists must account for the decline of socialist
parties in Western Europe as well as the collapse of state capitalisms
("actually existing socialisms"). Doing so culminates in new
definitions of socialism for the 21st century focused increasingly on
democratizing the workplace - at the micro-level. That is the key
change that was missing from previous socialisms. It must be added to
old definitions that were over-focused on substituting socialized for
privately owned means of production and substituting planning for
markets. This is the significance of the remarkable recent Cuban
policy decision to refocus its economic development strategy
relatively more on worker cooperatives and relatively less on state
enterprises. This is likewise the significance of the remarkable surge
of interest in workers' self-directed enterprises among anti-capitalist
Capitalism is relocating from its old centers in Western Europe, Northcan.
America and Japan, to new centers in China, India, Brazil and so on.
This relocation is also generating a vast new global criticism of the
private capitalism that proclaimed its absolute victory in the
aftermath of the USSR's implosion in 1989. Workers in the old centers
are slowly grasping that capitalism's relocation will no longer offset
their rising exploitation with rising consumption. They are feeling
abandoned by capitalism and raising increasingly critical voices. They
do not want a socialism defined in terms of Soviet or other state
capitalisms that had serious problems and imploded. They do not want a
private capitalism whose regulations proved reversible and whose
qualities of decline they deeply resent. A new socialism built around
democratized workplaces appeals to them in ways old socialisms no longer
Socialism in and for the 21st century must now define itself in cleardemocracyatwork.info.
distinction from both regulated private capitalism and state capitalism.
Only then can we begin our strategic debates over precisely which
socialist goal to set and pursue.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Richard D. Wolff
Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of
Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He
is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in
International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. He
also teaches classes regularly at the Brecht Forum in Manhattan.
Earlier he taught economics at Yale University (1967-1969) and at the
City College of the City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994,
he was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Paris
(France), I (Sorbonne). His work is available at rdwolff.com and at
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