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The Socialist Imperative
In a little more than a decade, economist Michael A. Lebowitz has written several major works about the transition from socialism to Beyond Capital(winner of the Deutscher Prize), Build It Now, The Socialist Alternative, and The Contradictions of “Real Socialism.” Here, he develops and deepens the analysis contained in those pathbreaking works by tracing major issues in socialist thought from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first.
Lebowitz explores the obvious but almost universally ignored fact that as human beings work together to produce society’s goods and services, we also “produce” something namely, ourselves. Human beings are shaped by circumstances, and any vision of socialism that ignores this fact is bound to fail, or, at best, reproduce the alienation of labor that is endemic to capitalism. But how can people transform their circumstances in a way that allows them to re-organize production and, at the same time, fulfill their human potential? Lebowitz sets out to answer this question first by examining Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, and from there investigates the experiences of the Soviet Union and more recent efforts to build socialism in Venezuela. He argues that socialism in the twenty-first century must be animated by a central vision, in three social ownership of the means of production, social production organized by workers, and the satisfaction of communal needs and communal purposes. These essays repay careful reading and reflection, and prove Lebowitz to be one of the foremost Marxist thinkers of this era.
Lebowitz explores the obvious but almost universally ignored fact that as human beings work together to produce society’s goods and services, we also “produce” something namely, ourselves. Human beings are shaped by circumstances, and any vision of socialism that ignores this fact is bound to fail, or, at best, reproduce the alienation of labor that is endemic to capitalism. But how can people transform their circumstances in a way that allows them to re-organize production and, at the same time, fulfill their human potential? Lebowitz sets out to answer this question first by examining Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, and from there investigates the experiences of the Soviet Union and more recent efforts to build socialism in Venezuela. He argues that socialism in the twenty-first century must be animated by a central vision, in three social ownership of the means of production, social production organized by workers, and the satisfaction of communal needs and communal purposes. These essays repay careful reading and reflection, and prove Lebowitz to be one of the foremost Marxist thinkers of this era.
- GenresPolitics
224 pages, Paperback
First published July 22, 2015
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229 people want to read
About the author
Michael A. Lebowitz
22 books20 followersMichael Lebowitz is professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and the author of several books including The Socialist Imperative, The Contradictions of “Real Socialism,” and The Socialist Alternative. He was Director, Program in Transformative Practice and Human Development, Centro Internacional Miranda, in Caracas, Venezuela, from 2006-11.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 14, 2024
Most of the pieces in here are bangers, a couple are so-so - overall I definitely want to check out Lebowitz' work more, I resonated a lot with his framing of socialist consciousness and the necessity of being both in and outside the state.
August 13, 2015
Michael Lebowitz has, in his past few books, shared a most interesting argument for protagonism - taking back democracy and building community once again from the ground up through 'revolutionary practice.'
"The commune form represented the destruction of centralized state power insofar as that state stands above society. Marx called it “the reabsorption of the state power by society as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it, by the popular masses themselves, forming their own force instead of the organised force of their suppression – the political form of their social emancipation.” With the conversion of the state “from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it,” self-governing producers thus wield the state for their own purposes, continuously changing both circumstances and themselves."
"The commune form represented the destruction of centralized state power insofar as that state stands above society. Marx called it “the reabsorption of the state power by society as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it, by the popular masses themselves, forming their own force instead of the organised force of their suppression – the political form of their social emancipation.” With the conversion of the state “from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it,” self-governing producers thus wield the state for their own purposes, continuously changing both circumstances and themselves."
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February 26, 2016335 L449 2015
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews