Page 133 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

seldom if ever attracts any comment. Nor is there any exploration of the
problematic achievements of the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation
4
(MCC) in the Basque country. There is no reference either to the well-
known work of scholars such as Roemer and Schweickart on the devel-
opment of socialist alternatives to capitalism in the light of the failures of
the Soviet model of socialism. 5
This strange neglect may be explained by the attitude of anti-globalization
thinkers to reject the experience of any form of explicit socialism as irrel-
evant and precisely what they wish to avoid when they attempt to develop
an alternative to globalization. As Cavanagh writes:

Both [capitalism and state socialism] centralized the power of ownership in
unaccountable institutions, the state in the case of socialism and the cor-
poration in the case of capitalism. Both worked against the classic liberal
economic ideal of self-organizing markets—markets in which communities
organize themselves to respond to the local needs within a framework of
democratically determined rules. 6

Such a position may or may not be acceptable but in any event does not
answer the point raised here. The reason is that the abortive reforms
attempted in state socialist regimes were precisely an attempt, however
half-hearted and fraught with insurmountable contradictions, to move
away from the state aspects of state socialism and to make some kind of
space for local autonomy and market relations ‘of the classical liberal eco-
nomic ideal’. One would therefore have thought that a clear-headed eval-
uation of this experience – after all, the only concrete one in which various
alternatives to capitalism were attempted – would provide some invalu-
able lessons for the anti-globalization movement, of both a theoretical and
practical nature.
Even if the experience of state socialist regimes is deemed irrelevant,
the same cannot be said of the experience with the Popular Front regime
in France between 1936–37 or with the Allende regime in Chile of the
1970s. In both cases, alternative economic arrangements were attempted
by regimes which could hardly be characterized as state socialist and in
both cases the reforms culminated in collapse, disaster for the popular
forces and the capture of power by the extreme Right. Surely such expe-
riences, while no doubt having their unique aspects, have much to tell us
not only about the economic feasibility of the alternatives to corporate
globalization but about the politics of such a process as well. A careful
reflection on the critiques contained in the works of Nove, Sutela or
Caldwell, for example, might more than repay the effort. 7

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