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“But What Are You For?”

By Markar Melkonian 

“I know what you’re AGAINST,” more than one friend has said in more than one way: 

“You’re against turning stodgy old Soviet sports complexes into glamorous gambling casinos.  You’re against the job-creators who own Armenia’s strip mines.  You’re against the family businessmen with their debonair bodyguards.  You’re against the Coalitions of the Willing that brought democracy and human rights to Iraq, Libya, and Syria.  Oh yes, and you’re against Free Enterprise, the key to Armenia’s prosperity.  You’re against all of these wonderful things, but what are you FOR?” 

It is a fair question. People want a vision of the future, however distant.  Years ago Margaret Thatcher loudly proclaimed that “there is no alternative” to the Free Market--but this is no vision at all, not even a wrong one. Twenty-five years after the demise of the USSR, millions of Yankees in the belly of the beast reject Thatcher’s dictum, as they line up behind a self-described “democratic socialist” presidential candidate. People don’t like to be presented with a fait accompli.  They want a vision of a better future, and every now and then they will even determine for themselves whether or not that vision is realistic. 

So I will set aside my materialist aversion to lighter-than-air architectural design and sketch a couple of features of a future without capitalist rule.  I will try to do this in a few brief gestures, just enough to dispel a misconception or two. 

Socialism Is Workers’ Power

What do people like me want?  The answer is workers’ power, the political power of workers as a class. We want the working class majority to wield state power, instead of a small class of big capitalists who most assuredly monopolize political power these days.  If the word “socialism” means anything in particular, it means this. 

Some people will ask:  Why workers?  Why shouldn’t we aim for leadership by plain old honest patriots, instead of the crooks who are now in power?  But let us remind ourselves that today’s crooks in Yerevan were yesterday’s honest patriots, and yesterday’s crooks were honest patriots the day before.  And let us also note that systems corrupt individuals sooner than individuals reduce corruption.  What is needed is not a change of personnel, but a change of the system. 

Others will ask:  But why should members of any particular class rule, instead of efficient tech savvy people who can “get the job done”? But let us recall the legions of disgraced technocrats from USAID, the World Bank, the U.S. Treasury Department, and scores of other supposedly non-ideological agencies.  Wikileaks and Edward Snowden have only confirmed what should have been clear long ago:  the jobs that these technocrats “got done” seem always to have benefitted the rich and the powerful. Champions of the working class are just as tech savvy as anyone else, and perhaps more so than most, but nothing is more ideological than technocratic thinking.

Armenia’s workers today are confused, exhausted, and demoralized.  But the smartest oligarchs understand, in their own way, that the greatest danger they face is that those workers will one day wake up to the fact that they do indeed constitute a class.  Our capitalist rulers understand class struggle.  Why should the rest of us be any less clear-sighted?  

We need to envision ways to fight back in the class war they are waging against us, but we should not feel we have to fill in every detail of a post-capitalist future.  Unforeseen challenges will confront us in the course of the struggle, and surprising opportunities, too.  So let us be cautious and speak only of the most sweeping features of a socialist future.

Socialism and Central Planning

Socialism, conceived as workers’ power, is not an economic system; rather, it is a political state of affairs.  As long as workers as a class are in the driver’s seat, you have socialism.

Some readers might object.  Socialism, they will say, is commonly defined as state ownership of the means of production plus central planning.  But neither state ownership of the means of production nor central planning are definitive features of socialism.  Economic planning is a feature of state policy in any large complex society today.  Every such society, from Singapore to Cuba, has a “mixed economy.”  Even the most laissez-faire of capitalist economies require planning and massive, daily state intervention in the economy, in the form of monetary and fiscal policy, regulation, and provision of “public goods” such as infrastructure, subsidies, public schools, and research. 

The question is not whether planning should take place.  Nor is it even a question of the proportion of the mix of market and planning in an economy.  Indeed, for all we know, a “mixed economy” under workers’ power might require less planning and less regulation than does capitalism today.  The question, rather, is the ancient one:  Cui bono?  Who will benefit from the planning?

Under socialism, planning will benefit working-class families, the poor, small farmers, women, young people, and households on fixed income.  It will also benefit self-employed workers, professionals, small businessmen, those at the bottom, and those in the middle, instead of just a small minority at the very top. 

For decades we have heard that there is no such thing as a free lunch:  we must face up to unavoidable trade-offs and make “hard decisions.”  If, for example, we want more social programs, we are told, then we will have to bear the burden of higher taxes.  But socialism poses entirely different alternatives, including the following:  either higher taxes for middle-income households and more public giveaways to corporations and the super rich, or lower taxes and more social programs for working class households.  Perhaps it is time to put an end to free lunch for the plutocrats.

Socialism and State Ownership

Nor is state ownership of the means of production anecessary feature of socialism.  Many forms of social ownership do not involve state ownership at all.  Consider, for example, collectives and worker-ownership.  Private ownership by self-employed workers might flourishing a socialist Armenia, too, just as it has proliferated for decades, with state assistance, in the Republic of Cuba.  Small and even medium-scale capitalist enterprises might also continue to operate in a socialist Armenia.

To face Armenia’s problems, though, some large sectors should be socialized sooner rather than later.  This would include energy, transportation, mining, banking, and finance and insurance. All of these sectors can and should be removed from the market to benefit consumers, workers, and future generations.  And perhaps other sectors, too, including the pension system and healthcare.

If worker-owned cooperative enterprises proliferate under socialism, alongside self-employment and even medium-scale capitalist enterprises, then the market must continue to operate over a large part of the economy, perhaps for a long time to come.  Over time, though, production for the market will give way more and more to production for use value, rather than the market. 

Gradually or not-so-gradually, land should be removed from the realm of private ownership, too. The commodification of land has brought woe to Armenia.  Consider the fact that in recent years land developers have denied the citizenry access to Lake Sevan, the only large body of water in the country.  Or consider the fact that affordable housing has disappeared in Yerevan, as the poor have been pushed to the fringes of the city.  Or consider the devastation of the countryside by oligarchs who have seized communally held lands. 

Land-use rights might be granted, as well as private ownership of structures on the land, but not private ownership of land.There might be lessons to be learned here from China, a nominally (but not genuinely) socialist country that will soon be the largest economy on earth.  China’s economic growth is much admired in the West, and yet, so far at least, that grown has taken place without private ownership of land. 

Full Employment and a Shorter Work Week

The struggle over the length of the workweek has been one of the hottest flashpoints of class struggle since the earliest days of capitalism.  The forty-hour workweek was an achievement of decades of class struggle, but as we have seen in recent years, the capitalists have rolled back this achievement, even as unemployment has soared.  A socialist Armenia would move to dramatically cut the length of the workweek.  Why not a thirty-hour workweek with a guaranteed living wage?  This would dramatically decrease unemployment and underemployment.  Higher productivity makes this technically possible today, but capitalism cannot cut the workweek without the risk of falling profits. Socialism, by contrast, pushes for high rates of employment.

A shorter workweek and more leisure time would open up new life options for people, strengthen families, and build communities. 

Socialism and the Family

Perhaps the first and clearest beneficiaries of workers’ power would be children.   The conditions of life for Armenia’s children have plummeted over the past twenty-five years.  Public schools have deteriorated and free high-quality daycare for working mothers has all but disappeared, as have paid maternity leave and access to pre- and post-natal healthcare.  Meanwhile, tens of thousands of mothers in Armenia have been abandoned by husbands who have left the country to find work.

These assaults against children and families constitute an on-going violation of deeply held Armenian values.  Socialism will abruptly reverse this process. The fight for socialism is a fight for children and future generations. 

Democracy and Personal Freedom

We want a multi-party representative democracy within the context of a workers’ state, instead of a capitalist state. Electoral democracy under capitalist rule is little more than a rigged ritual to legitimate plutocracy.  But one of the many lessons we should have learned from the last century is that socialism cannot endure if it stands in the way of representative democracy and personal freedoms.  Workers’ power could in principle deliver more freedom of speech, press, assembly, and conscience than prevails today in the most liberal of the liberal democracies.  A state that is not dedicated to perpetuating enormous inequalities of wealth and power would not need to unleash militarized police against neighborhoods, or to eavesdrop daily on the personal communications of millions of its citizens.

Socialism versus Ecocide

Before bringing this too-brief discussion to a close, we should at least mention one of the most urgent reasons for socialism on a global level.  Most of the humans on our planet today, including most Armenians, need more food, housing, safe drinking water, heating fuel, public transportation, healthcare, and schooling to meet “primary needs.”  If the climate scientists are right, though, consumption should be CUT in the richest capitalist countries.  The planet simply cannot sustain the high per capital consumption levels of resources, notably fossil fuels, in countries like the United States, Japan, Canada, and Australia. 

But how on earth is this trade-off to take place?  How would it be possible to increase production and consumption in countries like Armenia, while simultaneously cutting production and consumption in the richest countries?  How, for that matter, are we to slow down and reverse such unsustainable market-driven processes as automobilization in India and China?  Whatever it will take, it will involve breaking the overriding logic of market relations—and doing so on a global level.  Our capitalist rulers have abundantly demonstrated that they cannot do this. 

The single issue of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) alone should constitute a conclusive argument against capitalist rule in the twenty-first century.  Capitalism requires infinite expansion of production and consumption, but infinite expansion cannot take place on a finite planet.  There is widespread recognition, even among technocrats in the West, that capitalism is daily making the problem worse.  If a solution is to be found, then it must involve defying the logic of the market, and reining in capitalism.  Socialism holds out the possibility that production can be reorganized along sustainable lines without the risk of recession.

The topic of capitalism and AGW is pivotal, but it will have to take place at another time.  In the meantime, the reader is invited to access the following article by researcher and climate activist Chris Williams:  http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/33439-how-will-we-reach-an-ecological-civilization-and-who-will-build-it.

*        *        *

What do we want?  We want a social order that breaks the logic of capitalist expansion, a social order where production takes place not for profit, but to meet the most pressing needs first--food, shelter, healthcare, jobs, schooling, and public transport—and to do so in a way that will not lead to further global warming. We want a very different social order, one in which the police and the legal system defend workers’ power, instead of the power and privileges of the oligarchs.

Lenin wrote that he wanted socialism with human nature as it is now.  And so do we.  We do not demand paradise on Earth, and we do not require that human beings become angels.  There will be no mandatory meetings under workers’ power, and no phony altruism. 

But neighbors will not go hungry, children will not skip school because their parents cannot afford the books, and families will not be thrown out of their homes to make room for luxury hotels.  Our elderly compatriots will not be shunted away to die in poverty. Consumers of electricity, public transportation, and healthcare services will not live in fear of sudden price gouging by capitalist usurpers of privatized public property.  Women will walk safe streets and work in well-paid jobs, and the law will be on their side. 

Hovhannes Toumanian’s Golden City (Vosge Kaghak) was not paved with gold.  Rather, it was a modest town where the natural bonds of solidarity within the family, the neighborhood, and the larger community flourished. 

We see no reason why this sort of solidarity must be incompatible with urbanization and highly productive labor… At least not in our Golden City, where power will be in the hands of the economically productive majority. 

Markar Melkonian is a philosophy instructor and an author. His books include Richard Rorty’s Politics:  Liberalism at the End of the American Century (1999), Marxism: A Post-Cold War Primer (Westview Press, 1996), and My Brother’s Road (2005).

Comments (6)

H.
Levon, I don't think Angela was wrong in what she said. The Soviets did have lower living standards than those in the West. In fact, one of the things they noticed when they were allowed to travel and holiday was that their living standards were even below certain states of the Eastern Bloc like the GDR, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, etc. Markar, there is no opposition in Armenia, left or right. The Armenian communists you're looking for all decided to form their own parties–they can be found in the Republican Party, Prosperous Armenia, and so on. The thing is, the later generation of Soviet communists were less ideologically devoted to communism; for them, it was all about survivalism and getting ahead and the best way to do that was by parroting the rhetoric of the state and taking part in its institutions (many of the bureaucrats and leaders in Armenia were members of the Komsomol, for example). That rhetoric and those institutions are no longer communist and these people have adapted to this change. If there were true believers in communism we would see them on the streets, or, as you mentioned, on the Internet, where they can't even be bothered to put a website together. Says it all, doesn't it?
Markar Melkonian
Boghos, you are right, too: yes, of course Armenian workers have no power. If they did have power, then we would have socialism! But I don’t understand what you’re getting at when you write that there are no producers of wealth in Armenia. On the face of it, this is false. The oligarchs are not making all of their money off of imports and scrapped Soviet-era infrastructure, and the rest of the country could not be getting by on remittances and “foreign aid” alone. Armenia still has farms, mines, factories, power plants, and office buildings full of wager earners producing wealth. Or did you mean to say that workers in Armenia do not recognize that they are producers of wealth? This is a very different point, and it is a very old story: just as the medieval lords and their priests denigrated the serfs who were the source of their riches, so also the capitalists and their economist-priests trivialize the wage earners who produce the wealth today. Workers are always hidebound, overpaid, dull-witted, replaceable laggards. They are at the bottom because they have made bad choices and they lack the virtues necessary to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Capitalists, by contrast, are repositories of foresight, initiative, innovation, generosity, and social progress. People get what they deserve: this is the profoundest moral of the “value-free science” of economics that so overawed Yerevan’s counter-revolutionaries twenty-five years ago. Even workers themselves appear to accept this account of things. Wage-earners who spend forty of the most active years of their lives working forty hours a week do not think of themselves as workers. More often, they think of themselves as temporarily disappointed future lottery winners, or candidates for angel wings. And perhaps those rare souls who do identify themselves as workers feel little more than shame about it. But this, too, is an old, old story: as a rule, the producers of wealth typically admire their exploiters and consider themselves the undeserving beneficiaries of benevolent Job Creators. Junior Achievement, Radio Liberty, and the Chicago Boys have done their work in the country. But it should go without saying that these illusions are not primarily the product of a publicity campaign concocted by devious capitalists. Rather, they emanate spontaneously from constant competition for scarce jobs, the chronic fear of unemployment, and the wage-form. Karl Marx has much of interest to say on this point, too. When a large minority of workers start to understand that they are indeed workers, capitalists have a problem. So the sad state of Armenian workers just speaks to the success of their class enemies. This success is both a cause and an effect of the much-lamented fact that there is no genuine left opposition in Armenia, or at least none to speak of. Workers in Armenia need militant working-class organizations, but where are they? (As far as I can determine, the Armenian Communist Party does not even have a website. What is going on?) Levon asked about my opinion of Bernie Sanders. However we wish to characterize Sanders, it is of course less than unlikely that he will garner the Democratic nomination. And even if, by some miracle, he were to win the nomination, he would not win the election. And even if by some miracle that were to happen, he would not be able to implement his ideas in the While House. (Remember Congress and those fabled “checks and balances.”) Rather than applying a litmus test to Bernie Sanders the candidate, what I find more interesting is the phenomenon of the Sanders candidacy. Clearly, the Democratic National Committee and the mainstream media are doing what they can to torpedo the Sanders candidacy. And yet Sanders has received a groundswell of support and hundreds of thousands of small donations. His rallies have attracted tens of thousands of supporters across the USA--far more than even the clownish Republican candidates with whom the mainstream media is obsessed. And so it seems that a quarter of a century after socialism was buried without ceremony in Armenia, a leading candidate for the highest office of the United States of America is a self-described “democratic socialist.”
Markar Melkonian
Angela, your observations are most appreciated. We agree on the important point that the Free Market has created terrible problems for Armenia, and that it is not likely to provide solutions to those problems. We also agree that Armenia needs a new structure. Nationalizing banks and industries might mitigate some immediate problems, but I do not believe that it alone could provide long-term solutions, unless it takes place within the fundamentally transformed conditions of workers’ power. Only then would the nationalized industries operate directly to benefit the majority population of the country. As Levon noted, it is not at all clear that Armenians in the 1970’s and 80’s lived under worse conditions than many Western Europeans (let alone “capitalist states” in general!). Let us remind ourselves of such difficult-to-measure considerations as access to basic medical care, free higher education, pensions and paid vacations, safe streets, subsidized energy, and price controls on staples. Are we entirely sure that Armenians in the 1960’s and 70’s had a lower standard of living than, say, most Spaniards or Portuguese at that time? (I’ve been to sixty countries, but the only place I’ve ever seen a woman pulling a plow was in Portugal.) Or, for that matter, less personal freedom? I doubt it. But even if for the sake of argument we were to say that Soviet Armenian workers lived under worse conditions than that their Western Europeans counterparts (as seems unlikely), how do we account for the fact that Armenians experienced their conditions of life as so unbearable that they felt they had to rise up against the Soviet system? After all, hundreds of millions of inhabitants of ten dozen capitalist countries continue quietly to endure grinding poverty under worse tyranny. Armenians had justifiable grievances, of course, and the Soviet nomenklatura (see below) enjoyed great privileges and wealth compared to the rest of the population. But their privileges and the wealth-gap between the bottom and the top were tiny compared to what existed at the time in capitalist countries, even in the most prosperous of them. And the gap between rich and poor in Soviet Armenia was miniscule compared to what has replaced it. So again, how do we account for the fact that the Ter-Petrosyan-types were able to destroy the last remnants of Soviet socialism in Armenia? I do not have a complete answer to this question, but I’m pretty sure that part of the answer has something to do with the fact that in Moscow and in the capitals of the republics, a nascent capitalist class had already formed within high echelons of the Party and the Soviet state long before 1991. You mentioned the “ruling class” in Soviet Armenia. This was the Soviet Armenian nomenklatura, the Party aparatchiks and managers of large state-owned enterprises, and their sons. To the nomenklatura and their allies, Soviet institutions and social relations (notably property relations) felt like obstacles standing in the way of modernization, prosperity, and efficiency. In reality, these institutions and relations were obstacles standing in the way of their own personal power and massive theft of public property. As soon as they got their chance, the nascent capitalists and their allies, foreign and domestic, moved against whatever remained of Soviet socialism, manipulating popular movements (forglasnost, green demands, the Karabagh movement, and so on) to grab up resources, amass private fortunes, and seize power. The result has been capitalist regimes run by…well, quite literally, by thieves and gangsters. As in the case of many other capitalist countries (the USA of the Gilded Age comes to mind), these thieves and gangsters gradually came together and willy-nilly replaced the old state institutions with “respectable” new ones created in their own image. Whatever the complete story may be, it seems clear enough in retrospect that the counter-revolutionary movement started at the top and pushed down, just as surely as it benefitted those at the very top and impoverished most of the rest. Angela, you are right: the old system will not do. Indeed, it CANNOT do. Unfortunately for most of us, the Soviet order is gone, and any attempt at resurrection will fail. If socialism is to be built in Armenia, then it must be built up from the existing urbanized, industrial capitalist country. It will be something unprecedented, something new. (Continued below)
Peter
Finally some cogent counterbalance to the liberal economic onslaught that has devastated Armenia. Much appreciated.
Levon
Hey Markar....what do you think about Bernie Sanders? A real socialist or another left-leaning liberal?
ANGELA BARSEGHIAN
Here is the dilemma: During the Soviet Union, the people lived under poorer conditions, than the people in capitalist states, in Europe and elsewhere...The ruling class had all the privileges and wealth, whereas the people were living OK but not good enough to be compared with the European workers...therefore, the former Soviet people, wish to elevate themselves to European standards, I do not know, how, however, the old socialist system, is not going to do it, for now...a new structure needs to be created, and that structure has to start with nationalizing the banks, nationalizing major industries and the land, the mines....and every citizen should be receiving a portion of his right from the mining and other sources of the countries wealth..

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