Which road to socialism?
Based on a talk given by Deirdre Sinnott at the Dec. 6-7
"Reviving the Worldwide Struggle for Socialism"
conference.
How do we win socialism? Will it be voted in
or will it be won in a revolution? Once you've got socialism,
how do you protect it from being taken away?
There are several examples of the so-called peaceful
transition to socialism. Take Sweden as an example. Recently a
friend of mine said he was a life-long socialist and he wanted
what Sweden has. At first glimpse, it seems pretty
good--but.
First off, Sweden isn't really a socialist country because
there is a class of people who own the corporations. Ninety
percent of the businesses in Sweden are privately owned.
There are also mass layoffs in tough times of capitalist
economic crisis. TeliaSonera and Nokia both laid off workers in
2003. At times the unemployment situation in Sweden is
basically like here in the U.S. Both Ericsson and Volvo have
moved some of their plants overseas and laid off workers.
There was a strike in 2003 of over 50,000 council
workers--mostly women--for higher pay and to fight what has
been a decade of cutbacks and privatizations. The workers in
Sweden overwhelmingly supported the strike.
There is little doubt that a measure of workers' control and
social programs is much better than what we are used to in the
U.S., but it's still not socialism and still can be voted out
of existence.
The Swedish economy is forced to compete in a capitalist
world system. Whole industries like shipbuilding, which was the
backbone of the economy and helped make the taxation system
possible, have largely been closed down because of cheaper
labor markets abroad. When workers are forced to compete with
each other, wages fall.
This makes the social structure similar to the utopian
communes set up in Europe and the U.S. during the 1800s. These
utopian societies had better conditions for the workers than in
the rest of the country. But they went under because they had
to compete with capitalism. In capitalism businesses large and
small fail and disappear. This is what happened to these
communes.
I hope that the workers in Sweden are able to hold on to the
gains they have, but I wouldn't want to pin my hopes on
elections.
Workers' control of a capitalist government is not the same
as workers having their own government. In the same way that
the U.S. government is by and for the U.S. ruling class, where
laws are enacted to preserve and protect the property relations
of private ownership, workers could have their own government.
A workers' government would be to the benefit of the working
class. It would enact laws that protected workers' rights and
defend those rights so that they couldn't be stolen.
Here in the U.S. there is a constant battle not to lose what
we won in the struggle. Affirmative action and abortion rights
are under extreme attack. The same thing is true for the right
to overtime pay, the right to strike and other things we take
for granted. But in our society, the second we win these
victories, the right wing is thinking about how to rescind
them.
If someone told me that they had a referendum that was going
to give everyone a home, enough to eat, free healthcare, free
education, guaranteed job, I'd say it sounds great. The problem
is that even if it did get on the ballot, even if it did pass,
it would never be enforced. That's because the state is set up
to protect the assets of the very rich.
If you look into history you can see how the ruling class
solves its problems. Whenever the ruling class has felt truly
threatened, by an uprising, by a person, by a country or by an
economic system, it has reacted with violence. The ruling class
is going to protect what it has. They will fight every inch of
the way. If anyone here has ever been in a strike, you get to
see a glimpse of it. The bosses will do everything in their
power to win. They will threaten people, try to fire them, use
intimidation, burn organizers' homes, or in the case of
Coca-Cola in Colombia, have the trade unionists killed.
One of the lessons learned the hard way is Chile. On Sept.
11, 1973, a democratically elected government was violently
overthrown. With help from the CIA, President Salvador Allende
was killed in a coup that brought the fascist dictator Augusto
Pinochet to power. Bloody repression followed and many good
people were tortured and/or killed. Many of them had believed
that if they had a fair election and voted for what they
wanted, the ruling classes of Chile and the U.S. would say
OK.
Being a realist means knowing that if the ruling class is
not about to give up power without a struggle, than there is
only the revolutionary path. Do I want violence? No. I have
been part of the struggle against the violence of the ruling
class, but I have the right to defend myself. And when the
struggle for expanded rights heats up, particularly if it is
truly effective in winning substantial rights for the working
class as opposed to the ruling class, we can expect a fight.
Malcolm X said it best when he said, "Self defense is not
violence--it's intelligence."
Reprinted from the Dec. 25, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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