socialist • www.gli-manchester.net

[This article draws on the plenary “Are we socialists, and what do we mean by “socialism”?]

Blair. Alex Tsipras. Pol Pot. Gramsci. Stalin. What do they have in common?

Answer: they’ve all called themselves socialist at some point.

Socialism is clearly a slippery thing to define, then.

Khaled Mahmood, Labour Education Foundation (Pakistan), says it means ‘production for the satisfaction of human needs and not profit’. But what does that look like in reality?

It’s easy to see what’s wrong with the current system. Capitalism entails a lack of freedom – instead we are slaves to ‘capitalism, competition and greed’. Such an ideology is inculcated into the young virtually from birth.

Pakistan knows the worst of capitalism, with military control upholding the power of corporations and corrupt politicians in a country where 70% live in poverty, leading people commit suicide due to their hunger. The majority of Pakistani women are illiterate, and most children in rural areas have stunted growth.

Yet over 60% of Pakistan’s budget goes to (largely foreign) debt repayments. Why? Rulers present and past have taken out huge loans for themselves, then stashed it in offshore accounts. Another 30% of the budget goes to the military.

Social policy gets just 10% of government spending. That includes 0.5% on health and 1.5% on education. What kind of justice is that?

In such a despotic context, Derek Keenan (Strathclyde University, UK) can safely assert that ‘the state is not the friend of the working class’. Socialism, for Keenan, must be anti-state – a libertarian socialism that entails a world without bosses, either in economic or political spheres. ‘The two can’t be separated’. Getting back to basics, state ownership is not the same thing as socialism.

In Bakunin’s words, “Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality”. An order based on unmerited hierarchy cannot be the basis for utopia.

Socialism must be libertarian and democratic, therefore. But it must also be revolutionary – ‘those with power now won’t give it up freely.’

Yet people are often scared to talk about these ideas. As the Marxist Slavoj Zizek has noted, it’s much easier to imagine end of life on earth than a radical change in capitalism. Where’s the utopian dream of William Morris, or Pataud and Pouget whose book was confidently titled ‘How we shall bring about the revolution’?

Perhaps it’s a loss of vision following the collapse of the USSR that has crushed all talk of a hopeful future. We’ve seen new elites rise under red flags, neoliberal hegemony, and left retreating into mantras or accepting society as it is. The post-crash lack of left revival speaks for itself.

It’s not for lack of inspiring examples, however. The Paris Commune, workers’ soviets in 1905 and 1917, the Spanish Revolution from 1936-38, Portugal’s 1974 revolution, the Zapatista movement from 1994-present, workers’ control in Argentina in the early noughties, and workers’ self-management in the current Bolivarian revolution (while fighting state bureaucracy and capitalism) – all these cases show there are alternatives to grasp at. Why aren’t we?

There’s a simple underlying current in these examples: worker and community self-management of the workplace and society, and directly democratic structures of administration. In the long run, they strive for a transformation of social relations and the abolition of wage labour.

But for Keenan, these can’t be achieved from up high – salvation isn’t a party affair, comrades. ‘A new Lenin is not around the corner, and if he was he might be about to mug you’. It’s a line worth remembering, because politics is too important to be left to politicians.

Where does the GLI stand in relation to all this? It can play a crucial role in stimulating and leading new ideas on the left and in the union movement – embracing a plurality of social movements and socialist organisations to catalyse autonomous activity from below. But looking deeper, can the unions really be schools of socialism? ‘It never struck me as so in 30 years, though I did get told off a few times!’ Keenan (half) jokes.

To twist a phrase, is another unionism possible – one that is democratic, libertarian, revolutionary? It’s a big ask, especially when the vast majority of the working class in world is not in or anywhere near a union.

There may be lessons from Switzerland. Corinne Schärer of the Unia union says her union has become the most important organisation in labour movement in the country over the last 15 years, and is taking on an increasingly political role. ‘We are not a political party – you can’t substitute a party and we don’t want to – but you do need a political agenda and vision’.

So-called ‘fixed stars’ guide the union’s political work, setting a 15-20 year progressive path after two years of extensive discussion from across the union and parties.

Parties still matter. ‘We need left-wing people in Parliament, so we support the idea of having strong Socialist and Green parties’, both of which are now solidly left-wing – the former mostly down to Unia and youth activists getting organised.

Not just in Switzerland but in Europe and the rest of the world, the left has to work together, particularly with the rapid rise of the right. Whether unions will ever be revolutionary, however, is another question altogether.

And that’s possibly because, as Bill Fletcher from the American Federation of Government Employees pithily puts it, ‘when you’re trying to drain a swamp but you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to think beyond survival.’

That, perhaps, is a better explanation for the lack of socialism in the union movement at the moment than any.

Josiah Mortimer is a guest blogger for the Global Labour Institute’s third International Summer School for trade unionists at Northern College this week. The views expressed in this article are therefore solely those of the author in his personal capacity and do not necessarily represent the views of GLI.

You can follow all of the conference online on the GLI site, through Union Solidarity International, and on Twitter: #ISS14.

The global labour movement is at a crossroads.

That’s the verdict of Bill Fletcher of the American Federation of Government Employees, speaking to the Global Labour Institute’s International Summer School in Barnsley this week. Workers are being hit by neoliberalism across the world – that much is obvious – but politically, the issue is this: how are unions to respond in the face of supposedly left-wing parties that have conceded to many of the neoliberal policies unions despise?

It’s question being asked while the populist right soar in much of the global north – filling the void where previously socialist politics would have existed.

Fletcher sees the current attacks on workers – from privatisation to public sector cuts – as representing the ‘obliteration of the social contract’ that emerged following the Second World War. But it was a social contract that was also ‘historically specific’ – built amid fear of the red threat.

It’s a message echoed by Asbjørn Wahl of the Norwegian Union of Municipal and General Employees. For him, the tripartite state-union-employer relationship dominant across much of Europe following World War Two was the ‘child of class compromise’ – a child that’s now left home. In other words, there’s no going back. But neither should we. Capitalist and union cooperation dampened the radicalism of working class in an attempt to bolster support for the Cold War.

While it did lead to several decades of social progress in the West, social democracy became a mere ‘mediator between classes’. Such mediation became the final aim of the labour movement. And in capitulating to this, they gave up on socialism, contributing to an ideological crisis on the left.

Yet the end of the social democratic accord in the 1980s has made nation states less and less responsive to popular demands, while the stresses of neoliberal globalisation turn populations against one another. For Fletcher, the system’s weakness has created a breeding ground for a right-wing populism – what he amusingly calls ‘the herpes of capitalism’ – that is now on the rise across Europe and elsewhere. At the same time, any resistance to the neoliberal project is met with repression.

There is clearly a strong sense of alienation among people however. It’s up to the left to politicise this discontent. To do this will require broad new social alliances, concrete alternatives, and unions taking on broader political responsibility amidst mainstream party capitulation, Wahl claims. Such alternatives must be built on a minimum programme that includes standing against austerity, taxing the rich, cancelling public debt, socialising finance and defending democracy.

The current crisis is of course political. The response must also be political – rebuilding labour movement and rebuilding left must go hand in hand. There’s no going back to the corporatism of the 1970s. But Fletcher argues unions can be a ‘civilising force amid the current chaos’ – if they go through a reformation.

Such a reformation must involve the re-radicalisation and re-politicisation of unions instead of continuing a business or servicing model. And that’s no small task. But if the labour movement is to get out of this current conjuncture, we can’t depend on doing the same and expecting different results. Nor can we rely on revivalism and nostalgia for some by-gone social democratic past. Instead, we need a fresh start if we’re going to have any chance of challenging the ‘capitalism on crack’ that is the current paradigm. That will include working with social movements like those that organised the millions-strong Madrid march against austerity in March. If we do this, Wahl says, ‘we have a chance to avoid extinction’. It is, therefore, a chance we can’t afford to miss.

You can follow all of the conference online on the GLI site, through Union Solidarity International, and on Twitter: #ISS14.