To Preserve the Possibility of Communal Life and Emancipation

Coils of the Serpent: Journal for the Study of Contemporary Power, 2021

Joshua Clover is the author of Riot.Strike.Riot: the New Era of Uprisings (which will be published in German in 2021) as well as many other books and articles. This interview was conducted via email in the Spring of 2020. Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich and Marlon Lieber: Now, for a while it seemed as if a specter was haunting the United States-the specter of Democratic Socialism. Talking heads already hallucinated impending public executions in Central Park-and, indeed, the purges have begun as Chuck D kicked Flavor Flav out of Public Enemy for failing to feel the Bern. Yet, by now the majority of the Democratic Party has decided to cut the Malarkey and closed ranks around Joe Biden in order to exorcize the specter. Do you think that the parliamentary road to socialism remains a valid anticapitalist strategy in 2020 (and has it ever been such, for that matter)? Joshua Clover: I suppose this question pivots on how we define socialism. Is it still the lower stage of communism, a step along the way? None of contemporary anglophone socialism's leading lights seem to think so; they tend to articulate whatever they are calling socialism as the end of the road. Moreover, the imagined course of capitalism→socialism→communism that has been with us at least since "Critique of the Gotha Program," and was a kind of common sense of the worker's movement a century ago, was premised on a historically concrete situation in which industrial production oriented social organization, and worker control of that sector gave onto total expropriation of the expropriators. Is that still true? Is there still a worker's movement in that way? Even if there were, does the hard limit of climate collapse mean that the unfettering of industrial production on which that particular vision of the emancipation from labor was premised is not survivable? To the extent that any of these questions have answers, they all point away from the promise of what we now call socialism as a program of emancipation. It seems more to be a progressive management strategy for capital. It will ease some misery. It will point itself toward managed competition and

Social Thought and Research, 1986

Cultures of the Future, 1978

History Workshop Journal, 2004

This rich and substantial history of the left was, as Geoff Eley explains in his preface, researched and written across the great divide of 1989-91, when Communism in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe collapsed. Social democracy also during this period, as Eley points out, found itself ideologically hollowed out, widely rejecting its eighty-year long aspiration to transform society. Instead, it came to terms with the necessity of capitalism, and settled for electoral survival and some mitigation of the instability and inequity of the market system. But while this decomposition of the earlier socialist project and its institutions was going on, new forms of democratic activity and challenge were emerging in European-and indeed other-societies. Eley identifies the strongest of these as feminism, but also includes 'anti-nuclear campaigning; environmental activism; peace movements; gay-lesbian movements and the wider politics of sexuality; local community politics; squatting and the creation of "alternative scenes"; left nationalist and regionalist movements; and, last but not least, antiracism. . .' as movements which extend the boundaries of politics and democracy. These have had their revolutionary (or near-revolutionary) moments in the great upsurges of 1968, among both students and workers. And also, in a different context, in the protest movements against Communist regimes which took place in Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), Poland (1980-81) and East Germany (1989). The earlier risings against these Stalinist states were still framed in reform-Communist terms. But Eley claims these democratic movements for the tradition of the left, even in the later years when socialist ways of thinking had become discredited in these countries and were no longer available to them as narratives of opposition, as they still were in 1956 and 1968. He describes the paradox (from this point of view) of Solidarity in Poland, perhaps the most wholly working-class revolutionary movement of any time, yet militantly hostile to the ideology of socialism as it had become. But not long after this in the mid 1980s, in a pattern of 'combined and uneven development', Mikhail Gorbachev set out to mobilize new democratic freedoms in the USSR to achieve what he came to see as a transition to social democracy, a project which however failed. In his book, Eley aims to link together these different phases and forms of democratic activity-what we might think of as the socialist and the

LuXemburg, 2020

Do you want socialism and the future? How can we still talk about socialism in these dystopian times? And how to fall silent upon this? Capitalism is devouring our future—while the crises of our time are literally heating up, it appears that their resolution is all the more absent. Furious ecological destruction, escalating military conflicts, the rise of the radical right as well as the private appropriation of social wealth are putting the future into question. Planetary boundaries and tipping points are already reached, narrowing the temporal horizon for left-wing alternatives. More and more people are realizing that we are running headlong into catastrophe if we do not radically transform the economy and society quickly—Fridays for Future and the global climate strikes symbolize this. Right now, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than an end to capitalism (Frederic Jameson). Thoroughgoing and radical alternatives (system change) are increasingly being called for—and more often. Young people are beginning to connect the future to a socialist vision, especially in the US and in Great Britain. Socialism is even being fought over again in Germany, where there is a strong anti-communist tradition. What does a SOCIALISM FOR FUTURE, a socio-ecological revolution, a green socialism look like? How does it connect the various desires of the many? What does a policy that creates hope and brings real change look like? What is to be done and where do we begin? Socialism should first of all be obvious, self-evident, a matter of course... but it is also about producing exemplary, concrete social conflicts while lampooning the propertied classes' whine when little is taken from them. And moreover, there are a good many ideas and proposals: The Green New Deal put forward by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders being the most prominent. The neoliberal mantra "There is no Alternative" was turned into its opposite: There is no longer an alternative to radical transformation. Or according to Véronica Gago: socialism means taking care of the future. With contributions from: With contribution by Étienne Balibar, Mario Candeias, Alex Demirović, Verónica Gago, Sarah Leonard and Ingar Solty

Socialist Register, 2012

A fter three decades of the waning of trade unions as a social force, their generally anaemic response to the Great Financial Crisis cannot but be registered. With the failure to build on the golden opportunity offered up by Occupy's demonstration that audacious action can touch a populist nerve-punctuated by the eventual defeat of Wisconsin labour's recall electoral strategy over a year after its exemplary occupation of the state assembly (which predated Occupy Wall Street by six months)-the left today confronts a more discomfiting question: does the rejuvenation of unions still really remain possible, or are unions now exhausted as an effective historical form through which working people organize themselves? To be clear, the issue is not whether unions and union-led struggles are about to disappear. Unions will stagger on, sometimes very heroically. They will carry on organizing, bargaining and filing grievances. And they will continue to strike, march, demonstrate and on occasion remind us of working-class potentials. But trade unions as they now exist no longer appear capable of adequately responding to the scale of the problems working classes face-whether the arena of struggle is the workplace, the bargaining table, the community, electoral politics or ideological debate. 1 Although a recent symposium on unions in developed capitalist countries concluded that 'the declining trend is visible everywhere', this essay will focus on the impasse in US labour. 2 The last time the US working class faced a comparable economic and internal crisis, during the 1930s, industrial unionism came to the fore. What new form of working-class organization might explode onto the agenda this time? Then, communists and socialists were vital to the formation and orientation of unions, at a time when radical organizers were inspired by the notion that workers could become the historical agents of a new society and unions might become schools for socialism. Is it still credible, in light of recent history, to believe that working people might one day be at the centre of radical social transformations? 3

2011

This article discusses three contributions to new thinking on the Left. * Two of these, Anthony Giddens' s Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics and David Miliband's collection Reinventing the Left (to which Giddens contributes the first chapter), set out to provide the new thinking which the post-Clause 4 Labour Party certainly needs. Socialismfor a Sceptical Age, by Ralph Miliband (Miliband pere), defends traditional socialist positions against facile revisionism, as its author did throughout his working life. The most theoretically ambitious of these works is that of Anthony Giddens. It is a prolegomenon to a political programme, somewhere between a theoretical framework and the specific policies it might generate. 'A Future for Post-Socialism', one might say.' This book was originally announced in 1981 2 under the title 'Between Capitalism and Socialism'. It was going then to combine the project of realizing still-valid socialist ideal...

2012

In 2008 the 40th anniversary of that iconic year, 1968, was celebrated in the media in relation to student uprisings and cultural revolts, largely neglecting the very significant movements of workers and peasants who were challenging power structures around the world at that time. This omission reflects the failures of socialism in the twentieth century, which are explored in this essay. Beginning from a more complete picture of 1968, the essay examines the history of socialism, identifying the main sources of failure in its theory and practice, in particular that of the revolutionary left. If the failure lies in the elite character of socialist politics and its focus on distribution rather than production, it is to be remedied by a firm focus on the politics of the workplace and the goal of substantive equality. The concluding section reviews the prospects for such an alternative in the current circumstances of global crisis.

Taking Socialism Seriously, Anatole Anton and Richard Schmitt, eds. , 2012

Social movements are the means by which masses of oppressed people struggle for social change. But they do more than struggle for power. They empower the participants themselves, create collective consciousness and organization, and shape the culture of the society in which they act. In this paper I examine the ways in which social movements can contribute to the struggle for socialism. They have been an important vehicle for that struggle for the last two centuries. Today's economic and political crisis can only be resolved by socialism, so it is essential that socialists understand the importance of movements in bringing socialism about.