Occupy Has Nothing to Say? I Blame the Parents

 Socialism, or at least its 20^th Century version, collapsed for two main reasons: because it couldn’t find a political form which demonstrated at least much personal freedom and democracy as the Western liberal democracies it opposed, and because it failed to deliver economic progress at the same speed or to the same apparent degree of efficiency as capitalism. 

Like everyone else of a certain age I watched this collapse on prime time TV in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It had a profound effect on me. I was, after all, a card carrying Communist at the time – a historical materialist stranded on what appeared to be the wrong side of history.  

It very quickly became clear that there was no ‘easy intellectual retreat’, as it were, to social democracy. Generations of refugees from Marxist parties had made that journey before The Fall, comforting themselves they were still pursuing the aims of socialism but by defensible, democratic means.

Actually, a very large slice of the Marxist tradition had, by the 1980s, made a serious attempt to make this shift within its own intellectual framework anyway. Classical Trotskyism had its own (to me, always unconvincing) version of this which ran broadly along the lines of laying stake to the heritage of a purified and re-claimed ‘democratic’ Leninism; the libertarian Marxists had a more root and branch version, and my own tradition, that of Eurocommunism, somehow accepted the theoretical inapplicability of much of Leninist political theory in the West ( I mean, what else was all that bigging up of Gramsci about?) whilst still maintaining an institutional allegiance to the broad hope encapsulated in the ‘moment’ of 1917. All three, were, in their different ways, quite keen on refusing the supposed gap between ‘politics’ and ‘economics’ of course, and laying stress on the economic and workplace democratic element to a vision of socialism – something they held in common with ‘advanced’ social democracy, at least in Bennite/Livingstonian form. 

Yet none of these positions – not social democracy, not Trotskyism, not libertarian Marxism, not, most of all, Eurocommunism - survived the Fall in any meaningful sense. Sure, there are fragments of each of these traditions still knocking about the margins of the political scene - but the intellectual ‘oomph’ has gone from all of them. I don’t think this is because people looked at their political solutions to the evident lack of freedom in the Soviet bloc and rejected them.

I think this is down, in large part anyway, to none of them actually having a set of economic answers to the critique capitalism posed in 1989-1991: why aren’t you as rich as us ? It was the question that those glossy shop windows in West Berlin in 1989 shouted in the face of the newly arrived Ossi, still grasping the newly hewn piece of The Wall. It stubbornly remains as a question, even though most versions of leftism now have a critique of growth for its own sake and at least a Greenish tinge. The left lacks an economic policy, or even a vision of what a socialist economy might look like.

Given that the centrepiece of Marx’s own intellectual life was subtitled ‘a Critique of Political Economy’, there is a howling historical irony here. Capitalism is now in deep trouble – systemic trouble. So, to put it mildly, it is not immediately obvious to the average Greek that capitalism will make them richer - and fears of the same nature abound throughout the once triumphant West. But no one has any non capitalist economic language with which to discuss alternatives.

& that's down to my generation, not the predominantly young people who constitute the new foot soldiers of the Occupy movement. Good on 'em I say: they may not be practicing socialist politics as I understand it - in fact, it seems more like a usurping of the old religious tradition of 'bearing witness'. But they are practicing anti-capitalist politics, and perhaps such is the poverty of radical inheritance my generation of leftists have handed down to them that is all they can possibly do. But I'm very glad they're doing it.