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Foreword

‘What is not possible, however, is to even think about transforming the world without a utopia, without a project.’

Paulo Freire

In these times the search for alternatives to capitalism is imperative. The world’s economy is in total disarray, having emerged from a very deep recession only to suffer what appears to be a prolonged stagnation in which governments cannot determine which is most perilous: spiraling public debt, looming deflation or dangerous new asset bubbles. Public policies lurch wildly to counter one, then the other of these alleged threats, while ignoring the fast disappearance of stable employment that pays a living wage and its replacement by precarious employment, or no employment at all. The rush to cut back public services and pensions and attack unions in desperate waves of austerity only exacerbates the underlying economic crisis.

And there is a still more urgent environmental crisis facing us. As Naomi Klein recently declared at the founding convention of Canada’s largest private sector union, Unifor: ‘Our current economic model is not only waging war on workers, on communities, on public services and social safety nets. It’s waging war on the life-support systems of the planet itself – the conditions for life on earth.’ In his exploration of alternatives to capitalism, Richard Swift sees no solution in state socialism, whether of the communist or social democratic variety, as both impose socialism from above. Echoing a view first expounded by the late Robert Heilbroner, he argues that ‘state communism was not really an alternative to capitalism at all but merely a transitional form of it which allowed certain large “backward” societies hitherto blocked in their developmental path, to move towards their own peculiar model of autocratic capitalism’. As for the social democratic variety, it long ago abandoned any hope of replacing capitalism in favor of the attempt to moderate its most predatory aspects. Only very occasionally, as in the case of Allende’s Chile in the early 1970s, has capitalism found it necessary to engage in military exercises to destroy elected social democratic governments since, as Swift notes, the ‘tame Center-Left proved sufficiently accommodating to the needs of capital’.

As examples of evolving real-world alternatives to capitalism Swift applauds elements of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution initiated by the late Hugo Chávez, in particular the vast expansion of co-operative enterprises and the devolving of power to local community councils; he also casts an approving eye on Brazil’s experience with participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre and elsewhere. At the same time, he warns of the tensions in Venezuela and other manifestations of Latin America’s ‘21st-century socialism’, pointing out the contradictions between reforms from below and the bureaucratic machinery that breeds personal corruption and impedes democratic initiatives.

One of the finest chapters of SOS: Alternatives to Capitalism is devoted to tracing the legacy of anarchism from Proudhon and Bakunin through the Sixties New Left and its notion of participatory democracy to the anti-globalization, autonomous and Occupy movements. As Swift points out, there is a perennial tension within anarchism. On the one side are those who advocate the forcible overthrow of power through acts of mass defiance. On the other are those who promote building spaces and practices of self-rule within the fissures of the capitalist system so as to challenge state structures by example. The latter strand includes worker-owned producer co-operatives, housing co-operatives and credit unions. He argues persuasively that, however noble these efforts may be, and however satisfying to those who participate in them, ‘if there is no decisive challenge to the logic of capitalism, such alternatives will continue to be marginalized and deformed’. Swift also strongly opposes both anarchist rejection of the state in any form and Leninist fantasies of smashing the state: ‘the days of storming the Bastille and the Winter Palace are things of the past,’ he concludes. Against these two dead ends he adduces a third position: responding to popular needs and extending the notion of democracy to embed it in communities and workplaces.

In his survey of alternatives, Swift is most sympathetic to the current of thought taking shape under the rubric of ‘ecosocialism’. What differentiates ecosocialism from the socialism that preceded it is its rejection of a set of assumptions shared with capitalism itself: the necessity of economic growth, and the corresponding license to exploit the supposedly endless bounty of the natural world coupled with an uncritical belief in the beneficence of technology. Against some impressive efforts by scholars like John Bellamy Foster and others to paint a picture of Marx as an ecological philosopher avant la lettre, Swift correctly notes that while Marx explored a ‘metabolic rift’ that capitalism had opened up between humans and nature, this was a sidebar at best, coexisting with ‘a celebration of material progress as the path to human advancement’.

Swift is emphatically dismissive of Green parties that first emerged in the 1980s: like social democratic parties before them, they soon gave up any notion of replacing capitalism even though, as he says, it is ‘pretty obvious that both inequality and growth are built into the very DNA of the capitalist system. Capitalism can never be about selling us less, living in a more modest way or reducing inequalities.’ Having avoided presenting themselves as any kind of overall ecological alternative to capitalism, they are left with promoting such nebulous goals as ‘green growth’, ‘green jobs’ and market-based solutions such as the carbon tax.

SOS: Alternatives to Capitalism deservedly devotes ample space to the concept of degrowth. A degrowth economy would feature reduced working hours, a much expanded public sector, a guaranteed annual income, allocating resources democratically so that shortages are distributed fairly. It would also, to the extent that it is possible, prioritize the local in everything: energy and agricultural systems, the disposal/reuse/recycling of waste and so on. How could we ensure that wealth would be redirected away from paper speculation and harmful production and towards alternative projects of sustainability that would support democratic degrowth? For Swift, socializing the financial services industry, including converting the banks into public utilities, would be a good place to start. A degrowth economy would have to be a planned economy and Swift is to be commended for acknowledging that fact, despite not having sufficient space to tackle it thoroughly.

In his search for a way forward, it is important to Swift to say that: ‘The post-growth alternative to capitalism needs to be different in its very language. It must move beyond earlier preoccupations with class struggle, while maintaining its commitments to equality and democracy.’ While in general terms this sentiment may be widely shared among readers of this book, the assertion that class struggle in particular no longer has a place in movements of post-capitalism will obviously be controversial, including among many who share his ecosocialist philosophy.

With SOS: Alternatives to Capitalism, Swift joins a growing strand of 21st-century literature that explores radically different ways of organizing our economy and politics. These include, among others, Robin Hahnel’s Of the People, For the People; Joel Kovel’s The Enemy of Nature; Michael Lebowitz’s The Socialist Alternative; and Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias.

In my view Swift is commendably judicious in how he sorts through the contested turf of left thinking, but in so thoroughly and decisively dismissing so much of what passes for left politics – visions, strategies and all – this book is bound to generate much heated discussion.

It can’t begin too soon for, as the US anthropologist David Graeber has written, without the Swifts of this world, ‘we are left in the bizarre situation of watching the capitalist system crumbling before our very eyes, at just the moment everyone had finally concluded no other system would be possible’.

Cy Gonick

Cy Gonick is a senior statesman of the Canadian Left. He is both an activist and author as well as professor emeritus in the economics department at the University of Manitoba. He is the founder and long-time editor of Canadian Dimension magazine.