This is part two of the debate with my dear friend Kae, and it is assumed that the reader will have read part one and is thus able to connect the dots.
Kae went to town by asking questions like, whether I implied that socialism could not work in Namibia, whether capitalism where it had been applied had provided solutions or whether socialism, wherever it had been applied, had failed dismally.
Need I remind the reader that Kae failed to provide examples of socialist success stories after accusing me of dancing around this issue. Many socialist countries that I know have done relatively well when it comes to social protection or the promotion of social rights, but they have failed dismally when it comes to the protection of political rights and freedoms. Venezuela is a case in point. Under Chavez, they made good use of their oil revenues to provide affordable housing, free health care and free education to their people. During the early years of the revolution, they also saw an increase in the Human Development Index as well as a drastic drop in poverty levels. Over the last few years, however, their economy has been under siege and it is difficult to discern as to which problems are of their own making and which ones are caused by economic strangulation by the US and its local allies.
The other side of the coin is, the number of political prisoners in Venezuela is estimated to be in the region of 16 000 – some of them apparently on trumped-up charges. Recently, the country has dropped 42 places in the Press Freedom Index. Without too much value-judgement, I will leave that to the reader to decide for himself/herself whether Venezuela is a success story or not.
For Kae to argue that my lack of proposing an alternative to the neo-liberal exploitative global relations does not help the discourse, does not leave us none the wiser, because he is not suggesting a practical alternative either, except for the tired rhetoric of “…common ownership of the means of production…”
“Common ownership of the means of production” as a concept can easily render itself to becoming a runaway abstraction unless it is unpacked and contextualised in time and space, i.e. within a specific historical period and in a given country.
To refer to the “common ownership of the means of production” is too vague and it has become an over-sung song. Unless Kae tells us about the “bolts and nuts” on how to practically effect this “common ownership” he is, unfortunately, not telling us anything new.
The burning question is, do we, as a nation, for example, have sophisticated technology, skilled man/woman power and capital to do large-scale mining and other big operations like hydrogen and oil production, now that these resources are high on our radar? You need to take all these factors into account before you talk about common ownership of the means of production.
As I argued earlier, if we break away from the world market, how and with who are we going to trade? Alpesh Maisuria (2018) argues that “…the neo-liberal global relations of production are not optional, nobody can decide to step outside of these relations as they may wish because the system has encapsulated the entire world through a domineering economic and socio-cultural order.” This is the grim reality of the world we live in.
If my dear friend wanted to take me on “toe to toe” in the centre of the ring, the first question he was to answer was, how do we break away from these exploitative neo-liberal global relations? That was the central plank of my argument. Granted that I failed to provide an alternative, what is the alternative that he is offering?
Most importantly, any serious debate about socialism as an alternative to capitalism needs to rigorously interrogate what went wrong with the socialist project as a global process. This is an issue that many professed leftists I know have been dancing around because they are afraid of being labelled as “revisionists” or “reactionaries”. It is therefore high time we turned some of these outdated concepts and assumptions on their heads by redefining them. What was regarded as “progressive” or “reactionary” in socialist circles a few years ago, may no longer fit that definition any more because the world has moved on. All these concepts are relative. Whose definitions are we talking about and what social yardstick are we using to” measure” such concepts?
My point of departure is not that capitalism is a better system than socialism; it is not and it has never been. Socialism, as a theoretical socio-economic model, is the most humane system you could think of; implementation has been the major problem. The question is, how do we re-visit socialism without falling into the pitfalls of a highly-centralized bureaucratic state machinery that is totally alienated from the people, as was the case in Eastern Europe and elsewhere? Kae’s seemingly “blanket” embrace of socialism without proposing as to how the mistakes of the past can be addressed, does not help the discourse either.
In a typical Marxist textbook approach, Kae calls for “…. a classless society….” He, however, does not tell us how we can achieve this “classless society” without dwelling in idealistic romanticism.
In summary, my discourse is underpinned by a two-pronged position, namely: a) To break away from the exploitative neo-liberal global trade relations is not a viable option at this point in time, unless we want to “commit economic suicide” – the best we could do under the circumstances is to try to fight from within the belly of the empire; and b) Any serious debate about socialism as a viable alternative to capitalism should first and foremost start by asking hard questions as to what went wrong with the socialist project as a global process.
Rigorous hard-nosed scholarship, which I ascribe to as a quality, is invariably more about framing penetrating and diagnostic questions than providing solutions. I rest my case.