Transcending capitalism: three different ways? — Branko Milanovic

After the crisis of 2007-8, capitalism has entered among some parts of the public opinion into an ideological crisis. (I have written elsewhere why I think that this is not a general crisis of capitalism but a limited response to the decline of western economic and political power.) However, the question of durability or of non-permanency of capitalism has, unlike in the years after the fall of communism, reentered the public discourse. In many ways, in the West, the situation is returning to the 1970s or earlier when the ideas of alternative socio-economic systems were hotly debated. This is something that had disappeared in the next several decades driven away by neoliberalism in economics, the collapse of Soviet socialism, and the imposition of the pensée unique.

Now, things are changing, and understandably many people bring their own ideas about how capitalism can be “transcended”, that is replaced by a different socio-economic system. I want here to highlight three different ways in which this subject has recently been addressed....

Here is the nut of it.

In a new paper ”What is socialism today: Conceptions of a cooperative economy”, John Roemer starts with three essential pillars of all economic systems: an ethos of economic behavior, an ethic of distributive justice, and a set of property relations. In capitalism the three pillars are (1) individualistic ethos, (2) laissez-faire (no redistribution), and (3) privately owned means of production with profit accruing to capitalists. Until now, Roemer argues, all attempts to transcend capitalism focused on element No. 3, replacing privately owned capital with state or socially (collectively) owned capital. They have all failed.... 

Arguably, social democracy is based on 1) a communal ethos instead of an individualistic or collectivist ethos,  2) social justice based consideration of social value in addition to economic value, and 3) public control of the commanding heights of the society including the economy to organize public purpose in terms of the common good and general welfare instead of maximization of individuals' utility.

Democratic socialism would be based on 1 and 2, and three would include workers' cooperative ownership of the means of production.

Note: Branko Milanovic seemingly uses the term "transcend" as an allusion to Hegel's use of the German term aufheben as the driver of dialectic, both logical and historical.

Global Inequality

Transcending capitalism: three different ways?
Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-economic Inequality, senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Andrew Kliman — Not by Politics Alone: Thinking Through a Post-Capitalist Future

I believe that the central problem faced by people struggling for freedom today is the widespread acceptance of Margaret Thatcher’s TINA – the belief that “there is no alternative.” The main things that have led to the acceptance of TINA are the collapse of the state-capitalist regimes that called themselves “Communist” and the widespread failures of social democracy to remake society.

The struggles for freedom do not stop because of this, of course. Yet the acceptance of TINA acts to confine the struggles. They become self-limiting. In the perceived absence of an alternative, it is perfectly sensible that social struggles stop short of even trying to remake society totally. As Bertell Ollman has argued, “Why bother to struggle for a change that cannot be? … people [need to] have a good reason for choosing one path into the future rather than another.”

People need to have a good reason. That’s because they are rational. It is rational to engage in struggles to change what can be changed, and it’s rational to refrain from struggling against what cannot be changed. People who do not want to hear about socialism because of the failures and horrors of what they believe to have been socialism are making perfect sense. On the other side, of course, is a new global justice movement, part of which identifies itself as anti-capitalist, and which has raised the slogan “Another World is Possible.” This slogan, too, is eminently rational, if one interprets it, as I do, as a call to think through the possibility of another world and to prefigure another world.

But ultimately, the rationality of struggles that are not only struggles against injustice and exploitation, but struggles for a completely different, non-capitalist, human society rests on whether another world is indeed possible. At the present moment, I believe, no activist or theorist can really answer with confidence that it is possible.

I do not think this is a reason to despair. The effort to work out how another world might be possible is really just beginning. This problem received almost no attention throughout most of the last century. Until the collapse of so-called communism and living proof that social democracy is a futile dream, almost everyone on the Left simply assumed that socialism was possible, because it actually existed. Some were willing to critique Russia, China, Cuba, etc., to varying degrees, but they too tended to think that the actual existence of these countries was proof that socialism was possible. As they saw it, the defects or evils in these countries didn’t flow out of their mode of production; they were essentially political. What was needed was political change – “socialism and democracy” instead of socialism without democracy, or “socialism from below” instead of socialism from above, etc. And other people were confident that effective political action would enable the achievements of social democracy to be sustained and gradually extended to encompass more and more aspects of social and economic existence.

So it is only in recent years that any significant theoretical attention has been paid to whether another world is possible. I believe that this is the central problem of revolutionary thought today. Exposing the evils of capitalism is an insufficient approach when the question being asked by tens of millions of people is whether there is any alternative. Nor is it sufficient to focus on organizing or movement building, or to leave everything up to spontaneous action alone. Freedom struggles will no doubt continue, because the impulse to change things, the felt need to change things, arises spontaneously out of the defects of existing society. But again, the struggles will not reach for a wholly different future as long as such as future is perceived as pie-in-the-sky....

The left has generally been either too pessimistic, and as a result, too willing to compromise, or else too utopian to be convincing. Moreover, diagnosis based on identifying and removing symptoms ad hoc is insufficient for a lasting cure. Cure requires diagnosis that identifies causes and treats the dysfunctionality by addressing causes.

And again, such perceptions have arisen for rational reasons, largely because of the failures and horror of the last century. So it is likewise insufficient to simply affirm that another world is possible, or to remain contented with an ungrounded hope that it is possible. The possibility of another world needs to be shown. And this can only be shown by showing how it is possible to break with capitalism and how such a break could be sustainable....

With Sober Senses

Not by Politics Alone: Thinking Through a Post-Capitalist Future

Andrew Kliman | Professor of Economics, Pace University, author of Reclaiming Marx’s “Capital,” defending the Temporal Single System Interpretation of Marx's labor theory

Editor’s note: This essay is a corrected and slightly revised version of the author’s presentation, entitled “Not by Politics Alone,” during a panel on “Thinking Through a Post-Capitalist Future” that took place at the Left Forum conference in New York City on March 11, 2006.

Boyd Cohen — Post-Capitalist Entrepreneurship

The Occupy Movement perhaps first raised global awareness of the growing dissatisfaction with market-based capitalist economy. Banks too big to fail, government bailouts, and rising income inequality drew the ire of millions around the globe. Since then, the calls for a rethink of our economic paradigm have grown louder. One potential framing which has gained followers is Postcapitalism, popularized by Paul Mason in a book of the same name. Postcapitalism is not a return to Marxism, but instead, driven by the understanding that a third way that is not focused on heavy handed government control, nor on proprietary, venture-capital backed and publicly traded goliaths. Instead a postcapitalist economy would be driven more by collective, cooperative or even autonomous organizations, frequently leveraging non-government backed (fiat) currencies as well.

To date, however, there has been insufficient discussion about the role of entrepreneurship in a postcapitalist economy. While it may seem like an oxymoron to discuss entrepreneurship in a postcapitalist economy, I argue that is only because we have a narrow view of what entrepreneurship is. In Post-Capitalist Entrepreneurship (PCE) I highlight several emergent entrepreneurial forms including commons-based peer production, platform cooperatives, alternative currencies and initial coin offerings (ICOs) and blockchain-enabled distributed autonomous organizations among others....

Post-capitalism is an entrepreneurial activity. It has to be if the the system is to transform itself from within through adaptation that takes advantage of return in increasing coordination, decentralization of power and decision making as well as economic activity, and seizing emergent opportunities while addressing emergent challenges.

Evonomics
Post-Capitalist Entrepreneurship: Basic Income, Blockchain Cities, and Local Currencies — Towards a new, local, but globally interconnected, digital, collaborative, urban economic model of shared prosperity.

Boyd Cohen, Ph.D. in Strategy and Entrepreneurship from the University of Colorado who has been teaching, researching and participating in sustainable entrepreneurship for 15 years

Peter Dorman — Modernity and Capitalism

Well, that’s a heavy title. I’m not going to say the last word about it in a blog post, but I would like to make a fairly simple observation: for at least a century, defenders of capitalism have argued that the two are inextricably connected. If you like modernity you have to like capitalism, and if you get rid of capitalism you will lose modernity with it. By modernity I mean a way of life that is science-based, rational and skeptical, technologically innovative, liberal, cosmopolitan and adapted to markets.

The traditional response of the left was to argue that modernity under capitalism is flawed and that a better, socialist modernity is possible. In other words, it rejected the identity and saw modernity as bigger than any particular version of it.

That position has been complicated by the collapse of traditional models of socialism that do seem to fail the modernization test: they were clunky and inefficient, closed to the outside instead of open, stultifying instead of dynamic. Now, I can already hear the cries of paleo-socialists in my ear: No! Socialism didn’t fail in Russia/China/Cuba/wherever; it was encircled by the forces of capital and betrayed from within. I don’t agree, but I won’t debate it here; my only point is that most of the left is not paleo-socialist, so they’ve had to figure out what it means to be left wing and anti-capitalist in a world in which capitalism and modernity (in their eyes) largely coincide.…

Econospeak
Modernity and Capitalism
Peter Dorman | Professor of Political Economy, The Evergreen State College

David F. Ruccio — Creative economy—one year on

We know that inequality has been growing in many U.S. cities and metropolitan areas since the crash of 2008. Back in 2011, I suggested that “a creative way of getting out of the current crises created by capitalism” would be for cities, regions, and states to establish something like an Office of the Creative Economy, whose task would be to “grow a diversity of noncapitalist enterprises.”

As it turns out, New York City did just that, by approving a city budget that contains a $1.2-million program—the New York City Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative—to fund a community of nonprofit providers to facilitate the development of cooperatives. The idea is to build on the experience of Cooperative Home Care Associates—the largest worker-owned cooperative in the country—and start new businesses, support existing businesses, and expand the promise of workplace democracy to hundreds of low-income residents throughout the five boroughs.…

Occasional Links & Commentary
Creative economy—one year on
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame