by DOUG ENAA GREENE
The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now by Michael A. Lebowitz, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015, 264 pages
Those who open Michael Lebowitz’s new book, The Socialist Imperative, will find something far different and refreshing than the old apologetic Soviet manuals on the smooth workings of a planned economy. What they will discover is a collection of writings inspired by Lebowitz’s lifetime of activism and profound solidarity with the oppressed and exploited under capitalism and his revolutionary vision of how to build a socialist alternative.
Lebowitz takes seriously questions of what it takes to build a new socialist order that doesn’t just repeat the mistakes of the past. His other books, such as The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development and The Contradictions of Real Socialism: the Conductor and the Conducted, and this one deserve engagement from committed socialists and revolutionaries.
The purpose of Michael Lebowitz’s book is explained by his title choice — The Socialist Imperative. As Lebowitz argues, the pressing need to eliminate capitalism and replace it with a “society of associated free producers oriented to the full development of human potential” is not new, but is needed because of capital’s drive to expand without limit threatens the destruction of the natural world. This means that the need to act is immediate. Certainly with the crushing crisis of capitalism and ecological disaster in the not too distant future, the time is coming when to act may be too late.
The book itself is a collection of 11 essays by Lebowitz that cover a number of themes, only a few of which I will discuss here: Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, the problems of “real socialism” in the USSR, market self-management in Yugoslavia, and efforts to build socialism in Venezuela. Although Lebowitz has written on all these points before, it is still useful to find them succinctly collected here. I was pleased to find that Lebowitz addresses in detail questions that I have had about his previous work, such as the role of the party in building socialism.
The Gotha Programme
Lebowitz’s second chapter deals with both the historical moment led that Marx to write his Critique of the Gotha Programme and how subsequent socialists have misinterpreted it. The historical context of the Gotha Programme is well known. In 1875 the two wings of German socialism, “Lassalleans” and “Eisenachers” (the former non-Marxist), created a unified party known as the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which by the turn of the 20th century was the largest political party in the country. Both Marx and Engels took objection to a number of programmatic concessions that their followers had made to the Lassalleans on subjects such as the iron law of wages, internationalism, the lack of social demands, the role of the state and the post-capitalist period. However, since the real unity of socialists in Germany was a real step forward for the movement, both Marx and Engels kept their criticisms to themselves (not until 1891 did Engels publicly release Marx’s notes on the Gotha Programme).