The South African Civil Society Information Service

What Is Socialism?
6 Aug 2009

Brian Lehrer of WNYC, the largest public radio station in the United States, talks to Barbara Ehrenreich, author of thirteen books, including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. Ehrenreich is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Harpers, and the Progressive. She is a contributing writer to Time magazine.

They talk about "re-imagining socialism" after Ehrenreich contributed to a series of articles exploring the topic in The Nation magazine in March 2009. 

Find a transcript of their discussion below.

***

BRIAN LEHRER: What does the term (socialism) mean to you in a 2009 sense that you wrote this article for The Nation?

BARBARA EHRENREICH: Well here's what, you know, kind of mentally flummoxes me quite a bit about this. In 1848 when Marx and Engels were writing the Communist Manifesto, they thought that hey, you know, capitalism has been pretty nifty.

It really - you know - created all these factories, producing all this stuff. All we have to do now is get the workers to take over those quote "means of production" and divide/distribute things in a better way.

They thought the basic problems of not enough - of scarcity - had been solved by industrial capitalism.

Now, 200 or whatever it is years later, 150 years later...

BRIAN LEHRER: A new scarcity.

BARBARA EHRENREICH: Yeah, you look around and you say, no not only did industrial capitalism, not, you know, abolish - potentially abolish human need and scarcity, but its created new forms of scarcity because of the environmental destruction that has been going on.

And I don't just blame capitalism for the environmental destruction. I mean, Soviet style communism made a huge contribution to that.

BRIAN LEHRER: Terrible, worse, even worse on the environment.

BARBARA EHRENREICH: Okay, yeah. So that we're now ...  you know, the idea of socialism was well, let's just take things over - you know - and we'll run it in a better way.

Now you have to look around and say, "It's more than that. It's deeper than that."

We have to also go through some kind of like change in our lifestyle -- change in the way we live. This whole way of life is in question. Not just this financial system. 

BRIAN LEHRER: So listeners, if you are a self-defined socialist, this is your moment. Do you want to participate with Barbara Ehrenreich here in an exercise in re-imagining a new socialism for the new scarcity, for the environmental crisis, for the 21st century that we find ourselves in for the Obama era? ...

And you're obviously tough, Barbara, on the capitalists in your Nation magazine cover story, but you're also tough on socialists. Like you repeat the joke about the socialist economist who correctly predicted 11 out of the last three recessions.

Is that supposed to be a knock on consistent socialist pessimism about where things are at?

BARBARA EHRENREICH: Well yes, I heard it one way or another going back 30 years. "Capitalism is in crisis. I give it six months, etc., etc." 

And you know, capitalism is amazingly dynamic. It latches on to innovations like the whole high tech revolution. Then it got into this much more disastrous, you know, business of being fuelled by debt in the last fifteen years or so.

But, you know my feeling is, maybe it will come back -- you know, it can. It's done that  before. But right now, it's not working for us.

BRIAN LEHRER: And you say, more importantly than the 'stop clock' joke -- you say, socialists don't have a plan for dealing with this crisis. They don't.

BARBARA EHRENREICH: No. I mean I wish I could just reach into my pocket (inaudible) and say, "Look, I've got the whole thing figured out."

I don't.

But socialism is not about me or some other, you know, self-described socialist being smart enough to have such a plan. Socialism is just the idea that we all figure it out. You and me, you know, all of us, everybody listening. We all put our heads together.

And that's kind of a revolutionary idea, because we've been coasting along with the notion that the market takes care of everything -- and that allows people to be very passive.

BRIAN LEHRER: But then why don’t socialists, whoever these socialist leaders are, have a plan? Because after 70 years of being cast off into academia and maybe journalism or whatever, you know, 20 years now since the end of the Eastern Bloc and constant predictions that capitalism is on its last legs. Wouldn't socialist thinkers be bursting with alternatives to the corrupt version of capitalism that's now exploding?

BARBARA EHRENREICH: Can I quote you? "Corrupt version of capitalism" - excellent.

Yeah, I think there's been a lot going on. The people on the left and not everybody is a self-described socialist - you know - a lot of people would call themselves anarchists and feminists and all sorts of things. We've taken it as our role to try to improve things for people who are poor, for working class people within the capitalist system.

You know that just has always seemed to be, my job - it's look at poverty, look at the working poor -- what can be done about that?

Now, you know - wham - we did not expect capitalism to celebrate the 160th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, which was last year 2008, by shooting itself. This is a - shall we say - a real surprise

BRIAN LEHRER: Corrupt by the way, at least in the sense that those who are charge of the financial sector were able to get into the government and lobby the government sufficiently that the controls on decent leverage ratios and risk ratios were taken off in the last few years. 

And there is tape of this. The New York Times did an investigative report and actually came up with audio, some of which we played on here, all of which you can hear on their site that indicated an actual meeting of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2004 where the regulator said, "You know, if we allow all these credit default swops and all of that at the ratios that you're asking, there's going to be more risk.  Are you really prepared to take that risk?"

"Oh yes sir, we really think the economy can handle that risk." 

So, I mean who really made those decisions? It was such an inside the Wall Street kind of regulatory system - inside the Wall Street bank's regulatory system - that I don't think in that sense, corrupt is too strong a word.

You can find this page online at http://sacsis.org.za/site/article/159.19.