Power of socialism

From Ercan Gundogan, A Theory of Capitalist Society and Social Dialectics, (2011 December, Lap Lambert), pp:429-31

Socialism is a political force when it has its own parties, organizations and intellectual productivity. It is still in the memory of the past generations who struggle for socialism before the dissolution of the socialist systems during 1980s. It is the heritage of the “really existing socialism” of the past. More or less, all capitalist countries keep socialism in this level, as a passive line in political life. Socialist and communists parties in the parliaments cannot be seen as revolutionary parties until a revolutionary uprising emerges in the future.

Socialism becomes a social force only when working masses and intellectuals create an organised revolutionary power. Their political strategies may carry the characteristics of anarchism, Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, Euro-communism or post-Marxism or a variant of them.

Transition from the former stage to the latter one is the question of today’s socialist politics. As in the past, the task is to create and mobile organised holistic struggles to supersede capitalist contradictory relations. Marxist theory as a whole have provided the knowledge of the whole of capitalist social relations with their roots, developments, metamorphoses, interconnections and more importantly, their borders and influence areas, as this study has tried to demonstrate.

Marxist theory is a social theory which covers economic, political and ideological analyses in time and space, in other words, history and geography. It is specialised over the study of social contradictions and their supersession all.

Social relations, according to our analysis, can be dissolved into root contradictory relations such as worker-capitalist, man-woman, human-nature, and ruler and ruled, which are nothing but the establishment of host-alien relations as we named them in the different spheres of social relations, which are simultaneously lived. However, social division of labour creates different spheres of specializations. Capitalist, political and bureaucratic rulers and ideologues respectively correspond to workers, citizens and their practice based local thoughts. The strategic fact for socialist strategy is the simultaneity of social relations despite the changes in identities and contradictory parties corresponding to each other in different spheres. Worker is also a citizen; a ruled one although capitalist is not a politician and bureaucrat. While worker appears in a different identity in political life, capitalist cooperates with political-bureaucratic community for it to realize political domination over citizen workers besides its economic domination it realizes in his/her workplace.

Another strategic fact for socialist struggle is the territories and borders of economic, political and ideological spheres. As our diagram above (p: 144) represents, economy has its own sphere to which politics does not penetrate. It is pure spheres of capital relation and civil society. Next to those spheres comes the political sphere which is operated and dominated by the political-bureaucratic community being responsible for ruling and governing functions. The state seems to be the area of political economy simply due to its tax base, financial sources, investments, subsidies, transfer payments and other public expenditures such as its personnel salaries. However, this political economy is rather political in that political sphere is responsible for ruling the citizens and governing itself. Its economic and ideological functions are not pure economic and ideological, but politically oriented and functional. When capital relations (in the economic sphere) and bourgeois mode of thinking (in the ideological sphere) smoothly operate, the state with its political and bureaucratic community leaves those additional functions to their real owners and as liberals always demand, it is shrank and reduced  to a “limited” or “minimal”  governmental level. Currently, this shrinking process is realised by neo-liberal “economic” policies through deregulations, empowered autonomy of the central banks and privatisations for the state to realise its “authentic” works.