My website is primarily aimed at climate activists who realize that fundamental changes are needed to the way our societies are organized. Activists who understand the need for decisive state intervention to stop the emissions of greenhouse gases.

Socialism and the fight against climate change

This article on socialism is what I understand by the term. I intend it to be a non-theoretical, non-technical explanation of the fundamentals of socialism. These are my opinions.

There are many sources of more in-depth socialist theory. Readers are encouraged to examine these, and form their own opinions. If any reader, whatever their background and previous knowledge of socialism, has sharp disagreements with my ideas, you are very welcome to message me through the website.

But socialists generally spend too much time on how they disagree with each other. We will never be able to find a grand theory that everyone agrees on. But the fight against climate change should be a universally agreed principle for all socialists.

Why socialism?

Socialists are fighting for a world which can lift everyone out of poverty, provide security, healthcare, education and employment to everyone, and do away with the huge inequalities that exist today.

Socialism is system in which the economy and society are governed by the conscious decisions of ordinary people. No longer will the very wealthy dominate society through their influence over politicians and their domination of markets. Instead, working people will govern through collective democratic decisions.

The large corporations, industries, finance, utilities and essential services will be taken out of private hands and put under public ownership. They will be controlled by democratically elected institutions. Decisions on new investments, salaries, the running of major industrial and financial corporations will all be democratically decided.

Capitalism – creator of extreme wealth and extreme poverty

Capitalism has created enormous wealth, but most of this wealth is in the hands of the very wealthy. Despite global economic growth, billions of people remain poverty-stricken, especially in the formerly colonized countries of the global South. Wealthy countries rely on cheap labor, resource extraction and environmental damage elsewhere, while inequality within countries continues to grow.

Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism, which captures the essence of how it has always worked, explains that capitalism is inherently unstable, creating capital (embodied in productive assets owned by corporations and companies), faster than the producers (wage and salary earners) are able to consume its products. The result is that periodically profits fall, and the economy goes into crisis. Businesses close, jobs are lost, wages stagnate and public services are cut.

While economies have always recovered from these crises, for the last 60 years the recoveries have been getting weaker. In the US and the other wealthy capitalist countries, we now have had two generations in which children are growing up less wealthy than their parents.

What a socialist economy should looks like

Socialism does not mean the state running everything from the center. The soviet system in Russia and Europe after the First World War was not socialism. Whatever description is given to the “communism” of Russia and its allies, the soviet system was borne out of the crisis of the Russian revolution and the world war from which it never fully recovered. Real socialism means democratic planning at different levels – national, regional, local and workplace – with decisions made by accountable, elected bodies.

Large corporations, banks and essential services such as healthcare, education, energy, transport and water would be publicly owned. Their surpluses would be reinvested according to social priorities, not extracted as private profit. Small businesses could continue to exist, alongside cooperatives and worker-owned enterprises.

Workplaces would be run democratically, combining worker participation with technical expertise. Income and wealth would be far more equal. Obscene executive pay will be eliminated.

The environment would no longer be a victim of the drive for profit. Social and environmental priorities will be the outcome of rational decisions.

Democracy beyond the ballot box

The parliamentary and congressional democracy we have today is not real democracy. Once politicians get elected, they exist in a different world from those who elected them. A world with lobbyists, money and a media environment that protects the powerful and wealthy. Under a socialist democracy there would be

• an automatic right of recall,
• full transparency,
• a ban on private and individual lobbying, and
• a ban on campaign financing, except possibly government money for genuine constituency groups.

How did socialism arise?

The origins of socialist thought had two main strands:

• The revolt against the authoritarian rule in France, the Age of Enlightenment, which found expression in the 1789 French Revolution.
• The industrial revolution in Europe 18th and 19th centuries, with workers being employed in textile, iron and coal industries.

Early socialist theorists were “idealists”, in that they focused on ideas and principles against the background of the brutalities of early capitalism.

In the 19^th century, in the wake of the French Revolution, the growing number of factory workers led to the creation of the early trade unions. Workers used these unions to protest against their employers, demanding higher pay and better working conditions.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were young German philosophers. They were inspired by workers’ struggles to write “The Communist Manifesto” in 1848, on the eve of revolutions that swept across Europe.

19th century – Marx, Engels and others – aftermath of revolution, and reflecting the struggles of the growing number of factory workers and growth of early trade unions.

The Communist Manifesto was written by Marx and Engels just before the 1848 revolts across Europe. In the wake of the failure of the revolts, trade unionists and activists set up the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), also known as the First International.

The writings of Marx and Engels were hugely influential, helping socialist and communist ideas to spread across the world.

Social democracy vs democratic socialism

From the beginning, there were two currents in the First International – a radical, revolutionary wing and a gradualist, reform oriented wing.

Germany, where socialist politics was the most advance in the late 19th century, saw the SPD – the Social Democratic Party, split along these lines.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 sharpened the division, and there was a complete split in the socialist movement worldwide. The revolutionaries allied themselves with the Russian Bolsheviks, while the reformists increasingly abandoned Marxist and socialist policies, mostly calling themselves social democratic.

By the mid 20th century, there were established social democratic parties across Europe. The French Socialists and British Labour Party were among these.

Socialists opposed to the brutalities of the Soviet Stalinism broke away from the Second International. Leon Trotsky, who was first outlawed and then killed by the Soviet state, had formed a “Third International”, advocating democratic revolutionary socialism but rejecting stalinist communism.

Today, those calling themselves democratic socialists mainly advocate the fundamental replacement of capitalism and the market driven economy by socialism. But in contrast to the top down socialism of the Soviet Union, with a centrally driven economy in a one party state, democratic socialists are committed to political freedom and democratic control over the economy through state owned enterprises.

(Bernie Sanders, although calling himself a democratic socialist, in reality is an old style social democrat.)

Socialism and communism

Before the Russian Revolution, the terms socialism and communism were either interchangeable, or were used to describe stages of a socialist revolution.

After the revolution, the victorious Bolsheviks led by Lenin renamed themselves the Russian Communist Party, and the international organization formed by the revolutionary parties from across the world was called the Communist International, or Comintern.

The Comintern was dominated by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. And after the hopes for communist revolutions in the rest of the world receded, the focus of the Comintern increasingly became support for the Soviet Union. The authoritarian rule of Joseph Stalin set the tone for the “Soviet Bloc”.

Up until the Second World War, parties that called themselves socialist were usually reformist, social democratic parties. The end of the war, and the creation of the “Eastern Bloc” – European countries allied to the Soviet Union, marked the high point of communism.

Communism came to be exemplified by the brutalities of Stalin and the suppression of political freedoms in Eastern Europe. Other strands of socialism developed, notably among followers of Leon Trotsky, who had been expelled from the Communist Party and exiled from the Soviet Union.

Socialists today envisage the elimination of capitalist production as the main driver of the economy, replacing markets with democratic planning and worker control of industry.

Which countries are socialist today? Is China communist?

Only a few countries call themselves socialist today. China and Cuba both have a long history of communist party rule, and are the best known of countries ruled by a communist party, with economies driven largely by the state.

Are China and Cuba socialist? Cuba has a state owned economy, with small, but increasing, elements of private enterprise.

China, which previously had an economy almost completely run by the state, has opened important parts of its economy to private enterprise. The state still controls the overall direction of the economy, but the market economy has been a significant driver of economic growth.

There is much debate among marxist, left and other theorists and economists about how to characterize the Chinese economy. But they virtually all agree that China is neither socialist nor capitalist.

The lack of democratic freedoms in both Cuba and China also exclude them from being called socialists. A real socialist economy would be democratically controlled, with significant worker control over individual enterprises.

Was Russia communist?

Russia was never communist in the sense of the communism advocated by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. In their famous Communist Manifesto, they wrote “The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.” And in later writing, Marx approved of the following principles for representative democracy:

• elected by universal suffrage,
• re-callable at short terms,
• paid workers’ wages, and
• not separated into a privileged political caste

Marx and Engels thought that socialist and communist revolutions would first take place in the most advanced capitalist societies. But the Russia of 1917 was the most backward country in Europe, and the victorious Bolsheviks were surrounded by enemies internally and internationally. The Bolshevik party was only able to survive by means of a determined and at times ruthless party discipline.

The rule of Joseph Stalin, and the Soviet Union’s political and economic isolation prevented any semblance of political democracy emerging in Russia and the other soviet countries.

The Soviet economy was controlled by the state, with no place for any significant private enterprise.

Socialist and other historians and theoreticians have various terms to describe soviet society. But outside of the communist parties with historical links to the Soviet Union, there is general agreement that Russia was not communist.

Has socialism ever worked?

There has never been a fully democratic socialist state. Countries governed by communist parties, and those calling themselves socialist, have always been ruled by an all-powerful party. The lack of democracy has given opponents of socialism ample ammunition to demonize it.

But economically, state driven economies have shown the advantages of alternatives to capitalism. Although the Soviet Union and its allies suffered debilitating economic stagnation after the 1950s, Russia and the Asian soviet states especially made huge strides before the Second World War. Russia was pulled out of backwardness and transformed into a modern industrial economy.

China’s huge advances during the past 20 years have been thanks to state control of the main levers of the economy. Banking and credit, major infrastructure, energy, much heavy industry, land, foreign exchange and national investment priorities are all controlled by the state.

Although many industrial operations have gone private, the state’s central role in directing the economy has allowed the Chinese economy to outstrip its capitalist competitors.

But the examples of Russia and China are not demonstrations of real socialism, because of the complete lack of democracy in those societies.

Is democratic control of the economy really viable?

The huge strides made by both China in the past twenty years, and Russia during the inter-war years, was done with a high degree of centralization and very little democratic participation. Can democratically controlled economies ever be as successful?

The success of many workers’ cooperatives shows that democracy and economic progress are by no means incompatible. There are many examples of cooperatives that have thrived and provided stable employment for their members.

One of the best known of these is the Mondragon Corporation in the Basque region of Spain. It is a federation of cooperatives that has been going since 1955, with tens of thousands of members.

The Emilia-Romagna region of Italy is home to a network of cooperatives, supported by local legislation and a cooperative finance system.

In the Pacific Northwest part of the US, during the early part of the 20^th century, plywood co-operatives achieved high productivity and good incomes for their members.

Cooperatives have often failed. For example, many of those started by workers in the wake of the economic collapse in Argentina in 2001 have not survived.

But the overall picture is that where there is a supportive legislative and social environment, cooperatives have thrived.

How can socialism be achieved?

There is no blueprint for how socialism could replace capitalism. The likely preconditions will be:

• widespread support for a complete break from the existing order, capable of overcoming the resistance of the corporations and their masters, and
• the spread of socialism to enough countries to constitute a critical mass for an alternative world economy.

A socialist transformation outside of the US will face huge opposition from American corporations, and probably the US state.

Socialists have almost always theorized that, for socialism to succeed, it would have to become international. The history of the Soviet Union shows how difficult it would be to sustain a workers’ state in the face of a much stronger world capitalist economy.

The decline of traditional industrial trade unions in western countries, a result of a globalized world labor force, has been a barrier to the spread of progressive political ideas.

However, starting towards the end of last century, the inability of western economies to sustain the living standards of their populations has led to what has become known as “populism” – a rejection of old loyalties and political parties, and the turn towards radical politics of the right and the left. Support for left and socialist parties has grown in many countries in wide sectors of the population, who are in reality the new working class.

While this turn towards left politics has not yet penetrated the Eastern counties that are now home to the globalized industrial working class, the emergence of radical political movements in those countries is probably a matter of time.

Climate change and socialism

An effective response to climate change and global heating will require huge economic adjustments, including shutting down of many industrial and other operations, huge new investments, ensuring the continuity of employment, transfer of wealth from wealthy nations and individuals to poor ones. These are not changes that are possible with a market economy. They will require state intervention on a huge scale.

Although China is still the world’s major greenhouse gas emitter, the strides it has made in the fight against climate change is an illustration of how state planning is necessary for decisive climate interventions.

A socialist system would provide the perfect framework for the required changes. This is the central theme of this website. The fight for action on climate change requires a fight for an economic and social system that can bring this about – socialism.

Photo: Mike van Schoonderwalt – Pexels