A significant part of Kevin Schofield’s article, “Internal Socialist Alternative Documents Show It Runs Sawant’s Office and Controls Her Vote“—which Kshama Sawant described as an attack on a decision-making process that, unlike the mayor’s (Jenny Durkan is closely tied with “Sandeep Kaushik’s lobbying firm”)—is not ruled or influenced by corporations but by the people—is devoted to explaining the key ideological difference between socialists and Democratic socialists. It is clear that Schofield’s sympathies lie with the latter, and with good reason. The party that represents this political position in the US, the Democratic Socialists of America, is, according to him, about reforming society rather than outright destroying capitalism.
Schofield writes:
It believes that it is impossible to reform a capitalist state from within; it must be completely dismantled and replaced with a new economy and government. That view extends to the entire apparatus of the capitalist state, including for example the police: while not a police abolitionist, Socialist Alternative nevertheless believes that existing police departments must be dissolved and replaced once a socialist state is established. Contrast this with the DSA, which it views as “reformist,” attempting to evolve the existing capitalist state from within using socialist principles rather than replace it wholesale.
But here is the thing that needs to be explained, and that socialists or orthodox Marxists often miss: reforming society in the manner of DSA (healthcare for all, strengthening social security and services, checking the excessive power of the financial sector, the total transformation of the energy sector, which is based on burning fossil fuels and liberating dangerous amounts of carbon into the biosphere) means bringing economic growth as we know it to an end. The DSA program would effectively result in a steady state economy, rather than one that measures its failures and successes on the basis of unlimited GDP growth.
One of the key characteristics of capitalism is that it collapses or goes into crisis when its growth is zero or negative. It cannot survive without the positive feedback of money making more money, which is why it can only be propelled by the rotor via two things: the production of luxuries (which are, unlike, necessities, endless), and the production of a prodigious amount of waste (and this is why recycling is in essence anti-capitalist). Put another way, capitalism does not, one, make life cheaper but more expensive (which explains its rabid resistance to public forms of transportation, housing, and health insurance—they are more efficient, and therefore not costly); and, two, it must maintain an energy flow that moves not in cycles, but is uni-directional: from extraction to production to, when ever possible, permanent destruction (disposability).
Alter these two aspects of the process, then you don’t have capitalism as it is understood today. So, if a society aggressively recycles as many materials as possible, works less, lives in dense communities, and massively shares modes of transportation, it has basically ripped the heart out of capitalism. And this has nothing to do with the myth of “creative destruction”—no new capitalism is reborn from this kinds of death. The question is then, is such a society, which is concrete and not utopian, realizable by reforms or revolution?
Democratic Socialists like DSA and the socialists such as SA are, according to the SA, split on this point. One is reformist and the other is revolutionary, and only the latter can properly or totally eliminate the oppressive dominance of the market on all aspects of civil life. But where I disagree with SA is that the transformation of society need not be revolutionary. One does not have to demand the total and instantaneous dismantling of capitalism to bring it to an end. One has only to attack (and overcome) its core components to complete, intrinsically, this reconstruction. Now, this is not to say that dismantling the old system and reconstructing a new one at one stroke is not a plausible program. It is. But we must not at the same time miss or dismiss or underappreciated or register as primitive socialism the anti-capitalist programs that are all around us, such as recycling or public transportation. To use the language of Karl Polanyi, the full force of these isolated activities will surely “disembed” capitalism.
The thing to keep in mind is, these activities are not the lower level of primitive expressions of the full revolutionary spirit. As with André Gorz, I believe in only concrete utopias. The world that ought to be is not in some distant future. It is here and now and around us, and very possible. Using a bus or a bike for mobility is as hard-hitting as a revolution. It attacks capitalism at its core. Bikes are not expensive. Walking costs nothing.
