Pluriversal Socialism – The Very Idea

Social Philosophy and Policy, 1989

A small puzzle: the terms ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ initially present themselves as contraries, the one affirming what the other rejects. However, once removed from the dictionary, they function otherwise. The theory of capitalism is very much contained within the science of economics. The positive theory of capitalistic institutions, but also its normative superstructure, rest most easily within the language and methodology of the economist. What distinguishes the free market? It is efficient; allocation of factors of production are optimized; individuals maximize their utility; and so on. These are the terms with which justifications of capitalistic production typically begin – begin, and often end.

Every artist is influenced by what has been done before their time. If not by direct exposure, the information the artist is exposed to through other people, media, etc.

A contribution to the debate over liberalism and republicanism as it pertains to socialist politics. Published in Rational Radicalism and Political Theory: Essays in Honor of Stephen Eric Bronner, Michael J. Thompson, ed. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010).

Socialist Imaginations: Utopias, myths, and the masses, 2019

This volume offers new perspectives on the appeal and profound cultural meaning of socialism over the past two centuries. It brings together scholarship from various disciplines addressing diverse national contexts, including Britain, China, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the USA. Taken together, the contributions highlight the aesthetic, narrative, and religious dimensions of socialism as it has developed through three broad phases in the modern era: early nineteenth-century beginnings, mass-based political organizations, and the attainment of state power in the twentieth century and beyond. Socialism did not attract millions of people primarily because of logical argument and empirical evidence, important though those were. Rather, it told the most compelling story about the past, present, and future. Refocusing attention on socialism's imaginative dimensions, this volume aims to revive scholarly interest in one of the modern world¹s most important political orientations.

Introduction to forthcoming book "The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism"

1982

This presentation points to socialists’ mistaken assumptions of a malleable and perfectible human nature as an insuperable reason for the inevitable failure of socialist systems. It also points to socialist and liberal dependence on declarations of human rights as ineffective protections for human freedom—protections which can only be maintained in constitutionalist systems with deeper structural safeguards against tyranny.

Democratic Socialism, 2022

This essay traces the development of the phrase "democratic socialism" from the early nineteenth century to the present, especially in relation to "social democracy" and "communism." These meanings have changed over time, with democratic socialism and social democracy indicating the opposite of what they meant a century ago when social democracy was the more and democratic socialism the less radical position. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the decline of the post-World War II socialdemocratic compromise created space for a radical democratic socialism to flourish in our time. Twenty-first-century democratic socialism seeks to democratize the workplace and reorient the state, against the power of the organized capitalist class, to serve the needs of the many rather than the desires of the few.

Axel Honneth’s (2017) The Idea of Socialism is a timely reflection on a puzzling state of affairs: Perhaps at no time in the past several decades have so many sensed that there is something terribly wrong with global capitalism—from mounting inequalities to runaway climate change—and yet rarely has the resolve to think through workable alternatives to the global capitalist order been weaker. But the “sudden decline in utopian energy” (p. 2), or withering away of the millenarian impulse, is perhaps not so difficult to explain. As Honneth recognizes, it is incredibly hard to re-engineer vastly complex, mutually interdependent systems of political governance, economic production, and sociocultural reproduction—perhaps so difficult that the very idea of fashioning ideological blueprints for the refabricating of the world has itself grown outmoded.

Monthly Review, 2020

Any serious treatment of the renewal of socialism today must begin with capitalism's creative destruction of the bases of all social existence. Since the late 1980s, the world has been engulfed in an epoch of catastrophe capitalism, manifested today in the convergence of (1) the planetary ecological crisis, (2) the global epidemiological crisis, and (3) the unending world economic crisis. Added to this are the main features of today's "empire of chaos," including the extreme system of imperialist exploitation unleashed by global commodity chains; the demise of the relatively stable liberal-democratic state with the rise of neoliberalism and neofascism; and the emergence of a new age of global hegemonic instability accompanied by increased dangers of unlimited war.