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if folk imagine socialism to be a state in the sense of solid state nothing changes the best of all possible worlds then no wonder the conclusion follows that it's a pipe dream. that's how circular arguments work. you land where you started.
at the same time, it's obviously a problem what the whole stalinism thing did to the language that had been developed in the marxist tradition to critique and posit alternatives to capitalism....which of course they did by way of a single-minded application of a version of marx, processed through lenin (materialism and empiro-criticism anyone? i felt bad for the guy when i slogged through it in grad school) and comrade stalin himself, friend of the children, hero of nations, genius of linguistics, mass murderer, paranoid, etc.
at the same time, though, capitalism is not a thing. it's more a social form and one that keeps changing like any other complex social-historical phenomenon keeps changing. the baseline analyses that marx developed in the middle part of the 19th century for the critique of capitalism have been in trouble since pretty early on, really---at least since the development of the stock trade in the 1870s complicated the schema for thinking about the concentration of wealth, which in turn complicated the scenario that defined capitalism as a kind of giant jurassic technology that would, by running, destroy itself.
and then there was the actual success of the trade-union movement. in the old schema, that would not have been predicted as the nature of wealth concentration (and other things) were such that demands for things like power-sharing and higher wages would have exploded the system. except they didn't.
anyway, the problem i suppose with socialism in any revolutionary sense in 2011 is that no-one knows what it would mean or entail. there's not a lot of systematic critique of contemporary capitalism from a progressive political viewpoint. it's not clear that there is any reason to think in terms of The Revolution outside of a messianic viewpoint. it's not obvious what revolution would mean---the term is getting redefined before our teevee-eyes in places like egypt.
democratic socialism is basically a politics of resource allocation.
at it's simplest, it centers on a full-employment economy as its central political objective.
democratic socialism does not seem to me to square real well with the national-security state.
at the same time, old-school democratic socialism is kind of problematic because of the changes in the geography of capitalist organization.
but as a general way of thinking about what kind of social system with captialism at or near its center is desirable and in seeing the state as a powerful mechanism for both directing resources in ways commensurate with those goals and for extending public power at the expense of the (non-accountable) private sector, it's a good orientation.
certainly more ethically sound and sustainable than the still-dominant neo-liberal lunacy has turned out to be.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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