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A socialist manifesto for Labor

By Marko Beljac - posted Monday, 18 November 2013


The standard view of neoliberalism among the Left is that it is a fervently held ideology whose conceptions have dominated policy making given the sway that neoliberal ideas have had over intellectuals, opinion makers, and political leaders.

This is false. Neoliberalism represents an intrinsically capitalist response to the economic crises and class struggles of the 1970s. The ideology itself merely represents a set of ideas to legitimise the restructuring of domestic and international society at the behest of corporate power.

The reason why the opposite view, that it is ideas not corporate power which is sovereign, has attracted the adherence of the Left is precisely because the post-materialist Left eschews socialism; instead the emphasis is on philosophical doctrines that accord primacy to ideas rather than material processes, and these post materialist philosophies were embraced as the Left had bid farewell to the working class.

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The first thing that a socialist may offer is a socialist critique of contemporary affairs. Only a socialist critique correctly targets the true nature of the neoliberal processes that have shaped our period of history.

What, exactly, is socialism? The goal of socialism is the emancipation of the working class. Any idea, any systematic doctrine, any small scale social experiment, any society, can only be adjudged socialist if it promotes working class emancipation.

The traditional means to achieve this has been social ownership of the means of production, but this is a means not an end. The end objective is the emancipation of the working class, and a society whose means of production does not stratify groups into definite controlling and subordinate classes is just the preferred method of bringing this about.

Socialism, of course, is a dirty word given the authoritarian nature of the putatively socialist societies such as the Soviet Union. The damning exposes of the Soviet experience are legion; rare is the expose which shows us that the Soviet Union, where a state owned economy was managed by an elitist ruling class that subordinated urban and rural workers to its control, hardly represented socialism.

Nobody can say that the Soviet working class was free.

Critics of Marx, and later the Bolsheviks, within the broader socialist movement, especially anarchosyndicalists and other anti state socialists, pointed out that a "dictatorship of the proletariat" could only amount to a dictatorship over the proletariat.

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They were right, of course. But they also had little regard for the parliamentary road to socialism.

Here, too, they were right. They argued that the parliamentary leadership of left wing parties would always be beholden to capitalist power, and would collaborate with that power to maintain their privileged status as parliamentary leaders.

As with the Soviet experience, history shows us that this view is correct.

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About the Author

Mark Beljac teaches at Swinburne University of Technology, is a board member of the New International Bookshop, and is involved with the Industrial Workers of the World, National Tertiary Education Union, National Union of Workers (community) and Friends of the Earth.

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