21st Century Socialism on the Move – Reflections on ‘The Path to Human Development’

This review is published on Socialist Voice, here: http://www.socialistvoice.ca/?p=379

Within an otherwise bleak reality of capitalist crisis, Mike Lebowitz has provided us with an eloquent restatement of the case for socialism – The Path to Human Development: Capitalism or Socialism? This short text is now circulating widely in Venezuela, in Spanish, as a pocket-sized pamphlet, has been published in Monthly Review, and is about to be published in Canada in pamphlet format by Socialist Project.

This is not the first text Lebowitz has published on the need to argue, fight for, and build socialism. The Path was written on the foundation of Lebowitz’s 2004 book Build It Now! Both works were written with the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela in mind. This is no accident. Lebowitz, a professor from Canada, has been living in Venezuela for years and has been an active participant in the Bolivarian revolution. The imprint of that revolutionary process is strongly stamped on this short work.

The Path argues that:

1. Full development of creative human potential is the goal of life for human beings.
2. This full development is impossible under capitalism.
3. Socialism – protagonist democracy in the economy and all aspects of social life – is the path to human development.

Path breaking: a return to a socialist offensive

In the minds of many workers and anti-capitalist activists, the positive attributes of the socialist goal are obscured by the monsters of 20th century bureaucratic states. The general points raised by The Path stand as corrections to this legacy of Stalinist horrors. Such states that claimed the mantle of communism have nothing in common with Lebowitz’s “development of human potential.”

The Path states, “Our goal cannot be a society in which some people are able to develop their capacities and others are not: we are interdependent, we are all members of a human family. The full development of all human potential is our goal.” This recalls the manuscripts of the young Marx, where he sketches the blocks capitalism puts up against the free development of the creative, “sensuous” life of people. Lebowitz returns this theme in asking, “What do we all want?” and answers “To be all that we can be.”

From decades of defense and retreat, in which socialism has been defined by excuse or apology for Stalinist crimes, The Path forges, yes, a path. It is a return to the offensive – defining the ideological terrain of 21st Century Socialism.

Internationalism at the heart of The Path.

There are no We workers and Those workers in The Path. “The struggle between capitalists and workers (…) revolves around a struggle over the degree of separation among workers,” Lebowitz points out. “The premise is not at all that we have the individual right to consume things without limit but, rather, that we recognize the centrality of ‘the worker’s own need for development.’ ”

And at the same time, “As a human being in human society, you also have the obligation to other members of this human family to make certain that they also have this opportunity, that they too can develop their potential.” The Path does not draw any national borders around this human question.

For revolutionaries in imperialist countries this must sound loudly. At a time of great capitalist crisis and especially given the organizational and public-political weakness of the left, there is a great danger that the angers of many workers be directed at constructed Others: immigrants, racialized people, and particularly at people racialized as Islamic. The Path proposes “human society,” the “human family” – in other words, internationalism – as the axis of struggle. It demands equal access by all to everything each needs for their personal development.

A direct appeal to workers in imperialist countries

The Path’s rejection of a purely economic measure of standards of living is especially prescient. In the larger context of universal human development, he argues, money is not the point. This does not cancel out the important and constant struggles for improvements in the economic sphere, but reminds us that these struggles are part of a bigger picture. From that point of view, “Whether workers wages are high or low is not the issue any more than whether the rations of slaves are high or low.”

Lebowitz argues that the working class has in common – regardless of wage levels – a spiritual poverty based in alienation from the fruits of their labour. He sees consumerism – even and perhaps especially for workers who make “good money” – as substitution for meaning, within an alienated condition: “We try to fill the vacuum of our lives with the things we are driven to consume.”

So, on top of its internationalist appeal, The Path challenges the “well-paid” worker to reexamine what we really want from life for ourselves and those we love. and whether capitalism will allow these desires. For those revolutionary activists (like me) who vacillate daily on the question of whether the imperialist/colonialist country working class has revolutionary potential, this challenge is encouragement not to lose hope amongst the details.

The vicious circle of capital

Lebowitz points out the difficulty of advancing revolutionary ideas – even within capitalist crisis. But where Jim Stanford, Canadian Union of Auto Workers economist, reaches for a neo-Keynesian outlook out of hesitations with socialism (see www.socialistvoice.ca/?p=367¹), Lebowitz maintains that such difficulty is precisely why revolutionary ideas must be sown through practice. “No crisis necessarily leads people to question the system itself. People struggle against specific aspects of capitalism … but unless they understand the nature of the system, they struggle merely for a nicer capitalism, a capitalism with a human face.”

He outlines what he calls the “vicious circle of capitalism” where people without are compelled to sell their labour power to fulfill their material needs of survival. Then, having consumed, they are compelled anew to “produce for capital’s goals.” These “phases are interdependent, you cannot change one without changing them all.”

The virtuous circle of socialism

Against the “vicious circle” of capitalism, Lebowitz advocates what he calls the “virtuous circle” of socialism. Here his points may be less familiar to anti-capitalists and workers skeptical regarding socialism.

Lebowitz’s ideas begin with the concept of human development, are worked out through understanding the inhuman laws of capitalism, defined through working out its opposite, and developed by returning again to his premise of human development. Lebowitz outlines how socialism can and must accommodate all levels of human need – not just the material. The Path sees material security as the precondition for universal spiritual, cultural, creative development.

The Path outlines the “virtuous circle” of socialism: “We begin with producers who live within a society characterized by solidarity” who “enter into an association in order to produce for the needs of society and in this process develop and expand their capacities as rich human beings. Thus the product of their activity is producers who recognize their unity and their need for each other.”

Protagonism, the state, and socialist struggle

Lebowitz paints a vivid and living picture of the formation of a post-capitalist society in utero, through Venezuela’s Bolivarian cooperatives and other base organizations. He poses these revolutionary organizations as the foundations upon which post-capitalist society will be constructed.

He argues for the Venezuelan concept of “protagonism.” By creating mass organizations (in workplaces and in the neighborhoods) people can take control over the direction of their lives and satisfaction of their desires. Protagonism is a path to and, at the same time, the developing definition of a revolutionary democracy which can only be born of practice.

This is an important imaging. It is critical that we conceptualize and live the revolutionary process as a great organism and not as a vanguard atop a complacent mass. The Path asks and answers the question of why we should fight for socialism, but it is important to note some questions it leaves hanging.

Capitalist protagonism

If workers and other oppressed people are not protagonist today – in capitalist society – then who is? Workers’ protagonism (by “workers” I mean all working and oppressed peoples, to include Indigenous people, poor unemployed people, farmers, unofficial workers, etc.) can only be built through overturning protagonism as we know it – capitalist protagonism. The Path does not fully deal with capitalist protagonism, or what Antonio Gramsci called hegemony, but many times Lebowitz points in this direction.

Capitalist protagonism is embodied in the state. Lebowitz points out that “capital creates the state it needs.” While Lebowitz talks about economic regulation and ongoing “primitive accumulation” or capitalist expropriation, it is also possible to extract a broader generalization. The state includes the government and all its national and international institutions. Through these protagonist bodies, the state is joined arm in sleeve with capital.

Whether the mass deregulation and privatization of neo-liberal reforms or mass bailouts of crisis-hobbled banks, auto companies and mortgage firms, the state carries out these demands of capital. And when Chilean President Salvador Allende (to pick an example not so far from Venezuela), threatened the protagonism of capital within the government itself, another branch of the state – the army generals – smashed him and the Chilean socialist movement with terrible violence and murder.

The Venezuelan experience proves that it is possible for class struggle to be carried out within the halls of capitalist protagonism. But it also shows the limits of the possible within a capitalist state apparatus. What we see at play in Venezuela is a constant battle between opposing protagonisms – the capitalist and the workers – in open struggle for power. This struggle must end with workers extending workers’ protaganist democracy to all aspects of life and all fields of production by depriving the capitalist class of the state, what Lebowitz calls “capital’s ultimate weapon.” Lebowitz does not deal with this directly, but he does point out that capital “never stops trying to undermine any gains that workers have made either through their direct economic actions or through political activity.”

As Marx and Engels outlined it in the Communist Manifesto: “The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.” Anything less than abolishment of the capitalist state leaves the capitalist class a ready weapon for counter-revolution, and leaves working people the prospect of losing at any moment all gains fought for and won.

The Path as weapon against capitalist barbarism

In the introduction to The Path, Mike Lebowitz explains that he intended it as a weapon “in the struggle against barbarism.” But a weapon is only effective if used. The Path is written to be studied in groups, and it deserves such attention – both from seasoned veterans of the socialist and anti-capitalist movements and from people who have never read a Marxist essay or been to a demonstration before. The Path educates and challenges in its reasoned appeals to revolutionary practice.

The publication of The Path can be important for the regeneration of the international socialist movement. Today workers all over the world are afraid and wondering what will become of them and why. The Path not only poses answers to the questions of why, but imagines how life could be different, how a better world is possible and what it might look like. It could not have been published at a more critical time.

The Path to Human Development has been published online by Monthly Review at http://monthlyreview.org/090223lebowitz.php ²and by Socialist Project at http://www.socialistproject.ca/documents/ThePath.pdf

United Europe Represses the Right to Protest Against NATO

also available here: http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet201.html

Ivan Drury

On April 4^th the leaders of the NATO member countries met on the French-German border in Strasbourg France for the 60^th anniversary of NATO. At this meeting the US was to propose an escalation of the war in Afghanistan and ask for greater troop commitment from NATO countries.

A major demonstration was organized to oppose this meeting, the occupation of Afghanistan, and to call for the dismantling of NATO. This demo also happened to coincide with the end of my time in Belarus, just days before my flight out of Germany back to Canada, so I was able to attend.

What happened in Strasbourg

French President Sarkozy had ordered every possible measure be used to put down the demonstration. But while he succeeded in stopping the protesters from setting foot in the streets of Strasbourg, the demonstration was all that was to be seen of the NATO summit in the news and the public imagination. In part, this can be seen as a victory of the demonstration: the state had pulled all the stops to suppress the voices of the street opposition to NATO, and the street had refused to be silenced. That the voice of this street appeared in the media stripped of criticism of NATO should not be surprising – it would not have been regardless of the specific behavior of some of the demonstrators.

Before the demo began its course was set. Nearly two thousand protesters, some Black Bloc, some Clowns, some independent activists, some organized socialists, had set up camp to the south of Strasbourg. This camp had been negotiated with the government by the International Coordinating Committee, because the government had refused better accommodations to the protesters. But from the beginning of the camp – on Wednesday night, four days before the demo – the police began to attack it, harassing and provoking the Black Bloc. From Wednesday night on, the police attacked the camp with tear gas, provoking fights with the Black Bloc, sealing the protesters in and harassing them in their temporary ghetto.

In official circles the International Coordinating Committee (ICC) also met with blocks from the state. Up until the night before the demonstration the government would not agree to a march route, a rallying point, or even to the legality of the demonstration. The state was maneuvering with the intention of shutting the demonstrators out of the NATO summit entirely.

The plan, which the ICC had set with the state months in advance, was that a German contingent would meet on the German side of the “Europe Bridge” (the open German-French border bridge symbol of a united Europe) and a French contingent would meet on the French side. The demonstration would begin with the two sides meeting in the centre of the bridge and then marching back to the French side for a rally and continued march. The march organizers wanted the march to lead into the city of Strasbourg from there to oppose the NATO meeting happening there at the European parliament. Protest as usual. But no.

The day before the demonstration the police sealed off the centre of Strasbourg – which is ringed with canals and accessible by foot and car bridges – with armed guards in riot gear, gates, and high fences. The morning of the demo they intensified this blockade and completely cut off the rallying point from anyone staying on the north side of the city, where I was staying. After scouting numerous routes, I settled for a two hour walk around the long periphery of the city to get to the rallying point. But long before reaching the Europe bridge, the sound of tear gas cannons already filled the streets.

I have been going to demonstrations for about fifteen years, and the police repression at this demo shocked me. They were not only attacking Black Bloc participants either. As example, after the police had broken up the organized rally and driven the protesters back onto a train bridge, a group of mostly older peace activists stood with facing the advancing police with their hands over their heads. The Black Bloc was no where around us. Even I was surprised when the cops fired a volley of a dozen tear gas canisters high up directly at this line of people with hands in the air. These people turned and scrambled, slid, ran down the steep bank then through the blackberry bushes and to the street below.

The police were working very hard to provoke the Black Bloc as rationale for attacking the protest as a whole.

Two fires were set: a border office and a government visa building. The police – completely in control of the area around the visa office – waited two hours before calling the fire trucks in, letting the fire take over the building and spread on to burn a pharmacy and a hotel. Of course, the cops, the government, and the media blamed the protesters for the burning of the pharmacy and the hotel in a working class part of town… but no one knows who started this particular fire. When I was asked by a media rep about the police claim that it was protesters, I said that I was very suspicious of such police claims.

The police were clearly herding the crowd. Firing gas from lockdown positions to drive the crowd down a certain street, the easing off and letting the march go in the direction they’d driven it, firing gas again to stop us from moving down side streets, then easing off again. The march seemed completely out of the control of the organizers. My experience was that there were no organizers in sight, only the organization of some of the socialist groups who tried to hold together their contingents and the organization of the Black Bloc which rushed furiously around the periphery of the march in constant battle with the police. Finally the police herded us into their planned dead end: an industrial area with warehouses on each side with walls and fences bordering the street on each side.

A line of police cut us off at the front end, and the cops rolled a pair of freight train cars in to block the street behind us. They were so prepared for this trap that they had readied a train to barricade us into a blocked position in this street. They took position on top of and around this train and, with the crowd completely immobilized, began again to fire tear gas into the crowd from each end apparently with no other intention than to break the heart of the demonstration.

The Left organization(s)

Some difficulties within the French left were laid bare at the anti-NATO demonstration. On one hand, an impressively broad coalition had been pulled together to organize the demonstration. It was composed of a disparate and usually divided collection of organizations, parties, trade unions, and parliamentarians. But on the other hand, this coalition was unable to act as a coalition in a united way. This showed in the indecisiveness and lack of cohesive leadership in the face of state blocks in advance of the demonstration, against severe police repression, and also in the lack of political cohesion in presentation of demands on the face of the demonstration. There was no clear central demand rising out of the chaos of the day, no coalition made signs for independent demonstrators to carry. Some of this could have been remedied by a rally, if a rally had been allowed to happen. But this division hampered the ability of the demonstration to present itself politically (beyond the fact of the demonstration itself) and laid the demo vulnerable to the manipulations of the state in advance and the attacks and repressions of the police in the midst. In the chaos that resulted from this situation, the Black Bloc – although only two thousand amongst some thirty thousand demonstrators – emerged as a deciding force that played a disproportionate role in the character of the demonstration. In terms of their specific goals within the demonstration, they were better organized and more cohesive than the main demo. Also, the state created a chaotic situation which was better suited to the operation of the Black Bloc.

At first I had a hard time understanding why people were tolerating the Black Bloc at all, until I understood that they are a part of the French and German left / social movement, with a long history of a sort of co-existence with the other tendencies of this movement. Some aspects of this co-existence were visible when they would provide medical assistance to people overwhelmed by gas, and when some of them attacked a post office the crowd around them booed, and they stopped. As a World Social Forum organizer explained it to me, the Black Bloc is there, they are made by society too – the question is not whether to work with them, but how.

But more important than the Black Bloc – which is a comparatively static movement – the most interesting and encouraging aspect of the demonstration for me was the role of the NPA.

When the crowd was trapped between lines of police with individuals breaking off with their hands over their heads, most of the left parties and organizations also headed for the hills. It’s not our fight, they said. But in this environment the NPA stood their ground. They dismantled the pallet barricades and formed three front lines of activists with arms interlocked at the head of a retreat. Some of their leaders went on and made the hard – but completely necessary – decision to negotiate a retreat with the police. These leaders were verbally attacked for these negotiations by some in the rally, but if the crowd was allowed to remain trapped any longer the slow disintegration would put people in serious danger – the NPA realized this and made a move that showed real movement leadership. I joined arms in their lines of activists to lead the crowd out from the trap we were in. These street leader activists were uniformly young, spirited, calm, and morally disciplined. Some of these young people I spoke to had been members of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) before it dissolved into the NPA, and some of them were new members or sympathizers of the NPA.

The NPA acted in the interests of and as part of the social movement, and they bore a great deal of responsibility. From what I saw, they are true to their claims of being a movement based, pluralist anti-capitalist party; distinctly different from the attitudes and behaviors of a sect.

During the retreat through the lines of cops the crowd was attacked again and again, four or five times, with tear gas at close proximity. Each time the NPA would form a tight formation to maintain the grouping of the crowd, wait out the effects of the gas, and then loosen and march on. They waited until everyone was clear of the police lines then we pushed the train cars out of the street by hand and marched on.

After the demonstration

The police repression in Strasbourg continued after the demonstration was over. All trains to Germany were shut down and police blockades of bridges and streets were replaced with police check points for the day after the demonstration. All young people, and particularly Arab and Black appearing youth were stopped, searched, and forced to produce documentation in the streets. People were detained, photographed, and fingerprinted if found with fliers related to the demonstration or NATO. I saw the racist harassment everywhere while I walked the streets all day after the demonstration. Although I happened to be dressed entirely in black clothes I was not stopped even once: I am over thirty years old and am racialized White.

Ten thousand police had been mobilized to put down the demonstration. During the demonstration and its immediate aftermath more than 350 people had been arrested. Over the entire week or so long NATO summit the total arrests are over 600. These people charged are being tried immediately according to a new rapid trial law that applies only to people engaged in public disturbances. On Monday April 6 – just days after the demonstration – ten young people were to go on trial. Without time for preparation the legal defense lawyers did not stand a chance against a judge that cleared the courtroom and declared that he would be treated all charged as examples to be set. One man, who was caught with a rock in his pocket, was sentenced to six months in prison. Another man – with no evidence raised against him other than the word of a single cop who said he’d seen the defendant with the Black Bloc – was sentenced to three months in prison. A young man, who was arrested in a supermarket parking lot with a bottle of gas and a bottle of white spirits he’d just bought, was also sentenced to six months in prison. The “justice” branch of state repression in the courts is hitting just as hard as the gas bombs, flash balls, and concussion grenades used by the police in the streets.

As far as I know, the NPA is the only group to issue a statement condemning the police clearly and without reservation. They were also the only group whose members showed up outside the disgraceful Sarkozy show-trial, along with around a hundred local university student activists who (also along with the NPA) have been involved in the now ten week long France-wide student strike.

On Sunday after the demonstration a pre-planned conference was carried on. The program had been planned as a discussion of the anti-war movement but was completely overtaken with a discussion of the Black Bloc. The three hundred or so participants of the conference were predominately from the peace movements and most issued strong condemnations of the Black Bloc’s actions. More interesting for me was the comments of the representative of the Greek anti-war movement who strongly condemned the state repression and insisted on the right of people to defend ourselves against police attacks. Also, John Rees from the Stop the War Coalition (UK) said the anti-war movement must examine itself and move more resolutely to identify with the anti-imperialist resistance movements in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq. He argued that young people will identify themselves more and more with the radical tactics of the Black Bloc if the anti-war movement cannot embrace radical politics.

All in all, the Strasbourg demonstration must be seen in the light of the aggressive move by the French and German states to repress the right to protest, and not by the media broadcast light of flames. The state repression of this demonstration marks a intensification of their policy of dealing with dissent and movement people must be careful not to overlook this. We cannot be caught up in the clever capitalist media and government manipulations of arguing about the Black Bloc. The right of resistance, long under attack in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and all over the world, has come under a new offensive in Europe and it is the responsibility of the leftist and solidarity movements to fight this front along with the ones abroad.

In the immediate sense, we should not allow those persecuted by Sarkozy’s policies of ‘law and order’ to be made examples of; we must now fight for our right to protest, our right to defend ourselves. As another speaker at the day-after conference said: to protest against injustice should not have to be an act of courage – it should be a matter of course.