"No one's ever shown us a long-term working alternative to capitalism"

On a discussion group GA just wrote:

"nobody has hitherto managed to show in practice an alternative to a society harnessing the forces of capitalism that works, works in the long run, and works without serious side effects like dictatorship or other disproportionate limitations in the freedom of people to lead their lives"

I replied:

Well, it's not surprising, really, cos the history of human society doesn't work this way. The place of experiment has to be taken by real life commitment, on a huge scale. Comparing results needs an appropriately huge perspective both as regards time and place. 

We have seen perfectly clearly however that capitalism - as a long-term mode of production - does not work smoothly or beneficially for the mass of humanity. It proceeds from crisis to crisis, and the trade-offs in terms of health and well-being versus riches and technical advances are not worth making - from the point of view of the massive majority of people who merely produce the wealth rather than get to own and enjoy it. If today, after all these centuries, capitalism can do no better for the less well-placed than it's doing in Greece and Spain, let alone Haiti or Honduras, or South Africa or Rwanda, then it's an obvious failure. It is also totally incapable of systematically making use of the benefits of planned cooperation to apply available knowledge and techniques for the betterment of the majority of humanity. It can't even do this in the US (South Bronx, East LA), or the EU, let alone West Sahara or Eritrea. 

We have seen that certain important aspects of social progress - infrastructure, literacy, education, general (if basic) provision of health and education are much better managed in non-capitalist states, like the USSR, Yugoslavia, or China. This is quite amazing, historically speaking, given that the advantages became apparent so very rapidly. And given that the disadvantages inherent in the genesis and life of these states (non-hegemonic economic status, undemocratic governance removing the vast mass of the working people from planning and decision-making) are so very destructive and make them so vulnerable to aggressively hostile policies from more powerful capitalist rivals.

The road to social and  economic change and improvement will be created not by a small group of technocrats in an editorial office or library but by ordinary people getting together to run their own affairs free of exploitation and slave-driving, using free open cooperation with anyone they want using any ideas and techniques they want regardless of profits or patents. To do this, people will need ideas regarding political and economic and social organization, and they will have to fight to get their hands on these, since one of the major preoccupations of capitalism today is the stifling and extermination of these ideas and the organizations bearing them.

So, if you want a pre-validated successful non-capitalist society, you can forget it. Which means you either sigh, sit back and drink a resigned toast to really existing capitalism - Here's to Bhopal, Marikana, the Vietnam War, Iraq and Afghanistan! - or you get stuck in to making better alternatives than the ones that have half-worked in really existing (but far from optimal) non-capitalist societies. Or get swirled about in the wind with the sands on the bank of the Styx - a fate Dante wished upon the congenitally indecisive trimmers who never made a choice and never took sides. These poor sods never even got let into Hell - Charon felt too much contempt for them. Blowing through cold, dark, empty streets for all eternity. 

Local democracy

Mary Beard writes about electing the head of a local police authority in her blog:
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2012/10/who-shall-i-vote-for-a-police-and-crime-commisioner.html

I commented:

Democracy is a decision-making technique that works well when the decision-makers hold power and have a consensus on how to use it. So you get slave-holding democracy, feudal democracy, municipal/city-state democracy, etc, all working well until the hold on power is challenged and the consensus is shredded.
In the transition to a new power-sharing consensus power becomes the unvarnished exercise of force it always is in essence. We're living in a transitional epoch (capitalist to socialist ie non-capitalist  mode of production, a free universal association of working people) and none of the big historical events we live through can be assessed on the basis of formal democracy.
So we need to get real about the possibilities, limitations and risks of the vote as a problem-solving mechanism. Before any proposal is put to a vote for decision, it has to be devised and formulated by people with an interest in pushing it through. This process is real politics, and the conditions determining whose interests are served are what allow us to judge the adequacy of any claimed democracy. Good for slave-holders? Slave-holding democracy. Good for ruthless, murderous (think Bhopal, or Marikana for that matter) capitalists? Bourgeois democracy.
And it's the big picture that counts even in tiny local decision-making. If the arteries don't work, the capillaries clot up and gangrene ensues.
Sounds pretty much like gangrene setting in in the local organs of police power in Britain ;-)

Ramaphosa, the ANC, and "the left"

John Game on FaceBook made a sensible but indirect and rather dead-end comment on Ramaphosa's open hostility to the Marikana mineworkers (25 October 2012, 9.56am). I commented:


Well,  not just "remains" within the bounds of  capitalism but is forcibly and murderously constrained within the bounds of capitalism. John, you're right about the logic of *bourgeois* national liberation. Not about national liberation as such - the class contradictions can drive national liberation if the leaders of the mobilization are conscious of the class logic of the permanent revolution.
If you want to  lead the working class and poor peasants to emancipation and prosperity you can only do it by leading them to power in society and this means removing the bourgeoisie and landlords and their property rights (your property wrongs  ;-). Mandela never wanted this class emancipation. His Congress (like Gandhi's in India) never wanted this. The Freedom Charter sat even less convincingly on the ANC than Clause 4 did on the Labour Party. Marikana is Mandela's Sharpeville. The Stalinist ANC bourgeoisie is uglier than the apartheid regime because it is based on lying and treachery.
The ANC (and the PAC, and every other fighting organization) deserved the unconditional support of working class revolutionaries during the war against apartheid, but this did not entail support for their anti-socialist programme, their counter-revolutionary perspectives or corrupt bureaucratic organization. It's the same situation as with the Saddam regime in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
And of course it was the same situation with regard to the Korean war and facing up to US imperialism, which is why the Cliffite, state capitalist tradition is so lost when the chickens start coming home to roost.
Supporting forces like the Taliban doesn't mean capitulating to them politically. Even Mao understood this in practice when he allied the CCP with the Kuo Min-Tang during the war against the Japanese imperialists. The CCP, almost against its own desires, retained control of its policy-making and above all its command structure. (See Peng Shuzi's report on the Chinese revolution and the CCP http://www.marxists.org/archive/peng/1951/nov/causes.htm). "The left" - a really crap political category, by the way - has made capitulation and tailing political forces hostile or indifferent to the working class into its major strategic principle since the 1930's turn from ultra-left adventurism to Popular Frontism. Time to dump both "the left" as a worthwhile political agent and opportunist sniffing around for exciting bandwagons to jump on. We're not poodles looking for a good post to pee on.