The Revolution Has Already Occurred

Note from The Nation editors: Socialism's all the rage. "We Are All Socialists Now,"Newsweek
declares. As the right wing tells it, we're already living in the
U.S.S.A. But what do self-identified socialists (and their progressive
friends) have to say about the global economic crisis? We hope that
Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher Jr.'s "Reimagining Socialism: Rising to the Occasion will kick off a spirited dialogue. Four replies are featured in this issue, with more to come at TheNation.com.

Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher write mournfully that there was
supposed to be a revolution--but there was and is a revolution, just not
one that looks the way socialists and a lot of '60s radicals imagined
it. The Sandinista revolution thirty years ago may well have been the
last of its kind. The revolutions that have mattered since have been
less interested in seizing and becoming the state than circumventing it
to go straight to becoming other people doing other things without state
permission. The fifteen-year-old Zapatista revolution, which never
sought state power and (though badgered constantly) was never defeated,
is the revolution for our times, or really only the most dramatic of
countless thousands involving Native Americans and Indian farmers and
South African cooperatives and Argentinian workplaces and European
utopian communities.

In the United States the most obvious realm in which this has transpired
is food and farming. Organic, urban, community-assisted and guerrilla
agriculture are still small parts of the picture, but effective ones--a
revolt against what transnational corporate food and capitalism
generally produce. This revolt is taking place in the vast open space of
Detroit, in the inner-city farms of West Oakland, in the victory gardens
and public-housing of Alemany Farm in San Francisco, in Growing Power in
Milwaukee and many other places around the country. These are blows
against alienation, poor health, hunger and other woes fought with
shovels and seeds, not guns. At its best, tending one's garden leads to
tending one's community and policy, and ultimately becomes a way of
entering the public sphere rather than withdrawing from it.

"Do we have a plan, people?" Ehrenreich and Fletcher ask. We have
thousands of them, being carried out quite spectacularly over the past
few decades, for gardens and childcare co-ops and bicycle lanes and
farmers' markets and countless ways of doing things differently and
better. The underlying vision is neither state socialist nor corporate
capitalist, but something humane, local and accountable--anarchist,
basically, as in direct democracy. The revolution exists in little bits
everywhere, but not much has been done to connect its dots. We need to
say that there are alternatives being realized all around us and
theorize the underlying ideals and possibilities. But we need to start
from the confidence that the revolution has been with us for a while and
is succeeding in bits and pieces. Enlarged and clarified, it could
answer a lot of the urgent needs the depression brings.

If anarchists and neoliberals had one thing in common, it was an
interest in shrinking the state that socialists hoped would solve
things. Right now nothing but that state exists on a scale to drag us
back out of what the corporations and international markets dragged us
into, but one of the questions for the long term is about scale. Small
isn't always beautiful, but big beyond accountability or comprehension
got crazy as well as ugly.

Other Contributions to the Forum

Immanuel Wallerstein, "Follow Brazil's Example."
Bill McKibben, "Together, We Save the Planet."
Tariq Ali, "Capitalism's Deadly Logic."