Socialism: One Step Forward or Three Steps Back?

All over the Left, there are lots of slogans and ideas on how to challenge our economic system and create a just society. People want us to “Stop Shopping,” “Get Back to Nature,” “Kill Your TV” and go “F*ck McDonald’s.” These ideas and slogans embody the anger and frustration that many young people today feel towards the problems and inequalities that capitalism has produced in the United States. They are calls to action against mass consumerism, shallow pop culture, environmental degradation, poverty and a “fast food nation.”

These slogans, as radical sounding as they are, lead the left down a narrow and ultimately, dead-end road. They are, at the core, an attempt to “go back to the future” to recreate some idealistic, romanticized version of the past to solve the problems we face today. Do you think that industrial agriculture with its pesticides and pollution are damaging the environment? Then implement agricultural practices that existed before modern capitalism. Think that pop culture is dumbing down the American public? Then let’s get rid of our televisions! McDonald’s and Burger King sell us garbage to eat and pay their workers minimum wage; so let’s just get rid of them too! But these proposals create an agrarian world that wouldn’t be feasible nor solve the problems created by capitalism. We wouldn’t be able to just throw out our televisions, close down all fast food joints and start growing our own food.

People who advocate these types of ideals are what Karl Marx called “utopian socialists.” Utopian socialism isn’t a new idea. These ideas, in some shape or form, have been around since the development of capitalism.

The problem with this type of utopianism is that it is based upon a lack of under standing of how capitalism works and lack of confidence in the working class to make change. Utopian socialists of past and present realize that poverty, unemployment, low-wages and other critical issues facing working people are connected to capitalism, but not how. They don’t see the drive to maximize profits by any means necessary as the engine of capitalism. They divorce the problems created by capitalism from the system and see them as problems, in and of themselves, isolated from each other. In the end, these utopianists invent solutions that have little connection to what working people actually want and need.

One area where we see a lot of these ideas is on the role of technology. Modern utopian leftists essentially argue that technological modernization has contributed heavily to the destruction of our environment and the creation of empty consumerism in the US. For them, the problem is technology itself. Seeing this phenomenon in isolation and not related to the class struggle leads them to the idea that we should just do away with many of the new developments in the modern world, essentially recreating a time before capitalism.

To justify their ideas, they glorify and romanticize the conditions they see in poor countries, and in particular, poor countries that are developing socialism. They see the organic farming happening in Cuba and think that everyone should get back to nature and till the fields with hoes and oxen. They don’t understand nor want to know that this decision was based upon the harsh conditions the Cubans faced after the collapse of the Soviet Union, rather than solely on their desire to create a “green” society.
They delight in the fact that people in third-world countries get by without having to have expensive cars, don’t watch celebrity-obsessed shows and don’t eat at fast food chains. At the same time, they turn a blind eye to the negative consequences of not having, at their disposal, the latest technology. They don’t talk about the lack of access to safe water, electricity, medicine, and food.

At the core of this ideology, is a fetishism of poverty and racism. For the most part, it is white activists from more affluent backgrounds that get caught up in romanticizing the conditions found in other countries. They feel that people in developing countries are “better off” because they lack the technological inventions that have ruined American culture. People in these countries would be “better off “ without material development and trade because it would end corporations using them and their natural resources to make a profit. In essence, it would be better for people living in poor countries to stay technologically backwards because it would save them from the problems these activists see in the U.S. Of course, these very same Western activists often do not even think twice about how much they themselves enjoy, and are reliant upon, “bourgeois luxuries” such as iPods and the internet.

Marx never entertained such romantic notions about the material conditions within developing countries. In an article entitled “British Rule in India” for The New York Daily Tribune in 1853, he writes of the traditional villages in India at the time:
We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man to be the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Hanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.

He then further explains: “Modern industry, resulting from the railway system, will dissolve the hereditary divisions of labor, upon which rest the Indian castes, those decisive impediments to Indian progress and Indian power. “ Of course, this was no defense of British colonialism, which he fully realized, only served to reinforce the caste system. In fact, Marx advocated for Indian independence well before most anyone else in the Western world.

The point is that scientific socialism is not built on wants or desires about a fantasy world. If socialism is to work and to actually happen, it must be based in reality and the real conditions that exist. As Marx noted, “Socialism won’t be built on it’s own foundations, but on the foundations of the capitalist society that it grows out of.”
Building a socialist USA won’t be about taking a step back into the past, but about making a true step forward. Eventually, it can change, and do away with, the negative things that have sprung up under capitalism, and those injustices that capitalism has perpetuated. But, it will also take the technological breakthroughs that capitalism has created, to produce a better society—for everyone.