Socialism

6. The future of socialism

The near universal collapse of nominally socialist regimes since the late 1980s has led many critics of socialism to proclaim its death. But these regimes have always had their socialist critics also, for many of whom these historic events may prove welcome, not least in undermining the previously hegemonic status of Marxist-Leninism in socialist theory and practice, and the marginalization of other significant traditions of socialist thought. Thus one response to the political and economic failures of state socialism has been to return to some of these earlier, non-centralist socialist traditions, and attempt to re-work them for contemporary purposes. One such attempt is that of the ‘associational socialists’ who, taking their inspiration from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century guild socialism and syndicalism, propose independent and self-governing functional associations as the units of political and economic authority, rejecting both state and market.

By contrast, as noted earlier, the project of ‘market socialism’ is to construct a non-capitalist market system operating within liberal democratic political institutions. This position has the virtue of being able to provide a relatively well-articulated alternative to capitalism which takes account of the powerful objections to centralized planning. Yet its acceptance of market forces, of individual self-interest and relationships of exchange and competition, makes it appear to non-market socialists a poor substitute for the ‘truly human’ community to which they aspire. To this its proponents may reply that one should not aim at a single, monolithic ideal of community for society as a whole, but accept instead a more differentiated conception of social existence in which different forms of human wellbeing are realized within different spheres or domains, of which the economic is but one. Yet it remains unclear whether market economies are compatible with, or inimical to, the flourishing of significant forms of community outside the economic sphere (see Communty and communitarianism).

Further, like any market system, market socialism is subject to a range of objections from an ecological or environmental perspective. The market fails to take account of the environmentally destructive consequences of economic growth; it is unable to incorporate the interests of those who cannot engage in market transactions – whether the poor, members of future generations, or non human beings; and it encourages people to misidentify the primary source of wellbeing as the endless pursuit of consumer satisfactions. Indeed, whilst the environmental movement has presented a serious challenge to the tendency of much socialist thought to conceive of human emancipation as requiring the subordination of nature to human ends, it has also given new life to many traditional socialist objections to the market: its remarkable ability to generate collectively irrational outcomes from individually rational behaviour, including the underproduction of public goods and the overproduction of public ills. For both political ecologists and socialists, there is a vast range of social problems which require collective rather than individual action for their solution, and a continuing need for forms of ethical and political commitment that the market both fails to recognize and may often undermine (see Green political philosophy).