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Anticapitalist Manifestos: Monbiot, Albert & Callinicos

As distinct political currents begin to emerge in the anticapitalist movement, Richard Brenner, Jeremy Dewar and Sean Murray review the programmatic statements of three key figures, George Monbiot’s The Age of Consent, Michael Albert’s Parecon and Alex Callinicos’ Anti-capitalist Manifesto.

Names, programmes, classes

“A mish-mash allowing of the most manifold shades of opinion; a mish-mash of less striking critical statements, economic theories, pictures of future society by the founders of different sects.”

Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring, (Moscow 1962, pp. 31-2).

To some commentators, the inability of the global movement that has emerged against neoliberalism and war to settle on a name for itself expresses its strength – its heterogeneity, pluralism and inclusiveness. But this indecision – like the movement’s attachment to loose forms of organisation and rejection of democratic decision-making – in reality masks a profound weakness. It is increasingly clear that the movement is divided: its ranks contain not only varied but antagonistic projects, goals and class interests.

This is revealed in the growing preference of influential figures for the name Global Justice Movement rather than Anticapitalist Movement. Whilst the latter has the much-remarked upon weakness of stating only what it is against, rather than what it is for, the former “resolves” the problem only by leaving open the most critical question of all: can the injustices of the current world order be overcome within the confines of capitalism?

The forces that gave rise to this movement emerged on the streets. Spurred by the popular rebellion in Chiapas in the mid-1990s and relatively unencumbered by the restraining influence of the labour bureaucracy, a wide range of activist movements began to co-ordinate their protests.

In the demonstration in London on 18 June 1999, the street parties and actions of the British radical environmentalist initiative Reclaim the Streets coalesced into a mass protest against the capitalist system. In November that year, in Seattle, a co-ordinated action of unprecedented breadth drew such support from labour, environmentalist, student and internationalist and Non-Governmental Organisations as to force the cancellation of the World Trade Organisation summit.

Protests followed during 2000-2002 in Prague, Nice, Gothenburg and Genoa against the international financial institutions and political conferences of the global ruling class. These protesters named the enemy – this was the anticapitalist movement, a movement of “one no and many yeses”.

After Genoa, social forums sprung up in towns and cities across Italy during the summer of 2002. Despite the USA’s global “war on terror” after 9/11 the movement grew rather than shrank. Continental summits of resistance attracted scores of thousands of activists. The European Social Forum in Florence in November 2002 issued a call for united action against war on 15 February 2003 – a call that was answered by 20 million people … the biggest co-ordinated global action against imperialism in history. As a means of coordinating action, the movement has been an undoubted success.

But in generating a convincing vision of an alternative society and a realistic path to social transformation, it has made no advance. Nor could it, because unlike previous global anticapitalist movements such as the Second International between 1889 and 1914 or the Third International between 1919 and 1924, the new movement had no democratic structures within which political and programmatic decision-making could take place.

So it has fallen to a range of individual journalists and academics to give expression to the analysis and goals of the new movement. Many of these voices have been quick to urge restraint. Under the guise of offering precisely what was lacking – a clear programme and way forward – the anti-systemic character of the movement itself came under challenge.

This year, in preparation for the World Social Forum in Cancún and the European Social Forum in Paris, a range of manifestos has appeared. Each merits debate by the movement – delegates should insist that this take place in a fully democratic environment. But each programme serves to verify rather than undermine the idea that the movement is undergoing a process of internal differentiation, and that this proceeds along lines of social class.

From which classes’ historical standpoint do the contending manifestos proceed, whose interests do they promote and what social forces, if any, could bring them into realisation? If the debates in and around the ESF lay bare contending social classes within the movement and the class meaning and essence of the differing trends, then this will be a major step forward in the ideological maturation of the movement.

George Monbiot: Consenting to Capital

“…the most multifarious social quacks, who, by all manners of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances, … men outside the working class movement, and looking rather to the “educated” classes for support.”

Engels, Preface to the English edition of the Communist Manifesto, London, 1888.

One book being heavily promoted at the European Social Forum is The Age of Consent – A Manifesto for a New World Order by the British journalist George Monbiot. He rails passionately against the manifest inequity of the present world order – and tramples on a few shibboleths of the anticapitalist movement too. While there is a great deal to criticise in this book, the following should inform every contribution to the current debate:

“We have allowed ourselves to imagine that we can confront the consolidated power of our opponents with a jumble of contradictory ideas. While there is plainly a conflict between the coherence of the movement and the coherence of its proposals, and while the pursuit of a cogent political programme will alienate some of its participants, it is surely also true that once we have begun to present a mortal threat to the existing world order, we will attract supporters in far greater numbers even than those we have drawn so far…

…The notion that power can be dissolved and replaced by something called anti-power has some currency among anarchists in the rich world, but it is recognised as fabulous nonsense by most campaigners in the poor world, where the realities of power are keenly felt. Just because we do not flex our muscles does not mean that other people will not flex theirs. Power emerges wherever conflicting interests with unequal access to resources – whether material, political or psychological – clash…

…The question is not how we rid the world of power, but how the weak first reclaim that power and then hold it to account. We must harness the power of globalisation, and, pursuing its inexorable development, overthrow its institutions and replace them with our own.”1

This passage sums up three important points of departure for the movement today: that ideological coherence is a precondition for advance, not a threat to the long-term growth of the movement; that the power of the rulers of the present world order can only be broken if they are confronted by a greater power, rooted in material social interests that clash with those of our rulers; and that the development of a global economy and culture contradicts fundamental features of the current system, necessitating and making possible the destruction of the old order and the creation of a new one, accountable to the majority of humanity.

All very true and timely … but that is where Monbiot’s wisdom ends. The “cogent political programme” he proposes is strictly limited to reforms that – even if they could be enacted – would leave key levers of domination in the hands of the capitalist class; the political power and institutions he aspires to create are mere levers to pressurise and moderate the actions of the US and European capitalists; the alternative social force he wants to harness is the capitalist governments and rulers of the Third World, rather than their popular masses; his “inexorable development of globalisation” results not in a society free from capitalism and exploitation, but one in which global corporations continue to exploit resources and people and private property rights remain intact.

In short, Monbiot proposes a programme for a more humane, more equitable and more sustainable capitalism. In class terms, it is a liberal bourgeois programme.

His four proposals are: a democratically elected world parliament; a democratised UN General assembly with the powers of the Security Council; an International Clearing Union to eliminate trade deficits and prevent debt; and a Fair Trade Organisation to “restrain the rich” while emancipating the poor.

Upon examination of the “practical” detail, it becomes clear that it would be easier to overthrow capitalism in its entirety than to implement a single one of Monbiot’s demands.

First, take the world parliament. Every even partially democratic forum in history – from the Third Estate to the Paris Commune – has first emerged as a result of an oppressed class organising to struggle against its rulers. To achieve a global institution of representative democracy capable of reorganising society in the interests of the majority, our point of departure must be the struggle of the world’s poor, of the working class, unemployed and peasantry.

In the course of resistance, they must establish organs of their own power, overthrow the national capitalist states that hold them down, and by extending their social revolution, federate their new democratic institutions so as to co-ordinate global production and distribution in a sustainable, equitable and non-exploitative manner. This is no scheme designed by some great reformer, but the expression of real historical development.

Or at least, that was what we thought up until now. Monbiot, however, has designed a better way. Every adult on earth should have one vote for a parliament of, say, 600 representatives, (“each with a constituency of 10 million people”, he helpfully points out). Constituencies will straddle national borders. Members should have no connection with national governments, he tells us, but these nation-states will continue to exist. With breath-taking naivety he says that “If the United States told a member from Yemen that unless she changed her policies it would cut the aid it gives her country’s government, she could reply that the decisions she makes have nothing to do with the government.”2

Given the existence of a global network of capitalist nation-states, and given that Monbiot clearly has no intention that they be overthrown, how does he propose we set up a world parliament? Easy. “Our first task would be to publish pamphlets and web pages explaining the idea”. The second task, perhaps more time-consuming and expensive, is “to organise a consultation of as many of the world’s people, through randomly selected samples, as the budgets we raise permit, to discover whether or not our proposal commands popular consent.”3 If not, “we should cease the process of development”. A less persuasive appeal for funds could scarcely be imagined.

Warming to his theme, Monbiot goes on to say that if most of the people polled approved, we would be in a stronger position to raise funds and to “set up an electoral commission, staffed by professionals, with a strictly neutral mandate.” Quite how the six billion people of the world will express their consent for the selection (by whom?) of this “neutral” team of learned constitutional and demographic experts is unclear.

“The plan then becomes more expensive, more complex and more hazardous”. How could we find the $5bn that Monbiot estimates the global general election will cost? A small proportion he says could be raised from individuals and charities. “The only bodies which possess sufficient funds to provide the rest, however, are states, the international institutions and corporations, and we should of course be wary of accepting money from them”.4

Corporate funding is – he remarks with rare common sense – “ruled out altogether”, though he fondly imagines that perhaps some “liberal states” or a “sympathetic UN agency” might stump up a few million. But, realising that this is perhaps unlikely, Monbiot relies for the main wedge of cash on more sensible and dependable sources: “a global lottery, offering enormous prizes”, or donations from the reserve funds of an International Clearing Union, which admittedly doesn’t exist but, he assures us, really ought to, even though his proposals for its formation are as utopian as those for the world parliament itself.

The anticapitalist movement, which comprises workers’ trade unions, local grassroots initiatives, youth groups, peasants’ federations, NGOs relying on state and charitable donations, should divert its hard raised funds not into pursuing the struggle against the employers and their states, not into campaigning against injustices, not into forming parties and contesting elections on platforms of resistance to capital, not into organising our own legal and physical defence against persistent police attack, but into a hair-brained consultation exercise for an impossible-to-organise global general election, to take place within and alongside the existing repressive state structures. And what could this parliament do? Exert “moral authority” on the rulers of the world.

The biggest demonstration in human history and the condemnation of the majority of other states did not stop the US and Britain attacking Iraq in 2003. Universal approbation did not stop Bush tearing up the Kyoto treaty on global warming. A spuriously convened world parliament, however, despite having no state force and no levers of economic power at its disposal, is expected to bring them to heel.

It is when dealing with his second proposal, for a reformed United Nations General Assembly which assumes the powers of the Security Council, that Monbiot suddenly strays out of his utopian dream world and considers the question of bringing real forces to bear against the existing UN Security Council. He proposes a democratic security system “controlled not by five self-appointed governments but by the entire General Assembly”, with each nation’s vote weighted according to its population and its “democratic legitimacy” (determined by whose criteria?). But he cannot avoid the fact that the USA would “react with even greater hostility to this proposal than it has done towards the criminal court”. So what is to be done?

His answer is startling: global economic war. He proposes that the rest of the world should dump the dollar, transferring currency reserves to euros or yuan and insisting in trade only in non-dollar currencies. Not to be misunderstood, he states: “The rest of the world, in other words, has the means to wreck the US economy and, in doing so, to threaten its status as the global hegemon. This may be necessary if we are to construct a world order based on equity and justice.”5

Leaving aside the obvious fact that this would rapidly lead to a global military confrontation for which Monbiot would have us make no preparation, there is the small matter of the present unwillingness of national capitalist governments to follow this perilous course. However, at this point the masses – until now reduced to the status of lottery ticket buyers or voters in 10 million strong constituencies – are expected to enter the scene … constitutionally of course. The regimes will “find this courage only if their electorates [democracies only, please!] … press home their duty to prevent the possibility of another world war.”6

Monbiot’s other proposals – the International Clearing Union and Fair Trade Organisation – are similar to other debt alleviation and fair trade reforms already advanced in the anti-capitalist movement. We have examined them elsewhere (see [anti] capitalism: from resistance to revolution).7 Yet what is pertinent here is that Monbiot believes they can be effected in the same way as the world parliament and the new democratic security council: through a combination of moral authority and a co-ordinated revolt of the third world’s capitalist regimes. All this is to take place under peaceful mass pressure.

The majority of the world’s population are workers in industry and services, peasants or unemployed people. If they can be mobilised in sufficient numbers and strength to convene a global election, let alone to force the majority of the world’s national governments into economic and probably therefore military confrontation with the USA, then they could claim for themselves a role beyond that of Monbiot’s ancillary stage army or pressure group. They could press forward their own interests and demands.

If the people of the Middle East organise themselves into a mass movement strong enough to force President Mubarak or the House of Saud to break with the USA and cease acting as gendarmes for western capital, then they could also go forward to challenge and overthrow these reactionary regimes, which in reality repress them violently whenever they demand a greater challenge to imperialism (just look at the violent treatment meted out by police to the Egyptian demonstrations against the Iraq war).

For what is crying out from every page of The Age of Consent is something Monbiot can’t bring himself to say. Yes, the developing countries have been blocked by the Western powers from pursuing “normal” capitalist development; yes, a democratic revolution to open the road for this development – a bourgeois democratic revolution – is a pressing necessity. But despite Monbiot’s pleading, the brute reality in the twenty-first century is that the semi-colonial bourgeoisie won’t lead it, and can’t lead it. It is tied by a thousand ties to the ruling classes of the advanced powers, it depends for its personal wealth and privilege on maintaining at least a modus vivendi with the USA and the EU, and, above all, it fears the mobilisation of its own masses far more than it fears the White House.

But there is a way. Hundreds of millions of workers, peasants and unemployed can come to the head of the democratic revolution and proceed to their own anticapitalist, socialist tasks. This is no brand new innovation – it is known as “permanent revolution”.

In co-ordinating resistance, the millions can form democratic councils of their own like the Paris Commune or the Soviets in the early years of the Russian Revolution. They can struggle not just to moderate the actions of the giant corporations that dominate every aspect of global economic and political life, but to seize control of their resources and power by taking them into the hands of the state. They can overthrow national capitalist governments and establish their own democratic rule based on their own councils and their own force. They can begin to plan production and distribution democratically.

By organising the working class part of the global justice movement into a new world political party, the working class can come to the head of this revolutionary development – instead of being diverted into the impossible scheme of a world parliament they could spread their revolution. Starting in one country then spreading onto a continental and international scale, a global plan of production could replace the chaos of the capitalist market and do so under the democratic control of the producers and consumers themselves.

Monbiot says explicitly that the workers and peasants exploited under capitalism should not do any of these things. The global corporations should remain in private hands. They should be strictly regulated, but will then become “accountable”. This is because once their abuses have been corrected, there is in his view really nothing wrong with these organisations: “in principle, a corporation is simply a means of exchanging goods and services for money, a vehicle which carries wealth to and from the bank”.8

This is crude and dangerous nonsense, an apology for capitalism. These corporations are not just vehicles moving wealth around – they exploit millions of working people. Though Monbiot tries to dismiss the ideas set out by Marx in the Communist Manifesto 150 years ago, it is more true than ever today that the profits of the giant capitalist corporations are fundamentally secured not, as he imagines, by “the lending of money at interest”, which is just a description of the credit system and of loan capital.

Private ownership of the means of production creates the system of wage slavery, under which workers receive in wages not the value of the commodities they produce but only the value of the commodities required to keep them alive and get them back to work the next day. The remainder – surplus value – is retained by the capitalist, who has to compete with other private owners by driving down costs of production and increasing the intensity of labour. This is the source of all inequality in the world today, of the rapacious and unstable character of the present world order, of poverty, repression, competition, environmental destruction and the drive to war.

But Monbiot’s commitment to this – fundamental – aspect of the system runs deep. So wedded is he to promoting the action of the capitalist rulers of the third world, and so hostile is he to steps taken by working people that might challenge capitalist ownership and control, he even opposes a ban on child labour – an abuse stamped out in Europe in the 19th century by a working class campaign for protective legislation. He says a ban “would be deeply resented by many families which are so poor that they have no option but to send their children to work”, precisely the argument used by the venal PR consultants that have helped companies like Nike, Adidas and Gap defend their record of exploiting children in Asia today.9

That the working class movement needs to ban child labour so as to stop general wages being driven down, that a ban on child labour would force capitalists to employ more adult labour at higher rates, that an end to economic child abuse would raise the level of education and thus the productivity of labour in any given society, that it raised rather than depressed the standard of living when implemented in European countries, that it is just plain wrong that privately owned corporations should slave drive children into factories to work their childhood away … all this is lost on Monbiot.

Nor does he understand the consequences of leaving the fundamental global antagonism of capital and labour intact. Because he does not propose the abolition of this antagonism, his system needs to establish a precarious balance between opposing forces – regulated, competing blocs of capital, equalised nation states, extensive systems of arbitration between the classes. It would be a world riddled with bureaucrats and administrators – and it would be inherently unstable. And so, to maintain this artificial truce in capitalist competition, struggles between nations and class conflict, Monbiot endorses John Maynard Keynes’ proposal for … a world police force. Monbiot’s system would inaugurate not an Age of Consent, but a globalised Age of Coercion.

But enough of Monbiot’s genuinely hopeless schemes and wretched apologias for capital. An analysis of class interests reveals that there is only one real reason this absurdly inadequate manifesto is even being idly discussed, let alone seriously debated in the movement. It is not because of what it proposes we should do – it is because of what it tells us not to do. It is a bourgeois programme with bourgeois aims. It would reduce the anticapitalist movement to a helpless and incoherent pressure group.

Monbiot spends several pages of his book attacking Marx’s Communist Manifesto. In vain – 150 years ago it had the better of him. In it Marx described what he called the Conservative or Bourgeois Socialist, a figure uncannily like Monbiot today:

“By changes in the means of existence, this form of socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be effected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at best, lessen the cost and simplify the administration work of bourgeois government. Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression, when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech.

Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class…This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois Socialism. It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois – for the benefit of the working class.”1

But let us allow Monbiot the last word. He appeals to us: “I ask just one thing of you – that you do not reject these proposals until you have better ones with which to replace them.”11

As Monbiot’s challenge will surely have readers scrambling for copies of alternative programmes in search of better proposals, let’s go on to examine some of them.

Albert: Vision of the future or News from Nowhere?

For committed anticapitalist activists, Michael Albert is a far more attractive figure than Monbiot. Unlike the latter, Albert has never denounced anticapitalist demonstrators in the bourgeois press for violence before the event complained of has even taken place -as Monbiot did in the British Guardian newspaper prior to London’s May Day demonstrations in 2002. What is more, Albert does not defend capitalism – he wants to get rid of it entirely and replace it with a different, more just, equitable and efficient system without private property and exploitation. He calls this system parecon – a participatory economy.

Albert’s concern is to demonstrate that contrary to the claims of the neoliberals, there is a workable alternative to capitalism. There is a great deal in his sketch of this alternative, Parecon – Life after Capitalism, that draws on and resembles Marxist thinking on the subject of how postcapitalist society might have to organise. But its defects are two-fold. It does not explain how such a society could come into being and how therefore it would necessarily be conditioned by the actual circumstances of its emergence from capitalism. And it attempts to create a model of non-capitalist production and distribution while avoiding one of the indispensable preconditions for its success – a democratic institution of central economic planning.

Attacking global capitalism for “producing poverty, ill-health, shortened life spans, reduced quality of life and ecological collapse”, Albert proposes we should replace the imperialist institutions of the IMF, World Bank and WTO with “an International Asset Agency, a Global Investment Assistance Agency and a World Trade Agency” which would work to attain the core values of parecon, equity, solidarity, diversity, self-management and ecological balance. But unlike Monbiot, Albert recognises that simply replacing the global institutions of the imperialists with better institutions would be doomed to failure as long as capitalism survived.

Albert correctly concludes that if we want to win permanent gains that won’t be rolled back, we have to go the whole way and replace capitalism with a different economic system. While he does not attempt to say how we can get rid of capitalism, he does say that “to transcend capitalism, parecon-orientated anti-globalisation activists would offer an institutional vision derived from the same” core values.12

His vision is one in which the private ownership of the means of production – the businesses, factories, mines and farms where the wealth of society is produced – is abolished. Instead the productive assets of society are owned equally by all. Albert correctly points out that it is the private ownership of production that is the basis of capitalism and the basis for the massive inequality that exists in the society we live in. If we abolish it we can ensure that no individual or groups of individuals, can derive power, wealth or privilege from exploitation. “No one has wealth, income, or economic influence different than what everyone else has due to having different ownership of means of production.”

Under parecon our world will no longer be controlled by the decisions made in the boardrooms of the global corporations. No longer will we have to make do with electing corrupt and unrepresentative politicians to purportedly democratic institutions which ignore the will of the majority and only rule in the interest of the rich and powerful. In its place we will have a world administered by democratic councils. Workers’ councils will administer every workplace “in which each worker has the same overall decision making rights and responsibilities as every other.” These councils manage and run the workplace and allocate tasks and responsibilities equally to all who work there, deciding on the work to be carried out and the resource needs of the workplace.

No longer will we have the market blindly deciding our consumption choices for us. In place of the market we would have consumer councils organised on a local level, deciding and planning consumption. Because once “we recognise that consumption activity, like production activity, is largely social, we must insist that consumption decision making, like production decision making, be participatory and equitable.”13

Under parecon the way we work would also be radically different from today. Albert introduces the idea of a “balanced job complex” in which each and every one of us would spend time doing empowering work that would give each of us an “equal chance of participating in and benefiting from workplace decision making.” Albert sees this as a way to break down the “corporate division of labour” whereby some spend all day on a production line, while others spend all day making decisions and planning future production.

While he points out that we will always need some division of labour, (i.e. not all of us can be a doctor or nuclear physicist) nevertheless “if you work at a particularly unpleasant and disempowering task for some time each day or week, then for some other time you should work at more pleasant and empowering tasks.” Until we can eliminate the need for boring, repetitive and mundane work, under parecon everyone is going to have to do their fair share of it.

Under capitalism, our pay bears no resemblance to how socially necessary or valuable our work is. Nurses struggle to make ends meet while professional gamblers make millions in the stock exchange. In a world based on the principles of parecon remuneration for work would be based on how “much effort or sacrifice we have endured in our useful work”. What type of work was more valuable and useful to society as a whole would be decided democratically through workers’ and consumers’ councils.

The spheres of production and consumption are bound together by these councils which establish planned prices and negotiate them with one another via Facilitation Boards, and an overall co-ordinating Iterative Facilitation Board at the national level. In planning these prices:

“Participatory workers must weigh the gains from working less or using less productive techniques against the consequent loss of consumer well-being. Likewise, participatory consumers must weigh the benefits of consumption requests against sacrifices required to produce them.

Participatory workers must distinguish an equitable workload from one that is too light or too heavy. Likewise participatory consumers must distinguish reasonable consumption requests from ones that are excessive or overly modest.

Everyone must know the true social costs and benefits of what they desire to consume or produce, including the quantifiable and non-quantifiable consequences of their choices.”14

So far, so excellent. But we have three vital questions. Could this model operate without a central planning authority? If not, would such an authority of necessity become undemocratic and thus undermine the egalitarianism and efficiency of the system? And without such an authority, could a participatory economy even come into being in the first place?

In some important respects, Albert’s model is similar to one proposed by Eugen Dühring, a nineteenth century German reformer and critic of Marx. Dühring argued for a model of economic communes which would determine prices of products and deal with the exchange of goods. He wrote that, “The individual economic communes in particular will replace retail trade within their own areas by completely planned sales.”15

In some details, his system differed from parecon. It based prices on average production costs, whereas Albert’s scheme allows the price-determining agencies or facilitation boards to take other social and environmental costs into account as well. And Dühring preserved money based on the precious metals, while Albert insists that his money would have no cash form and would exist merely as an instrument of accounting for labour time and other democratically determined social values.

The obvious weakness of Duhring’s system was that every individual would supposedly be able to do whatever they liked with their money. This raised the possibility of them creating a cash hoard, and correspondingly of the re-emergence of credit and debt. What is more, one economic commune would be able to accept money payment from another, raising the possibility that a commune could exploit labour and circulate its profits back into the economy in money form without another commune knowing where that money came from. Both the motive and the possibility of converting money into capital would exist, resulting inevitably in profiteering and ultimately finance capital.

Albert says this could not happen under parecon. Rightly, he points out that wages could be paid in proportion to the individual’s expense of labour time and that no cash need be circulated to do this – “money” entitlements could be drawn against the pool of goods and services through computerised accounting (presumably, a complex swipe card system) . But without central planning, how could one commune (or guild of communes) be prevented from fixing prices that do not fairly reflect social costs? How could a specific commune’s pricing be prevented from reflecting its higher labour productivity, or its lower productivity?

Friedrich Engels considered these issues when responding to Dühring’s model. He observed:

“If therefore in the trading of an economic commune with its members, metallic money does not function as money but as a disguised labour certificate, it performs its money function even less in exchange between the different economic communes. In this exchange, on the assumptions made by Herr Dühring, metal money is totally superfluous. In fact, mere book-keeping would suffice, which would effect the products of equal labour far more simply if it used the natural measure of labour – time, with the labour-hour as the unit – than if it first converted the labour hours into money. The exchange is in reality simple exchange in kind; all balances are easily and simply settled by drafts on other communes. But should a commune really have a deficit in its dealings with other communes, all ‘the gold existing in the universe’, ‘money by nature’ though it be, could not save this commune from the fate of having to make good this deficit by increasing the quantity of its own labour, if it does not want to fall into the position of dependence on the other communes on account of its debt.”16

Logically, this objection holds whether the commune uses cash money or not. Even in book-keeping the difference in values would make itself felt between the communes.

But Albert is ready for this argument. His reply is not only that parecon does not have a market because of its participatory planning and planned prices, but that a market cannot emerge. He says “It still cannot happen because society just doesn’t allow it. The planning process will not provide the [exploiter’s] firm with inputs, and it will not accept its outputs.”17

How does he know? Without a central authority, any producer or consumer council could do this – the system of negotiated relations between autonomous units would allow it. Albert’s participatory economy has the distinction of being the first mode of production to slide into crisis before it even exists.He has only two answers to this problem. One is absurdly idealistic; the other violates the precepts of his system.

The first is that exploitation would not be worthwhile because it would entail becoming a social outcast. “But if, in fact, the black marketeer manages to get people to pay … how does she explain her resulting abundance? The social ostracism that would accompany any ostentatious consumption that revealed cheating … would be a very high price to pay for income above and beyond the already quite comfortable and socially rich existence parecon typically provides.”18

Let’s leave aside the fact that in all human history the result of a higher than average income and ostentatious consumption has tended to be the opposite of ostracism. This supposedly won’t happen in parecon because … people will already be well off. With one bound, Albert is free. He has leapt over the central problem, which is not how some pure construct of his mind might function, but how we can get from a market economy in which the majority is emphatically not quite comfortable and socially rich, to a socialised economy, without the market subsuming, reincorporating and ultimately subordinating elements of democratic planning and reproducing an exploiting property owning class.

As the new society emerges, people will still be poor and unequal. And it is of course at this stage that the danger of the market re-emerging is at its greatest.

Albert’s second answer to the problem is that the planning process “won’t allow it.” And indeed, however much he tries to present the planning process as an entirely consensual and negotiated affair between the various workers’ and consumers’ councils and federations, he is forced to develop also the notion of Iterative Facilitation Boards which set indicative prices for consideration by local bodies, and then revise them as the local bodies resubmit proposals. “Overly optimistic and otherwise unfeasible” proposals are “whittled down”. Through a process of successive iterations, “proposals move closer to mutual feasibility” and thus the procedure “generates equity and efficiency simultaneously.”

This is fine when the system is well established and understood by all to work to raise living standards. But again, before we can consider the norms of how this participatory economy might function, we have to consider something more immediate: how a society in transition from capitalism to democratic planning might confront this process.

Here suddenly the picture looks a little less sunny. Contending proposals are inevitable from the discrete units. Mutual feasibility is less likely to be apprehended by the contending groups. Poverty, conflicting needs of development, a vast private sector and a growing black market, sabotage by former capitalists and their supporters, the intervention of foreign capitalist powers, shortages as a result of blockades, balancing the needs of military production, food supply and luxuries, determining how to allocate the overall social surplus – these are the life or death issues that a real postcapitalist society will have to “whittle down” in its “iterations”. Perhaps, just perhaps, some councils or “facilitation boards” might not always agree to accept the majority’s final “iteration” of the plan. Then what?

And this is where central planning comes in, why it is essential. Not because Marxists want to boss people around, but because we want to create a postcapitalist society, not just on the page but in the real world. To do so, we have to address the tasks of transition. And here, to paraphrase the Woody Guthrie quote with which Albert opens his book, “Most everybody in the anticapitalist movement knows the truth but they just don’t want to admit that they know it.”

Even to begin to construct the society Albert describes will mean taking over privately owned property. There is only one way this can be done – the working class will have to confiscate it. There is no chance of this without breaking up the capitalists’ repressive state apparatus and then employing co-ordinated force to hold them down and stop them taking it back. That’s a central authority – a state – whether you like it or not.

If individual enterprises are not to be private property, they need to be owned and controlled collectively. To effect this they must be under the protection of the very force that has dispossessed the former owners and is keeping them dispossessed. That’s state ownership, whether you like it or not.

Albert doesn’t like it. But frankly, that’s just tough. Without these things, his parecon is simply impossible, will never happen. And he tacitly knows this, because he refuses to describe how his society emerges from the old.

The reason for this is a mortal fear of where central planning might lead. He believes that the monstrosity of bureaucratic and anti-worker planning carried out by the elite caste in the former Soviet Union arises as a direct result of central planning, and that therefore central planning must be avoided at all costs.

If this is true, then all is lost. A socially owned and democratically planned society like parecon cannot be constructed without central planning, as we have shown. But if central planning necessarily results in domination by a new elite, oppression of the workers, inequality, inefficiency and stagnation, then eventually it will collapse as the USSR finally did. If central planning inevitably leads to Stalinism, then there really is, as Margaret Thatcher said, no alternative.

History, however, does not support this ultra-pessimistic view. The first country in which central planning was attempted was backward, the majority of its people were not involved in modern capitalist production but were peasants. It was subjected immediately to devastating foreign invasion and, crucially, the social revolution that inaugurated the new regime of workers’ councils failed to spread to more advanced countries. By the time the five year plans were drawn up, the USSR was dominated by a self-appointed bureaucratic caste which arrogated privileges to itself and feared the self-activity of the workers more than it feared capitalist restoration. Subsequent “command economies” were established by Stalinist parties, directly on this model, extirpating every vestige of working class organisation and democracy before confiscating capitalist property.

Why should the next social revolution have to end in this way? Next time we may begin in a more advanced country, or may have greater success in spreading the new social relations so as to aggregate the efforts of the working people of many countries. Certainly to have succeeded in the first place we would have to have created a political party separate from and hostile to the Stalinist parties – because everywhere the Stalinists insist on limiting the revolution to a bourgeois democratic stage and refuse to advance to socialist planning. And, above all, there are clear means available to control and hold to account anyone charged by the people to work in the administration of a central plan.

What are these means? Albert describes them himself. In his critique of central planning he polemicises exclusively against the system of bureaucratic command, and Marxists can endorse much of what he says. But in the section of his book in which he distinguishes parecon from central planning, he explains with admirable clarity precisely those methods that can be used to hold any planning system to democratic account, whether local or central.

He explains that planning and administration roles could be rotated. Even if key elements of the planning process had to be made by someone specifically assigned to that task, “that would still not mean that there is a coordinator class in the economy any more than the fact that there is a managerial function in many industries in a parecon implies that there is a separate coordinator class there … it is not the existence of important technical or conceptual tasks per se that engenders class division, but rather how those tasks are distributed among the populace.”19

This is exactly right – but why should this apply to tasks dealing with local issues but not to tasks dealing with regional or national ones? The prevention of bureaucracy is a critical task in building a successful postcapitalist system, but the mechanisms to prevent it can apply to a central as much as to a series of integrated and negotiated local plans. They are: democratic decision making; freedom of parties to operate within the workers’ councils and to campaign for amendments and changes to planning priorities; rotation of administrative/bureaucratic tasks; no such individual to earn more than the average wage for other skilled tasks; recallability of all such individuals from any position; public access to the inputs and outputs that enable the plan to be drawn up; decentralisation of as much of the planning process as possible, allowing democratic centralisation of whatever is necessary.

In this way, the government of persons can really begin to make way for the mere administration of things, without preventing the majority from taking steps to assure the subordination of market forms and the success of the transition to democratic planning, or socialism as we shall continue to call it.

If Albert is still worried about some immanent tendency to bureaucratism, he had better apply his concerns not only to democratic central planning, but also to his parecon’s facilitation boards, let alone the crypto-centralising “Iterative Facilitation Board.”

The problem with Albert’s parecon scheme arises not from the fact that he has designed an imperfect model of the future society, but from the fact that he is trying to “design” such a model at all. This is a flawed approach that can never achieve scientificity, because it does not proceed from the real. Any meaningful postcapitalist project must be grounded in the real, which means it must take as its starting point capitalism.

It is in the struggle against capitalism that working people are forced to resist, forced to develop their own forms of organisation. In workers’ and peasants’ councils the germs of the organs of future administration arise. But in no circumstance, not in one revolutionary situation, have these organisations even begun to supplant capitalism as an economic system except where they have taken political power by force and organised a new type of state to suppress the bourgeoisie. The need for central planning arises from this.

The experience of the Russian Revolution and its defeat and the compromised nature of the Stalinist political parties has of course wreaked extraordinary damage, disillusion and despair within the working class and anticapitalist movement. On the positive side, a determination to avoid its negative outcomes is manifest everywhere. On the negative, it has caused activists to turn their backs on a precondition for advance to a postcapitalist order.

But the only alternative is to return to the project of constructing idealised utopias, paper descriptions of a perfect society after the messy business of socialist transition has been completed. In this sense, parecon is not a map of a future society, but a mind map of the radical intelligentsia of the early twenty-first century, still traumatised by the defeats of the twentieth.

Unlike capitalism , Parecon can be overthrown without violence and without a centralised state for one reason only – it doesn’t exist, cannot exist.

What is the class character, then, of Albert’s proposal? There is only one class that objectively has cause to fear both the centralised state apparatus of the big capitalists and the centralised semi-state of the workers. It is the petit-bourgeoisie, the middle class, which is dispossessed by the great corporations and fears dispossession by the proletariat too. To say this is not to direct insults at Albert or to question his intentions, still less his commitment to the struggle against capitalism. It is to identify the objective class basis of his utopian proposal – and to reject it in favour of a working class alternative.

Callinicos Co-ordinates Consensus

Alex Callinicos, a leading member of the British Socialist Workers Party and secretary of the International Socialist Tendency, has published An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto. His ideas about the nature of capitalism in the era of globalisation and the way forward for the movement will undoubtedly be read by many anticapitalist and antiwar activists.

The problem? It is not a consistently proletarian programme. In fact it represents a further stage in Callinicos’ drive to accommodate to the policies and practice of his hoped for allies to the right of the SWP in the movement. It tries to split the difference between the ideas currently in vogue in the movement and the principles of communism. And, if applied, it would lead to catastrophe for the working class and the anticapitalist movement.

The first thing to note at this stage is that despite his organisation’s support for the idea of democratic central planning, his programme attempts to present a model of postcapitalist economy without such a mechanism. He develops the notion advanced by Pat Devine of “negotiated coordination” between distinct local and regional planning units of production and distribution – markedly similar, in fact, to Albert’s parecon.

The difference here is that Devine’s model apparently allows for a solution to the problems we have outlined above. Callinicos tells us that according to Devine “Broad economic parameters – covering such matters as the macro-economic division of resources between individual and collective consumption, social and economic investment, energy and transport policies, and environmental priorities – would be decided nationally by the elected representative assembly on the basis of an alternative set of plans drafted by experts.”20

At the same time, Devine says: “negotiated coordination bodies would allow economic decisions to be co-ordinated consciously, yet without central administrative command, in the light of the overall situation, yet on a sufficiently decentralised basis to make effective use of local knowledge.”21

To be effective economic planning should, of course, take place at the most decentralised level possible. But what Callinicos is silent on is the unfashionable fact that in deciding on “broad parameters”, the elected assembly referred to would be exercising democratic authority and if necessary overruling non-compliant elements of local planning. The key feature enabling decentralised planning to work is a strong central planning body – albeit necessarily one under the most extensive and strictest democratic scrutiny and control.

It is entirely possible that this is what Callinicos really believes in and really wants. Then he should say it openly – not in ambiguous terms designed to slip unnoticed through the current “anti-statist” discourse. Why? Because to achieve it, millions will need to fight for it. To persuade them of this, a working class party must actively combat the pervasive idea that central planning leads inexorably to Stalinism, not seek to dodge the fight by terminological innovation.

At the heart of the book is what Callinicos calls a “transitional programme”. This phrase derives from Leon Trotsky, who developed a programme on this basis for the Fourth International in 1938. But, as we shall see, Callinicos’ programme adopts a different method from Trotsky’s entirely. Whilst Trotsky developed a series of demands linking the contemporary struggles of the working class to revolution, working class state power and a planned economy, Callinicos instead presents a series of disconnected reforms together with the vaguest possible explanation of the need for revolution – an explanation that avoids any mention of the forms of struggle, types of organisation and mass actions that would make a revolution a reality.

Callinicos’ alibi is that his is only an indicative set of demands and that “others could come up with more extensive and imaginative programmes”22. He goes on to say, “For all that, these demands aren’t just a wish list plucked from the air. They represent responses to contemporary realities, and have all been raised by existing movements. At the same time, the tendency of these demands is to undermine the logic of capital… while not necessarily formulated for explicitly anticapitalist reasons, these demands have an implicitly anticapitalist dynamic. They are what Trotsky called transitional demands, reforms that emerge from the realities of existing struggles but whose implementation in the current context would challenge capitalist economic relations.”23

Now this is not what Trotsky understood by transitional demands. One would have hoped that, after the decades of calumnies heaped on his ideas by the Stalinists, Trotsky’s supporters might at least refrain from misrepresenting his ideas still further. He explained transitional demands in his 1938 programme as follows, making it clear that each of these demands will only challenge capitalism if they are presented as part of a system linked to the need for revolution:

“The Fourth International does not discard the program of the old ‘minimal’ demands to the degree to which these have preserved at least part of their vital forcefulness. Indefatigably, it defends the democratic rights and social conquests of the workers. But it carries on this day-to-day work within the framework of the correct actual, that is revolutionary, perspective. Insofar as the old partial, ‘minimal’ demands of the masses clash with the destructive and degrading tendencies of decadent capitalism – and this occurs at each step – the Fourth International advances a system of transitional demands, the essence of which is contained in the fact that ever more openly and decisively they will be directed against the very foundations of the bourgeois regime. The old ‘minimal program’ is superseded by the transitional program, the task of which lies in systematic mobilisation of the masses for the proletarian revolution.”24

So do the demands listed in Callinicos’ programme undermine the logic of capital and do they in their totality provide a bridge from today’s situation to revolution?

He proposes support for the Tobin Tax, for example, despite the fact that he can posit no agency that would collect or enforce it. Indeed, earlier in his book he even criticises this miniscule 0.01 per cent tax on foreign exchange dealings as “a method of reforming capitalism – and in particular of rehabilitating national capitalisms”25. Later on Callinicos explains how Lionel Jospin’s French government pushed through an amendment supporting the Tobin Tax in November 2001 in order to “cultivate a socialist image” while he “actually privatised FFr240bn worth (E36.4bn, Ł22.5bn) of state enterprises, more than the past six French governments combined” (p.90). How does this tax undermine the logic of capital?

In its entirety, Callinicos’ programme of transitional demands includes: cancellation of the third world debt; introduction of the Tobin tax; restoration of capital controls; a universal basic income; reduction of the working week; renationalisation and an end to privatisation; progressive taxation; abolition of immigration controls; a programme to defend the environment; dissolution of the military-industrial complex; defence of civil liberties.

There is not a word on how these demands are to be effected – not a word on how the struggle to implement them could be linked to the struggle for a social revolution. It is entirely correct to support reforms that improve the condition of the working class, irrespective of whether, on their own, they direct the movement towards revolution. But it is entirely false and downright dangerous to suggest that such reforms, outside of a system of interlinked demands, can somehow automatically grow over into revolutionary struggle. This notion legitimises the idea that all revolutionaries need do is fight for reforms and history or “the process” will do the rest. It is an excuse for systematic opportunism.

In the history of the Marxist movement, transitional demands have been anything but a catalogue of such disconnected reforms: they are the means by which revolutionaries seek to build a bridge from the immediate burning needs of workers today to the goal of working class power. Here’s what Frederick Engels said about the method as early as 1847:

“All measures to restrict competition and the accumulation of capital in the hands of individuals… are not only possible as revolutionary measures, but actually necessary. They are possible because the whole insurgent proletariat is behind them and maintains them by force of arms. They are possible, despite all the difficulties and disadvantages alleged against them by economists, because these very difficulties and disadvantages will compel the proletariat to go further and further until private property has been completely abolished, in order not to lose again what it has already won. They are possible as preparatory steps, temporary, transitional stages toward the abolition of private property, but not in any other way.”

Here we have the whole transitional method explained. Starting from the immediate needs of the working class, they rally the workers to exact measures which encroach on bourgeois economic and political power and strengthen the workers’ self-organisation (“by force of arms”) in the process. Because these measures impede the capitalists’ ability to compete and accumulate, the working class and its allies will be forced to go further until capitalism itself is overthrown.

But Engels, and Trotsky after him, stressed that these measures are only possible if they are linked to the conquest of power.

Take the fight for a universal minimum income. This will, if it is to be set at a reasonable rate, have to be won through industrial action. Workers will have to build strike committees and wage a battle against their own union bureaucracy, who will want to sideline the campaign.

To establish the level of the income, working class communities will need to set up price watch committees, so as not to be swindled by economists or inflation. Bosses may plead bankruptcy and sack workers or even shut down enterprises as a result, in which case workers will need to occupy the factories and demand to see the accounts and fight for nationalisation under workers’ control.

As recent events in Argentina show, this too is only a “temporary, transitional stage” and “in order not to lose again what it has already won” the working class will have to fight for a workers’ government that can bring the whole economy onto a socialised basis.

This is what is totally missing from Callinicos’ Manifesto. In fact, the opposite is implied: “the demands listed above are generally placed on states acting either singly or in concert. This reflects the fact that, whatever the effects of globalisation, states are still the most effective mechanisms in the world as currently constituted for mobilising resources to achieve collectively agreed goals.”26

Here, Callinicos lays bare the limits of his vision. Of course, we should place demands on the capitalist state, but we should not sow illusions in the ability of the capitalist state to mobilise resources to “achieve collectively agreed goals”.

The capitalist state cannot be depended upon to uphold anti-capitalist goals. It can only be forced temporarily to concede measures in the interests of the workers – it will immediately attempt to claw them back. While a state power is indeed “the most effective mechanism” to achieve the goals of the working class, this must be something Callinicos cannot bring himself to mention: a working class semi-state erected on the shattered ruins of the capitalists’ repressive state power.

The world working class will need to establish democratically centralised planning – something which demands not just negotiated co-ordination between regional and local planning units or non-class specific “states” but working class government and a working class state. This would be a dictatorship over the former ruling class: not simply to ensure capitalism does not mount a counter-revolution, but also to raise the living standards of six billion toilers so that they can truly control their destiny.

The weakest element of Callinicos’ programme is how it says this can be done. Despite the SWP’s newspaper carrying a Where we Stand column calling every week for workers’ councils, a workers’ militia and revolution to smash the state, the Anti-Capitalist Manifesto calls for none of these things.

Any transitional programme worth its salt today would relate to the most promising, militant and potentially revolutionary aspects of the anticapitalist movement and develop demands linking their further development to the struggle for revolution. After the mass attempt at organised self-defence at Genoa, it would call, as Trotsky’s transitional programme did, for a working class defence guard, starting with the task of defending protestors and strikers from police attack but able to move forward to challenge the capitalists’ monopoly of force.

It would point to the social forums in Italy and the people’s assemblies in Argentina as a growth of popular democracy and call for delegate based councils of workers, peasants and urban poor, as a way of co-ordinating the struggle on the broadest possible basis and as an alternative basis of power in society, the seeds of a future working class republic. And it would call for the smashing, the forcible demolition by the workers, of the apparatus of state repression that the capitalists use against the anticapitalist movement and the peoples of the third world alike. This, and only this, is social revolution.

All this is absent from this utopian programme, which trades away the necessities of the struggle for the sake of “negotiated co-ordination” with the reformist intellectuals of today’s global justice movement. The revolutionary high point of Callinicos’ analysis -the boldest he gets -states:

“But the latter option [a revolution] would be a revolution not simply in the sense of a systemic transformation: it could only be achieved by overcoming – forcibly if necessary, the resistance of capital and those mobilised behind it.”27

If necessary? This can only mean “perhaps it will not be necessary”. The Susan Georges, George Monbiots and Luca Casarinis can breathe a sigh of relief that perhaps they will be spared this catastrophe. And the revolutionaries are supposed to weaken our argument for their benefit, suggest that there is any possibility whatsoever, in the age of the War on Terror, of Genoa and the bombing of Baghdad, that force will not be necessary?

This is a contemptible abandonment of Marxism, which is a warlike doctrine of struggle from head to foot, and whose founders wrote over 150 years ago: “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” 28

For revolutionaries, a transitional programme is the “bridge” between the needs of the struggles of millions today and the need for revolution. Alex Callinicos’ manifesto, on the other hand, is a bridge reaching out to liberal economists like Susan George and Monbiot … a bridge the working class components of the anti-capitalist movement must not cross.

And the social class that wishes to act as a go-between for the two

Some Conclusions

What then, in summary, would be the component elements of a consistently anti-capitalist manifesto today?

It would be anti-systemic, challenging not only the manifestations of inequity and injustice in the current systems of distribution and representation, but also in the exploitative production relations of capital.

It would be partisan, seeking everywhere to promote the self-organisation and mass action of the working class, the peasantry and the youth.

Far from turning its back on the burning democratic questions that confront the peoples of the ‘Third World’, it would champion the fight for the fullest rights, including national independence, an end to rigged trade rules and an end to debt. But it would warn that the capitalists of the developing world will not lead this struggle to its conclusion. It would insist that the working class – in alliance with the peasants – needs to come to the head of this struggle, and must proceed to its own socialist tasks in the process.

It would promote a vision of society based on representative councils of producers and consumers. And it would go on to show how these can arise. It would seek as its starting point not the ideal, but the real. Therefore its point of departure would not be how best to design such bodies on the page, but to identify the real organisations that have arisen in struggle – like the social forums in Italy, the Popular Assemblies in Argentina – and to seek their extension, development and strengthening. Only by commencing as organs of mass resistance to capital today, can the bodies that will govern a future society take shape.

It would agitate – openly and not in veiled terms – for the only feasible alternative to capitalism: a centrally planned economy based on social ownership. It would insist that for this to function efficiently and sustainably, the planning process would have to take place democratically. It would demonstrate how the possibility of this is prefigured in capitalist forms of organisation and in class resistance to capital.

It would raise demands to meet the burning needs of today. Far from avoiding mention of these ‘reforms’ or presenting them as universal panaceas, it would link them to the need for the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system, never failing to point to the essential precondition for a planned and rational organisation of society: that the armed repressive power of the capitalists be broken. This can only be a forcible act. The fate of our culture depends on this outcome – on this there is no room for ambiguity.

Therefore, a proletarian programme can make no concession to the fashionable – in class terms petit-bourgeois – notion that the anticapitalist movement should avoid constituting a coherent political alternative, should avoid democratic decision-making, should avoid struggling for power. In fact, the opposite is needed. A consistent class manifesto would proceed not from the question of how to preserve the unity of the workers’ organisations with middle-class academics and journalists or how to broker a programmatic compromise between these forces, but how to organise the unity of the workers in the struggle for their own power.

The only possible conclusion is that the organisations of the workers, the unemployed, the poor peasants and the youth need to unite in a political party – a new global party of social revolution – as a living embodiment of this programme, as an instrument agitating and organising for its active implementation. This – not continuing incoherence, bourgeois reforms, utopian schemes or brokered compromises – is the only way forward for the movement.

Fortunately, the programmatic discussion in the global anticapitalist movement is not a three way debate between Monbiot’s bourgeois reformism, Albert’s petit-bourgeois utopianism and Callinicos’ centrist attempt to broke a compromise between the workers and the middle class intelligentsia.

Also to be presented to the ESF will be the recently published programme of the League for the Fifth International, whose title leaves no room for fatal ambiguity and consistently expresses the interests of one social class, the world working class: Manifesto for World Revolution.

Footnotes

1 George Monbiot, The Age of Consent – A Manifesto for a New World Order, London 2003, pp. 14-15

2 ibid. p88

3 ibid. p.89

4 ibid. p.91.

5 ibid. p.136-7

6 ibid. p.137

7 League for a Revolutionary Communist International, London 2001.

8 Monbiot, op.cit, p.235

9 ibid, p.225

10 Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Moscow 1986, pp.63-4

11 Monbiot, op.cit, p.4

12 Michael Albert, Parecon – Life after Capitalism, London 2003, p9

13 ibid. p.94

14 ibid. p.123

15 Cited in Engels, Anti-Dühring, Moscow 1962, p.411

16 ibid, p.416

17 ibid, p.268

18 ibid, p.269

19 ibid, p.272

20 Alex Callinicos, An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto, Cambridge 2003, p125.

21 Cited in Callinicos, op.cit, p.126.

22 ibid, p.139

23 ibid, p.140

24 Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, New York 1977, pp. 114-5

25 Callinicos, op.cit, p.34

26 ibid p. 139

27 ibid, p.141, (emphasis added)

28 Marx and Engels, op.cit, p. 70

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