On Socialism
Dr. Thomas Maack’s critique of
my Thirtieth Anniversary
Essay, “Socialism is Dead; Long
Live Socialism,” (Letters,
March/April 1998) discards my
specific assessments of why social-
ism failed in particular Latin
America countries, arguing that all
socialist projects collapsed because
they “occurred in the context of
underdevelopment.” He also states
that I downplay the importance of “cooperation between workers in
underdeveloped and developed
countries.”
Because of my need to focus on
Latin America, I did not fully artic-
ulate a new approach for revitaliz-
ing socialism, that of postmodern
Marxism. Elsewhere, I argue that a
critical flaw of classical Marxism is
the demise of its principal social
actor, the proletariat. It is not that I
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am innately opposed to the idea of
workers overthrowing capitalism.
The problem is that changes in the
nature of capitalism itself, particu-
larly in the epoch of globalization, have reduced and altered the role of
the working class. Today societies
and classes are fragmented.
Workers, peasants, indigenous soci-
eties and other social groups have
very specific identities depending
on their location, culture, history
and other factors.
These realities compel us to turn
our attention towards two major
groups which have emerged as
agents of transition-the social
movements and the castaways, or
marginalized sectors of society.
Certainly no major alterations of
the current order can occur without
the participation of the working
classes, but neither can fundamen-
tal change occur without the active
involvement of the civil rights and
ethnic movements, the feminist and
the environmental movements, the
peace and antiwar movements, and
others, depending on the configura-
tion of a given society.
Regarding the castaways and
their largely subsistence economic
activities, Maack says that I am
mistakenly elevating “some of the
most desperate struggles for sur-
vival” to building blocks for social-
ism. I would insist that revolution-
ary change and new societies can
only emerge from the mobilization
and involvement of the most dis-
possessed and alienated sectors of
society.
What is needed today is not a cri-
tique of one social sector or another
as being more revolutionary, but an
increase in cooperation and con-
sciousness among all sectors, espe-
cially between and among the social
movements, workers and the grow-
ing underclass that are marginalized
by late capitalism. In a certain
sense, we need to do for the epoch
of globalization what Marx did for
the era of industrial capitalism-
namely, describe the economic and
social processes at work and present
a new approach for transforming
the world as we know it.
