It is really a huge honour and privilege, not just to be part of this panel, but to be able to speak at a conference discussing the work of Boris Kagarlitsky. Like everyone else here, I'm full of admiration and respect for his commitment, his fearlessness, his intellectual integrity. But I also have to point out how much I appreciated the immense profundity of his book. Like several others, I have some disagreements with specific arguments and details. For example, from a South Asian perspective and more broadly a developing country perspective, imperialism is taken for granted. So, I will not go into the issue of whether Boris’ book has a correct understanding of imperialism or not, because in the world that I inhabit, it's taken for granted, as a lived reality. And the ways in which imperialism works, particularly through the local ruling classes, is also taken for granted.

Nevertheless, this is a major work: not simply a sweeping and very insightful assessment of the Soviet experience, but also an accurate reflection of the problems that we face globally in garnering the support for socialism that many of us thought we could take for granted in an earlier period. He has been particularly interesting in capturing the difficulties of getting our vision across, specifically in a way that is accepted by those whom we thought were the natural home of this vision: the oppressed, the working class, broadly speaking the exploited. It is really that issue that I want to take up.

Let me begin by quoting a particular paragraph from the conclusion of his book, which I thought made some very important points. “The politics of socialism are complex, aimed at restoring the social quality of government, a quality undermined by the logic of market competition that has acquired a more radical form under the conditions of neoliberalism. Overcoming the consequences of fragmentation, however, is no longer a question of affirming the ideological principles of the left, but is becoming one of meeting the social requirements felt in different fashion by people who hold diverse views and who even belong to different social groups and classes. The problem is one of uniting these people for shared, constructive work without dividing them, either on the basis of identity or of ideology, or of class in the narrow sense.

This is especially true since, as the process of transformation goes ahead, the class structure of society and its culture inevitably change and attempts to preserve them in their initial forms to fix or freeze them bureaucratically become a factor of social conservatism. Even if these efforts are accompanied by revolutionary slogans, society cannot be integrated successfully through an enforced common ideology, but only through participation in the building of a new economy and through joint decision making on different levels.”

I cannot tell you how much this resonated with me: it really captures many of the contradictions, dilemmas and difficulties we all face when we are trying to generate a socialist politics on the basis of our own understanding of political economy. Increasingly, we find that things that appear obvious to us are absolutely not seen as obvious or even as acceptable by a very wide range of people who should be “on our side”.

So, rather than address his book per se, I want to consider how this book made me think about “the socialist problem” essentially in a period when, even though all the features that previous speakers like Bill and Alex have identified are absolutely true, we face such constraints in getting our messages across.

One reason could be that, even though many of us no longer necessarily think that way, we are very much still identified with some older visions of the left/socialist project. My own view is that those visions of the left project have to be explicitly changed, and we have to make it clear to what extent we are either abandoning them or moving away from them or reforming them. I will identify seven such features, which I think are particularly important.

First, we have to reject democratic centralism. We really have to go for democracy, not democratic centralism. In my own country, I have seen how it works in our communist parties or our even our social democratic parties. We have to move towards a much more organic and genuinely representative democracy that gives voice to everyone. That's not as easily done, and I know of very few places where it has really worked. And there is a tension, I also must admit, between this much more vibrant, organic, genuine democracy and the ability to get things done in what is still a very deeply imperialist world in which power structures operate in ways that typically require a much more organised resistance and response. So, it is a dilemma, but I wanted to highlight that, and to remind ourselves that the essence of democracy is not just voice but perhaps even more significantly, accountability.

The second issue is a rejection of over centralisation. This is partly related to the first, but it's not only we still tend to privilege the large, and specifically what economists call economies of scale. This essentially means that tend to privilege more centralized rather than decentralized options, both in economic terms and in social terms. This is something that many of us imbibed in developing countries, as we saw centralized planning as a major means of enabling development and overcoming economic backwardness. But we have to think of newer and different ways of doing this and in every possible respect, not just in economic terms, but also socially and politically.

The third issue is possibly potentially controversial, but it's about property. Yes, we reject private property, but I think we overdid it in some cases in terms of what we what we advocated. I've seen this certainly in countries like Vietnam and elsewhere, where the socialist experiment also meant a decimation of personal and communal property, in ways that were not sufficiently sensitive to specific historical, social and other requirements. The importance of personal and communal property and the recognition of different kinds of property is something that we have to we have to be thinking about more carefully and in a more nuanced fashion.

The fourth is the issue of rights, human rights. Many of my comrades in the left over decades have often seen these as a reflection of a bourgeois notion of the world, specifically the emphasis on civil and political rights as something that then subordinates social and economic rights, which is possibly problematic. But when you think about it, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is actually a socialist agenda. It's unachievable in the world we have today. It's certainly unachievable under capitalism, but it is a socialist agenda. The recognition of rights of different kinds is something that we in the left have not always sufficiently been always conscious of. And we have not used them to the extent that we could, perhaps even in our political lobbying and mobilization and so on.

The fifth issue is something that I think already was raised by Bill and Alex: the issue of identities other than class, such as gender, race, ethnic origins, caste, etc. Both of them have pointed to some sort of “anti-wokeness” concern. But there is a problem here. And certainly, it relates to the next one that I'm going to identify. But you know, the inability to recognize differences and then build coalitions across them, is a major problem. There is a continuing emphasis on class as the dominant contradiction, which in many ways it is; but in some cases imperialism is more important; and in other cases, other identities mix in so inextricably with class that you cannot just focus on one without the other. I know in India caste plays such a role, for example. This is something that we in the left need to think much more about, about how to adequately recognize and build coalitions across other identities so that we create a much more joint Popular Front rather than enable the fragmentation that Boris also described.

The sixth is the issue of what used to be called the woman question, more properly the gender question. That's critical, also in economic terms, because the left, just as much as the right, has been such an exploiter of unpaid labour. And of course, the unpaid labour that occurs is gender-differentiated. We know what role it plays in capitalism. But I would argue that the left, too, has been a significant exploiter of unpaid labour. Certainly there has been an insufficient emphasis on gender and the various roles it plays in discrimination, exclusion, differentiation in society, economy and politics.

Finally, an issue that is now very much on everyone's agenda: the issue of environment and nature, which we have historically disregarded, and are only beginning to come to terms with now. Planetary boundaries, the exploitation of nature, the inability to be in harmony with ecology and the environment. This has been as true of leftist regimes as it has been of purely capitalist or neoliberal regimes, but it's also something that we still don't adequately incorporate into our mobilization and our advocacy and our politics.

Having identified these areas of needed changes, I also want to emphasize some areas of continuity. I already talked about imperialism, and both Bill and Alex have emphasized its significance.

We have new forms of economic territory that we didn't even think about in the past. We used to think about land, markets, labour. But now we have cyberspace, new intellectual property rights as markets and so on, which are all expressed in very dynamic, imperialist ways. And that is a continuity from the past. But it's one that we need to be factoring in much more in everything that we do. And I don't think even we in the global left do that sufficiently.

Finally, the nation state. Whether we like it or not, it remains the terrain in which we have to engage, confront, deal with many of these issues: whether it is rights, or the kinds of democracy or the reduction of centralization and so on. In all of these, the nation state remains critical. So we have to aim for internationalism rather than a kind of withering away right now of the state.

Possibly, these are all controversial statements. I'm sure that these are not necessarily agreed to by everyone here either, but I think it's a tribute to how Boris’ book forces us to think and shows how his book is very profound in important ways. It also forces us to think about our own national and international contexts, and what we really have to do in order to take our project forward. Thanks.

QUESTIONS

Nancy Fraser: Thank you. Well, thanks to the three speakers, those were all really insightful and interesting comments. And I wanted to say something about the relation of gender, race and class, the primacy of class, the inadequacy, though, of dismissing race and gender as wokeism and so on. I think it's very important to distinguish between the structural plane at which we think about these issues and what some people here are calling the identity plane. And I want to just say on the structural plane, in my opinion, gender and race are not alternatives to class. They are divisions and differentiations within it which are structurally generated by capitalism itself. I alluded to this much too quickly in my earlier remarks. You cannot extract surplus value from doubly free workers in factories without somebody doing the unpaid social reproductive work that that produces them. And without somebody supplying below cost, raw materials, energy and other inputs. Du Bois was mentioned earlier: you don't have Manchester without Mississippi. Today you don't have Cupertino without Shenzhen and without Kinshasa. So, these are all imbricated across the globe.

I was trying to say to stress the heteroclite and diverse character of the global working class, but we should say more as Marxists than that it's diverse. We should be able to say something about what structurally makes it diverse and what structurally creates the divisions and appearances that gender and race are somehow, you know, not connected to class. This is what I was trying to get at, and my thought was that, to overcome fragmentation – it's an experiment, you know – how far could we get by redescribing a lot of issues around gender and around race and empire as labour issues. How far could we get in trying to reveal to the social actors themselves that gender and race are not epiphenomenal but are formations that are generated within the class structure of capitalism. I think that's a different position. But then the idea is that these are three things that we have to think about, take account of all of them, and it's certainly different from the idea that only class is real and fundamental. Thank you.

Devparna Roy: Thank you. I am Devparna Roy, associate professor of sociology at Nazareth University in Rochester, New York state, United States. I am very happy to be able to get the opportunity to speak with you all today. Thanks, Nancy, Alex, Bill and Jayati. The first point relates to the question of gender and race as I teach American undergraduates about race and ethnicity. I teach them about intersectionality, a concept that has been created by black feminists such as Patricia Hill Collins and Kimberlé Crenshaw. So, is there a way to infuse intersectionality concept with a structuralist perspective, and how would that help us combat what Nancy Fraser has correctly identified as a central question that the global left faces today? A second follow up question relates to the matter of de-growth. I haven't had the privilege to read Boris's book as yet, but does Boris deal with the question of de-growth? And could Professor Jayati Ghosh would kindly address the issue?

Tanya Marquette: I really appreciate the comments of everybody. And I don't know that I will sound as coherent as some of those who spoke. I'm in New York State. I have been a community organizer on different issues, predominantly on race, gender and health, for pretty much all my adult life. My concern is with some comments that Bill Fletcher made where he was using Covid as an example. And one of the things that I find with the left that's a real concern of mine is how while people on the left may understand corporatism and capitalism, they seem to have a segmented way of looking at health care, as if the health industry is different from any of the other industries. And one of the things that I have seen very clearly is that the medical industry, which is an industry no different than any of the others, has completely commoditized the human body for profit. And it has been done intentionally. Anybody who does research into that, which I have done quite a bit of, knows it was intentional. It has focused on only supporting drugs that can be patented for profit, which means that it attacks anything natural. It will rape the environment for natural products that they can then turn into patented drugs. There's a long history of that, and Covid is the perfect example of how an entire population has been brought under control.
As I think a Belgian psychologist wrote, his name is Matthias Desmet, this is mass formation gaining complete control of the population in order to subordinate them to the needs of the corporate class. The studies on Covid, on the drugs that are used have been fictional. They've been fraudulent. They have been used intentionally to depopulate the world. The one million deaths in this country are mainly from the drugs that were used, called vaccines and treatments such as ventilators and remdesivir, a drug that in many tests killed at least 50% of the human subjects. So, health has to be understood in the same way that we understand every other aspect of society, of people under capitalism, how they are exploited, how they are used for profit and somehow or other, we have to find ways to educate the public away from the belief system that is as profound as any religion in the health industry, which is not health. It's all about medicine and profit and actually works on attacking our health. And so, this is something I really feel that has to be included in any of the work that we do on socialism and bringing in all these other groups of people that have been ignored, all these identities and all the different ways that people are exploitedand used for profit under capitalism and imperialism.

ANSWER

Currently, my problem really is not that this is not recognized, since there is now enough analysis for us to understand that, partly due to Nancy's own work and a bunch of other Marxist feminists and others who have done this. Rather, I feel that we haven't incorporated this in our own politics and practice. That's my problem: I believe that the left today and the Marxist left, or whichever left you want to call it, doesn't sufficiently recognize this, doesn't sufficiently recognize unpaid labour or even informal labour in the same way. I think Alex was highlighting this a little bit.

There's a very interesting comment by Enver Motala in the chat, about alternative solidaristic communities that evolve with very fragile forms of work, and we have to remember that informal workers are about 70% of all workers in the developing world.In my own country, in India, they are 90% of all workers. They are only about 30% in the rich countries in the advanced capitalist economies. But obviously they have to evolve survival strategies, create forms of community cooperation and so on, simply to survive. These are extremely vulnerable, fragile types of livelihood, so you only survive if you do this. But I think it's absolutely true that we have to pay attention to this, and that left movements across different countries and within countries have to be more conscious of the specific things that are going on and how those could be either expanded or protected or strengthened. And we don't often look at that. We're still stuck in the old trade union mode rather than other forms of association and combination.

There was a question about degrowth, and we could easily have a whole new lecture on degrowth. Let me put it very quickly and briefly. I personally think that the debate between green growth and degrowth is a red herring. My view is that we are only obsessed with this because we have fallen into the trap which capitalism creates. Economic growth is fundamental to capitalism, which cannot exist without accumulation and expansion. But is it fundamental to development and human progress? I don't think so. It is possible to achieve an economy that provides basic needs for all health, for all capabilities of all, etc., without necessarily a higher GDP. But a lot depends on the nature of the production, consumption, distribution and so on. What that means is that we have to be thinking of the kind of economy we want, which meets human and social goals within planetary boundaries, and consider what measures are required for that. And if you look at it, advocates for both degrowth and the green growth are saying exactly the same thing in terms of the policies that they want to promote. The proposals and recommendations for what they want, the things that they want for the economy to do, they are essentially the same. But then they're fighting over whether the GDP should be going up or down. To me, that's irrelevant, that's not the important issue. Maybe it goes up in some cases, maybe it goes down in some cases. It doesn't have to be either. And I don't think that we should be obsessing about that, because that means being caught within a paradigm that we should really be getting out of. But that's a very brief and quick answer to something that is a much bigger issue. So let me stop here. Thanks.

QUESTIONS

Leo Gabriel: Good afternoon. I'm happy to be among so many like-minded friends because I discovered that we are approaching the same subject from different points of view, keeping our diversity And diversity is also the key element. According to me, I, who has been most of his life dealing with Latin American cultures where you can capture the cultural dimension within a structure than what the nation state has offered to us for two or more centuries. And I think what we could do and there I agree very much with Jayati Ghosh that we need to have an extreme effort of decentralization and that's the difference from the, let's say, old fashioned, Soviet Union type of socialism, so that we can recognize our difference within a common structure. And from that point go on, in order to have another dynamic. I don't believe very much in utopias in the sense of castles in the air, a fixed concept that you have to get to in an ideological way. I'm more for people of movement and movements. That's to say we have to go ahead, struggling for the realization of something.And we find our enemies on the way. So, I think just in Latin America, there are a lot of examples in the economic fields, which have been quite successful, like the one under the name of solidarity economics, participatory budget and others where you can really build something from the bottom up and not from top down. I think that is the most important. And if we agree on this form of procedure, then we can come to a convergence of different kinds which are now separated – a peace movement, the women's movement, the movement against climate change and so on. We could have this way, like little stones in a mosaic, which then eventually get together and produce a form. I don't know yet what the form is, but the struggle will say where we are heading. Thank you very much.

Steve Firebrand: Hi. Thank you very much for this conference. It's been really, really interesting. I agree with what the speakers have said about, identity politics and imperialism and so forth. I think one key weakness in the book is a rejection of the Leninist idea of a revolutionary party. I think that's exactly what is needed on the left today. We need to re-establish the real Marxist tradition, going back to self-emancipation, and re-establish organizations that put that forward and intervene in the class struggle and the struggle of the oppressed. To do that we need today to go out and organize the many thousands and thousands of people who are open to Marxist ideas but are not yet an organization. A key weakness, I think, on the left is the lack of actual revolutionary organization, which is founded on the basic principles of Marx, Engels, Lenin, etc. These kinds of organizations are needed today to intervene in the struggles that are going on, both in terms of the struggle itself and in terms of the political battles around the issues that people have brought up. So, I think that re-establishing that tradition is important, and actually building Marxist cadre around those ideas and organization is, the key question and that that entails democratic centralism as well, to make that effective. And we can't shy away from that. We have to reestablish that as opposed to the so-called leftism of Stalinism and social democracy, which have become dominant on the left. And I think that's one of the key questions we have to face today. Thank you.

Francis King: Hello. Thanks, everybody. Very, very interesting conference. I'm Frances King. I'm the editor of the journal Socialist History. We're pleased to have Boris Kagarlitsky as one of our editorial advisors – I'm sure we're not the only journal in that position – as well as an occasional contributor. I want to talk a bit about the idea of the long retreat, because I come from the orthodox Communist tradition. And one of the things that we had, one of the great advantages that we had was an ability to point to what we imagined was a feasible, really existing model of an alternative society. An alternative mode of production. An alternative economic system in which we believed. In certain countries, quite a lot of people did. Others, like Britain, not so very many. It represented, if you like, at least the bare outline, the armature of a viable, feasible alternative system which we could recognize, which we could recommend to other people. And for the last four decades, the belief in the possibility of an alternative to capitalism, a viable alternative to capitalism, which can be built and we know is going to work, has largely dissipated.
And I think one thing which kind of under underlies a great part of this retreat is precisely that lack of belief. And so, we get this kind of fragmentation, which is represented in identity politics and that sort of thing, individual liberations, little struggles here and there and that sort of thing. But the overarching belief in the possibility, feasibility and, you know, realizability of an actual alternative mode of production that seems to be the one thing which used to exist and is now largely, largely missing. And how you actually deal with that? I don't have the answer. But without that, the socialist movement is kind of missing one of the most important assets it used to have in the past, but that it does not have now, something credible it can present to people who are not already convinced.

ANSWER

Jayati Ghosh: I was hoping for a little more time to think because there's so many interesting comments and responses out here. First, I want to completely agree with Leo Gabriel that there are many different types of initiatives going on: solidarity economy, participatory budgets, different kinds of movements for even tax reform and so on, that we should all be relating to.

A very quick comment on David Schwartz's note in the chat about Ecosocialist movements and the defeat of fossil fuel capitalism. I think one of the problems is perhaps that we are looking at it too narrowly. In very many developing countries, there are real concerns that this would impede the access of the poor to even getting electrification in their homes and so on and so forth, which is an argument promoted by national governments in league with their own fossil capital. What we really need to do is to look at the entire ecosystem that perpetuates this kind of reliance. The already developed new technologies, the greener technologies in renewable energy like wind and solar and so on, those are simply not made available to most of the developing world. It's the other aspect of imperialism that has already been mentioned. As a result, the reduction of fossil fuel production then becomes something that is seen to impede the achieving basic needs for a large proportion of the population. Instead, we should be focusing more on that entire ecosystem, particularly the monopolization of knowledge that is inhibiting much needed technological progress of different kinds.

I also want to pick up on a comment on health systems. There's no question that the global medical industry is highly commercialized and oriented to short-term profit rather than longer term public health. But we shouldn't be overinfluenced by the example of the US medical system, which is perhaps the most obscene that I have seen. Given the varieties of capitalism, there are still countries in the world where you can access health care in a much more reasonable way, accessible and affordable for all. It is possible to avoid the trap of the very privatized, financialized and aggressively profit oriented health economy exemplified by the US insurance-based model. So we have to stop the export of that US model to other systems, rather than simply say that's what capitalism creates.

Essentially, in the absence of what Francis King has just described as “the viable socialist alternative”, we have to focus on the things that we can achieve. I believe that we can chip away at the edges of a very exploitative global capitalist imperialist system. That doesn't necessarily mean a huge and fundamental socialist transformation, but it's the beginnings of it. Boris also mentions in his book how these small movements aim at reform—but they also can create momentum for wider changes that cannot be achieved without a more fundamental transformation.

Also, as a slightly provocative response to Francis, maybe it was a problem, that we were relying on this big, viable socialist alternative that was an illusion. And so instead of saying, oh, it's too bad we don't have that anymore, we have to recognize that it was our flaw in not recognizing the problems with that system that made it more difficult for us to persuade others. So we shouldn't be saying “we've got the template, the universal answer for how we're going to organize society, economy and everything”. Instead, we should be saying that there are these different movements from the ground up in different places that are challenging different parts of the existing system. Let us build solidarity across all of these different movements, which range from tax reform to solidarity economy to different kinds of energy use, to breaking down the monopolies over knowledge that impact us in so many different ways to anti-imperialist struggles. Let's try and build solidarity across all of those, without saying: this is the exact point and final goal we have to reach. We have to think of all the different progressive ways in which people are trying to transform societies and economies in a more equitable and desirable socialist way and work together along those lines.