The case for participatory socialism
We need an alternative based upon socialism, but with emancipatory, participative democracy central, argues John Keeley
The material conditions that shape political consciousness are changing. Despite the Tory election victory, politics is catching up with economics with increasing numbers disillusioned with the political system & capitalist exploitation. People no longer expect to see their standard of living improve and the younger generation are considered lucky if they have a job and a home. The system is failing increasing numbers. More than ever we need an alternative and if we present the case well we really can change the world.
The Material Conditions
Firstly, we need to understand the economics if we want to understand the politics. Finance capital is in a precarious position. For at least the last four decades it has reigned supreme with its neo-liberal ideology based on the free movement of capital & privatisation. The problem is it has been based upon debt, and this debt has now reached unsustainable levels. The crash of 2008 showed us its fragile nature. It is once again heading for a fall.
Finance is an integral part of capitalism. It is supposed to take money from surplus units in the economy and lend it to the parts that offer profitable investment opportunities. If it was just allocating savings to investment and enabling profitable growth there would not be a big problem. However, in recent decades speculation has become an increasingly dominant feature of capitalism. That is, speculation in the sense of newly created money inflating asset prices without any basis in production. So instead of the usual money-commodities-more money (M-C-M’) circulation of capital, which is the essence of capitalism, the production of commodities is not bothered with & we go straight from money to more money (M-M’). As any Marxist will tell you, the problem with this is it is only in the sphere of commodity production that surplus value is extracted from the workers & surplus value is the source of all profit; no commodity production, no profit, no capitalism.
What has been happening is recorded profits have been based more and more upon the fictitious capital of money created with no link to real value. So called ‘Quantitative Easing’ is the most powerful example of this. It is governments buying back their own debt from the banks. Because they will never be able to dump the debt back onto the markets they have in effect been ‘turning to the printing press’. They cannot keep on extending and pretending. The more they delay the bigger the next crash. Capitalism really is living on borrowed time & when ATM’s stop working & supermarket shelves go empty, political consciousness can change overnight
Political Consciousness
Since Labour saved the banking system and so capitalism, gradually the ruling class have been able to create the illusion of fixing the economy. This, along with nationalism is why a large section of the working class voted Tory in the general election. English nationalism was stirred by the Tories with the threat of Scottish nationalists having some power over ‘us’. This ‘them and us’ attitude is also why UKIP are now the third biggest party. Their spectre of ‘Brussels bureaucrats’ or ‘floods of illegal immigrants’ resonates with many workers, fed by a media that maintains class rule by creating such divisions.
100 years ago such nationalism resulted in the slaughter of World War I. The Labour Party sold out the workers then, just as they have always done. This is the problem with a political party that focuses on parliament. Careerists take over and the goal of socialism is continually pushed into the distant future, or dumped entirely and replaced with ‘fairer capitalism’. More than ever though people are looking for an alternative. Labour are lost in history and have no answers. They have abandoned socialism just when we need it. New Labour’s sucking up to ‘aspiration’ is always going to struggle because if you want Tory policies why not vote for the real Tory party? And when we talk of Labour ‘shifting to the left’, without the case made for a real alternative to capitalism, it will all to easily be portrayed as ‘tax and spend’ and ‘handouts for the lazy’.
There are though increasing numbers who have given up on capitalism & the political system. Occupy are their most visible expression of recent times. The Guy Fawkes masks exemplify what many feel about parliament and voting. Joining this movement together with the still important, but declining trade unions in the fight against Tory cuts can be the foundation for challenging the capitalist system itself. An alternative based upon socialism, but with emancipatory, participative democracy central.
Participatory Socialism
Stalinism is dead and many revolutionaries just look like Russian Revolution equivalents of those who re-enact the English Civil War; both groups being very middle class. Social democracy is unaffordable, not because there’s not enough wealth, but because capitalism is based upon profits and social democracy is just a form of capitalism. This ‘road to socialism’ is a hang-over from the post-war boom.
What is needed is an explanation of what socialism really is: the direct, participatory control of the means of production and distribution by all. Not nationalised industries run from Whitehall by bureaucrats answerable to a majority Labour (or Left Unity) government, or run by Commissars of a one-party dictatorship that thinks it knows what’s best for the workers. Rather a system of Communes that take the place of the parliamentary system. A system that is based upon equality of decision-making. This is the real ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ that can quickly lead us to a post-commodity society where money, wages & poverty are abolished.
Left Unity has yet to demonstrate that it is more than a last hurrah of social democrats, and that it really understands, identifies and can embrace a participatory model and create a real alternative that working class people will support. The first steps can be taken by implementing a website that is built bottom-up. That means members are allocated to a local group. For me that would probably mean joining a Folkestone group, even if I was initially the only member. But I would also be a member of a group of a bigger geographical area, Kent, where I can see what other members there are and work with them. Kent might be part of the South East region, or the next level up might simply be England. The website should enable members to organise, debate and vote at the various geographic levels. A model of democracy in line with how we eventually want to run society.
Slogans are important. Whether we call it ‘Participatory Socialism’, ‘Participatory Democracy’ or something else is up for debate. What is crucial is that it is, and feels very different, to today’s politics and career politicians. Anyone agree with me?
5 comments
5 responses to “The case for participatory socialism”
Left Unity is active in movements and campaigns across the left, working to create an alternative to the main political parties.
About Left Unity
Read our manifesto
Left Unity is a member of the European Left Party. 
Read the European Left Manifesto
ACTIVIST CALENDAR
Events and protests from around the movement, and local Left Unity meetings.
ongoing
Just Stop Oil – Slow Marches
Slow marches are still legal (so LOW RISK of arrest), and are extremely effective. The plan is to keep up the pressure on this ecocidal government to stop all new fossil fuel licences.
Saturday 27th April: national march for Palestine
National demonstration.
Ceasefire NOW! Stop the Genocide in Gaza: Assemble 12 noon Central London
Full details to follow
More events »
GET UPDATES
Sign up to the Left Unity email newsletter.
CAMPAIGNING MATERIALS
Get the latest Left Unity resources.
You started your article off so well , John. Then your “solution” fell back on a 19th century anarchist dreamworld , of capitalism being replaced by “a system of Communes” ! Sorry , John, here in the real world of globalised , and financialised, monopoly capitalism – which is busy rolling back even the right to strike , as well as all the post 1945 Welfare State gains, a credible party of the Left needs to have a rather more credible plan for society than this if it is to win mass support.
I’m afraid that any party of the Left worth its salt will have to embrace the hard nitty gritty realities of offering, through hard work participating in the democratic process, a comprehensive socialist National Plan for economic and social reconstruction to an electorate offered only neoliberal free market claptrap from all the major parties, and an acceptance of the domination of market forces by even those supposedly “anti austerity” parties like the Greens, Plaid, and the SNP.
Far from the state “withering away” under a serious socialist government within a short period of taking office – or some grand cathartic “revolutionary event” overnight shifting our society to an era of socialist plenty or structureless “free associations of producer citizens” , as anarchists like John believe – there will be a long, long, violent and difficult, transitional, transformational period, on a national and multinational scale. During this decades long period a series of co-operating nation-based democratic socialist workers states will have to be organised with a discipline and centralised planning akin to Britain during WWII. Also, the medium term stages of such a transformation can only be on the basis of a mixed economy – as our Left Unity Aims section of our Constitution clearly states. To believe anything else is simply to believe in political wishful thinking.
A comprehensively planned democratic workers socialist state is not “Stalinism”, John, Anarchist dreams of doing away with the need for centralised democratic workers state in short order , simply segue today with the cynical “shrink the state” objectives of globalised capitalism. The point is not to “abolish the state” – or ignore the opportunities for political progress provided by bourgeois democracy . The point is to capture the state democratic institutions via political action (as with the current Syriza and Podemos’ examples) , backed by building mass action beyond the parliamentary institutions.
John,
Thanks for your comment. I think you misunderstand my position. Probably because I’m trying to get the ‘participatory’ message across.
Just how we get from capitalism to communism is still very much up for debate; it hasn’t been down anywhere yet. We are presented with essentially three ways:
1. Anarchism – no need for any workers’ state acting as the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as councils/communes/soviets essentially take us straight to communism almost overnight
2. Communism – the need for the working class to be organised & to seize power, set up a workers’ state & through a transitional period abolish all classes & realise a classless society
3. Social Democracy – elect to parliament a working class party that legislates in the interests of the workers & bit by bit legislates a classless society into being
I’m very much in the tradition of the 2nd option, communism, not anarchism. If you (re)-read Lenin’s The State & Revolution, you will see that my position is not radically different. Just like Lenin my emphasis is on communes (soviets/councils) implementing direct, participative democracy, not on parliament & parliamentary legislation. That doesn’t mean we ignore parliament, neither does it mean that we want a one-party dictatorship pretending to be the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Bolsheviks were unable to give all power to the soviets during the civil war & afterwards didn’t want to because it would have meant the peasant class being in the driving seat. Isolated the Soviet Union was unable to progress to a classless society & became a one-party dictatorship.
Today we do not have a peasant class of any significance to complicate matters. This is why we can have a parallel system of communes to challenge the legitimacy of capitalist, parliamentary rule. Whether the working class will form together as one party or a looser movement during the transitional period is still to be seen. I suspect the days of only party members taking positions of power are not to be repeated. I may be proved wrong though.
Left Unity, as the name suggests, would presumably like anarchists, communists & social democrats to work together where they can. Anarchists will foolishly refuse all parliamentary work & decry anything using the term ‘state’. But they do remind us of the need to get to a classless society ASAP otherwise risk a new bureaucracy ruling over us, whether career parliamentarians or commissar apparatchiks.
Suppose we won. Suppose that we have a legitimate Left Unity government in power. Assuming we remain a democratic socialist party, how do we ensure that at the next election we are not swept out of power by an electorate who are frightened by the instability that inevitably followed and swayed by a well-funded, immoral and ruthless capitalist reaction? I agree with John P that the LU government will have to hold the commanding heights of the economy very tightly indeed, given the forces that will be ranged against us, but I do think that to persuade most people that socialism is indeed for them, and gain their long-term trust, it will be necessary to ensure local participatory decision-making processes are integral to the socialist economy and society.
Tim,
You appear to be supporting the ‘parliament legislating socialism into being’ route. Parliament is just one aspect of the state. For the people to take control of society & abolish classes we need people actively participating at the local level. This requires something like communes/councils/soviets. Along the lines of the Paris Commune & the Petrograd Soviet, even Barcelona 1936. People doing the politics directly, not just voting for the ‘workers’ party’ whether that’s LU or not. That does preclude a LU parliamentary majority nationalising the commanding heights. But that would be just the beginning.
Politics is a lot more than parliament, & socialism is a lot more than voting.
I have a lot of time for the idea of developing separate representative bodies to (among other things) bypass the corrupt farce that is parliamentary politics. I wish I could see it happening, but so far I can’t. Not that I can see the Left winning through the aforesaid farce either…