What's left? A new American socialism.

• Author: Marable, Manning

Americans who identify themselves as |the Left' - independent progressives, radical feminists, democratic socialists, Marxists, and others - have never lived in a more depressing, challenging, and potentially liberating moment.

With the collapse of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union, the immediate reaction was "capitalist triumphalism" all over the world, but especially in Europe and the United States. Many social democrats repudiated their commitment to the liberal welfare state and adopted the rhetoric of the free market, the laissez faire entrepreneur. Communist parties in the West fragmented or disintegrated as many Marxists renounced any identification with historical materialism.

The surprising defeat of the Labour Party in last spring's general election in Great Britain, combined with growing mass movements inspired by racism and anti-Semitism, from Germany to Louisiana, reinforced the general perception that the world's center of political gravity had shifted fundamentally to the right. Western liberals weighed the mounting evidence and announced their latest version of the Lesser Evils Thesis - that even traditional liberal goals were unrealizable in the immediate future, that anything just barely to the left of Reaganism/Thatcherism was preferable to being held hostage by the militant Right.

But before we deliver a solemn eulogy to socialism, let's re-examine the corpse. Internationally in recent months, the Left has won several important electoral victories without sacrificing its principles. In New Zealand and Guyana, socialists have won. In Mexico, the Democratic Party of the Revolution of Mexico has won millions of adherents and is now poised to challenge the government's pro-corporate policies. The Workers Party of Brazil is the largest democratic, popular force in Latin America's largest nation. In Haiti, it required the brutality of a military coup to overthrow the popular electoral Lavalas movement of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Even in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas stand an excellent chance of being returned to power in the next national elections. In Europe, the situation is less optimistic for the Left, but not entirely bleak. Last November, ex-communists were swept into power in Lithuania. And inside the United States, that same spirit of political unrest which has erupted into socialist and labor movements elsewhere simmers just below the surface of our political culture.

Part of the reason for the new worldwide activism of the Left is the radically different international environment in the aftermath of the Cold War. In reality, both the United States and the Soviet Union "lost" the Cold War. The decayed factories of the Rust Belt, the doubling of the number of homeless Americans within a decade, the thirty-seven million-plus who have no health insurance, the 1,500 Latino and black teenagers who drop out of school every day - these stand as graphic illustrations of the failure of rampant militarism and Cold War economics. If the U.S.S.R.'s disintegration symbolizes the bankruptcy of Stalinist communism, that is no reason to believe that American capitalism has solved its problems.

What can the Left do?

What's required is not a blanket rejection of Marxism as a critical method of social analysis but a fundamental rethinking and revision of "socialist politics."

The Leninist vanguard-party model of social change, evolving in the context of a highly authoritarian, underdeveloped society devoid of any tradition of civil liberties and human rights, has finally been thoroughly discredited. The idea of seizing state power by violence in a computerized, technologically advanced society is simply a recipe for disaster.

But if socialist politics are defined specifically and solely as a radical project for democratic change, what set of political perspectives and concepts can guide the renaissance of the American Left? What is still worthwhile and valuable in the concept of "socialism" for a new generation heading into the twenty-first Century?

For starters, we should examine the practical problems confronting American working people and racial minorities and respond with a series of political interventions that actually empower the oppressed.

And we should advance our political agenda in concert with larger, stronger currents for social change in America - feminists, people of color, trade unionists, lesbians and gays, environmentalists, neighborhood and community organizers, and many others - recognizing that we socialists will play, at best, a secondary role in the struggles immediately ahead.

My vision of a new American socialism will certainly not be the same as that of others on the Left. My objective here is not to present a theoretical blueprint, but to build a framework for dialogue among democratic socialists across organizational and ideological boundaries. All too frequently, the disorganized, fractious Left has made its sectarianism a red badge of courage, refusing to speak to others who share 90 per cent of its own politics because they differ on the remaining 10 per cent. But we can no longer afford to dwell in the political ghettoes of ideological purity.

We must champion a renewed commitment to internationalism - espousing global solutions to global problems. Critical environmental issues cannot be fully addressed at the level of the nation-state, but predatory corporate capitalism has the destruction of the biosphere on its agenda.

And we must link the question of the environment with labor issues, recognizing that the export of U.S. industrial and manufacturing jobs to Third World nations is not just a capitalist search for lower wages but also a desire to avoid pollution controls and health-and-safety standards.

With a new vision of socialism, we must rethink the character of capitalism and the means by which the corporate-dominated economy can become more egalitarian and democratic. Our economic system is based on private greed and public pain, but it is also much more flexible, dynamic, and creative than earlier generations of Marxists, including Marx himself, ever imagined.

The immediate task for American socialists is to support and build strong workers' movements and to defend the rights of trade unions. But we must also help create transitional economic structures that address working-class needs and build solidarity across the boundaries of race, ethnicity, and income, giving people a concrete understanding of what economic alternatives are needed.

We should establish a clearer public identity for "socialism," outlining in a common-sense manner our theoretical and political boundaries - and how our politics differ from those of our ideological second cousin, "liberalism."

A new American socialism must make a clear and unambiguous distinction between our politics, values, and vision, and those of American liberalism. Irving Howe has defined "democratic socialists" as "the allies of American liberalism," pressuring "liberals to hold fast to their own ideas and values, without equivocation or retreat." Howe argues that liberals and socialists alike share "an unshakable, premise of our politics that freedom is the indispensable prerequisite for social and economic progress." By "freedom," what Howe really means is "liberty," in the context of classical Western European political philosophy. Howe described his commitment to the struggle for human equality as secondary to his faith in liberty. Within his scenario, there is a logical continuity and cordial ideological kinship between socialism and liberalism.

The problem is that there are too many...