Thanks for bringing this issue up, lagatta. A lot of socialist thought and socialist movements have forgotten some of the bases on which they're founded. Socialism or socialist democracy is both a means and an end. I think this is one of the reasons Cuba is sooo confusing for people. The same goes with labour and social movements, left parties, and co-operatives.
There's a lot of ignorance about the Commune. A lot of the Commune's principles could be pretty easily applied to virtually any of our movements -- no property qualification for suffrage, representatives earning the average wage of a skilled worker, the right to recall of representatives. Suffrage for women was one of the Commune's major faults.
Unfortunately many kneejerk Leftists don't ackowledge the importance of these issues, and take any criticism of large salaries of labour officials or democratic demands advanced by the political Right as direct attacks on the Left. Unions would be much more representative if leaders earned the average wage of their members rather than the highest.
Around the issue of Utopian socialism and co-operatives I've had to rethink some of my ideas. I'm engaged with a couple of co-ops at the moment, and rather than seeing them as distraction, we should see them as points of engagement. It's amazing what work people will do when they do work of intrinsic value rather than as a wage slave.
Charles Fourier's plans around organizing labour seem correct -- some people like to clean, some like to make things, some like to care for others, some like to be inside or outside, etc. Labour according to desire makes sense.
At the co-ops I'm involved, people self select what they want to do, are able to do, or want to learn to do. Bureaucraatic organization is kept to a minimum and the work gets done. Natural creativity isn't stifled, it is directed by formal or informal collective discussion.
During the blackout of 2003, it was amazing how people just assumed roles of responsibility. The police were moot.
The other dimension that I think is tremendously important is the role of gender. Women were the unappointed vanguard forces during episodes of socialist democracy, even if their role was not admitted. Women were key to the numerous French Revolutions and to the Russian Revolution. Women have been key to maintaining semblances of cooperation, collectivity, and organization according to need and not for profit.
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posted 28 September 2005 02:06 PM
