John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

The Bolsheviks dallied with this alternative economy in the 1920s. Before the enormous wrong turn of 1929 that force-fed Russian workers into a titanic state capitalist machine, Bukharin had advocated a “wager on the cooperatives”. He suggested the best way to satisfy the small-producer instincts of the peasants and to move the Soviet economy towards socialism was to expand the cooperative sector, supported by government credit and state-managed markets. This would constitute “the continuous and systematic growth of the cells of the future socialist society”. 33In this Bukharin–far more than Lenin, Trotsky or Stalin–followed in the footsteps of Marx.

In his Inaugural Address to the First International in 1864, Marx spoke of the British workers’ cooperative movement. “The value of these great social experiments cannot be over-stated”, he declared,

By deed, instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labour need not be monopolised as a means of dominion over, and extortion against, the laboring man himself; and that, like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart. 34

In like vein, Mark Fisher, the author of Capitalist Realism and an acute cartographer of the social and cultural reality wrought by neoliberalism, echoed this when he wrote of the socialist alternative, “Our struggle must be towards the construction of a new and surprising world, not the preservation of identities shaped and distorted by capital”. 35

Fisher saw that the primary strategic goal of any serious left should be to foresee and shape the future. The essential thing is not just to create the political vehicle to help deliver it–in my view, either radically transformed left parties operating more like social movements than traditional political parties, or entirely new cross-class progressive alliances–but to germinate the seeds of an alternative society within the decimated shell of the existing one. We have already seen this process in action in the creation of Greece’s “Solidarity Economy”, an unofficial sub-culture of free exchange and alternative currencies that is providing the necessities of life–food banks, soup kitchens, legal aid, free education and medical care–to those who can no longer afford them.

Thessaloniki’s Micropolis, which emerged out of the disintegration of Greece’s formal economy after the 2008 crash, is a voluntary “community” which includes a daycare centre, workshops, a library, a kitchen that serves cheap food, and a farmer’s market where farmers not only sell produce but teach others to be self-sufficient. It also has a Wild Animals Team that rescue and support abandoned and injured animals. Micropolis reaches out to its equivalents in other countries, buying its coffee from Zapatista liberated zones and its sugar from the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement. It is run via direct democracy and a weekly General Assembly. Micropolis has been called “an example of how alternative institutions can meet our collective needs in the short term while prefiguring the self-managed society”. 36

Similar examples exist all over the world. To take just one, the Mousai House in the heart of Afro-American Washington D.C. is a communally owned music venue, studio, school and community centre that exists outside the conventional money economy. Providing peer-led cooperative education, the Mousai House has been converted from an abandoned warehouse to “a self-sufficient, self-determined artist-led cooperative incubator”. Its membership pays minimal fees to take part and run the enterprise, but the fees are optional and can be replaced by other input such as teaching aspiring musicians. It is just one segment of a growing national network of democratically owned enterprises providing life opportunities and dignified employment to an excluded black underclass. Of this network, the political economist and specialist in community-based asset building Jessica Gordon Nembhard wrote, “The theory of change behind this model of a cooperative solidarity commonwealth is that the more people that practice economic democracy, collective ownership, and economic transparency, the more they will come to expect to see these practices in the rest of their lives”. 37

This impulse to what Irving Howe called “a world more attractive” finds expression at all levels. The bourgeoisie are not immune. After the decline and decay of the elevated tracks that used to feed New York’s meatpacking district, a group of local residents formed a not-for-profit group called the Friends of the Highline and lobbied to convert the disused track to an urban greenway running for two miles through central Manhattan. In response the New York City government committed $50 million of public funds to assist the conversion of the Highline into an elevated urban park. The Highline is an example of how collective voluntary endeavour, assisted by imaginative support from local government, can turn the discarded structures of industrial capitalism into free green spaces for public use and enjoyment.

If neoliberalism is the undiluted logic of capital, the marketisation of every aspect of our lives, then projects like Micropolis, the Mousai House and the Highline are the de-marketisation of capitalism, the organic emergence of a Solidarity Economy. By its very nature an economy of this type can only be run on democratic lines, with the continuous input of the citizens it services. Murray Bookchin–a man raised in the Bronx by his exiled SR grandmother–championed the model of the popular general assembly, as practiced in Kronstadt, Rojava and by Occupy. There are logistical issues with a General Assembly representing an area (e.g. a city) beyond a certain size and population, but these could be solved by a mixture of local assemblies reporting upward and continuous digital inter-connectivity.

Such a model would also require acknowledgement there is only so far consensus-oriented decision-making can go, and that ultimately decision-making has to be based on democratic debate and majority vote. This model is a modern variant of the Council Communist philosophy rejected by the Bolsheviks. In Noam Chomsky’s view,

some form of Council Communism is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial society. It reflects the belief that democracy is severely limited when the industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers, technocrats, a ‘vanguard party’ or a State bureaucracy. 38

New economic forms and emergent social structures arise spontaneously, but they can fail and fall back. Contrary to John Holloway’s assertion that the left can “change the world without taking power”, a lasting transformation to a carbon neutral post-capitalism will require progressive governments to pave the way. But who and what will form these governments? Regurgitating the classic social-democratic party is a non-starter. Its traditional social base–the organised industrial working class–has eroded, along with its instinctive sense of identity, community and solidarity. This is a grievous loss, one the old left continues to pathologically deny. And yet, if it is to achieve political victory, it will have to re-create that solidarity in other forms, other communities, other identities, other networks. It will also have to re-create itself as the champion of political pluralism, free information, participatory democracy and eco-socialism.

We have seen the beginnings of this process in new political formations such as Podemos in Spain, Die Linke in Germany, the Parti de Gauche in France and the Five Star Movement in Italy. The next stage is for these parties to put aside nationalism and marginal policy differences, and to form a functioning transnational alliance to support and protect each other from Empire’s attacks. Even so, it will not be easy for them to be elected or to implement transformative policies once in office. Like Syriza in Greece, they will face ruthless opposition. Nonetheless they must aim for, and deliver, democratic public ownership of key utilities, strong regulation of the financial sector, a real increase in affordable social housing, free higher education and a significant redistribution of wealth. Equally important is the provision of a Universal Basic Income to all citizens. Sufficiently generous, it would deny the neoliberal economy the army of cheap labour on which it depends whilst simultaneously creating space for social, economic and cultural experimentation.