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Reviewed by:
  • The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development
  • Ingo Schmidt
Michael A Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development (New York: Monthly Review Press 2010)

Inspired by Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution, Lebowitz advocates a kind of socialism less focused on the development of the material forces of production than on real human development. His starting point is the “socialist triangle” that Venezuela’s president Chavez began promoting after his re-election in 2006. This triangle represents “the combination of social property, social production, and (the) satisfaction of social needs.” (24) Lebowitz discusses the three sides of this triangle in the first part of his book and concludes that their implementation would lead to conditions where the “simultaneous process of the changing of circumstances and self-change creates rich human beings as the joint product of productive activity.” (81) It is important to note that Lebowitz doesn’t equate “rich” with individuals amassing plenty of stuff or money but with a society in which, in the words of the Communist Manifesto, the “free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” In the second part of the book, “Building the Socialist Triangle,” Lebowitz makes it clear that the “Socialist Alternative” he suggests is not only an alternative to capitalism but also to the actually existing socialisms of the 20th century.

Drawing on Marx’s early work in the Grundrisse on alienation and the critique of the capitalist division of labour, Lebowitz explains that human development is not about individuals pursuing their self-interest but about the development of human capacities, in which individuals self-organize the collective production of their lives. He distinguishes this concept of human development from the well-known concepts of Amartya Sen. For Sen, human development is all about creating a level playing field without transcending the focus on individual self-interest. Self-interest, together with the division of labour between “thinking and doing,” or, for that matter, “manual and mental labour,” lies at the core of alienation and passivity of the vast majority of workers who are subjected to the rule of a small group of owners of the means of production who, as owners, also decide what workers have to do and how they must do it. Following Marx, Lebowitz succinctly shows how capitalist relations of production lead to a degradation of labour and alienation among workers, which ultimately produce a sense of powerlessness, passivity, and cynicism.

He extends this critique to the Soviet Union where private ownership was [End Page 357] replaced by state ownership without giving workers a say in planning and managing the production processes, so that the capitalist division between thinking and doing, with all its detrimental effects on workers’ engagement, was reproduced in the name of socialism and workers’ power. Under these conditions, Soviet leaders used material incentives to increase productivity. Yet, as Lebowitz argues, “material self-interest points backwards! It points back toward capitalism.” (109) From this angle, it is quite understandable why Soviet communism eventually collapsed and why workers did nothing to defend a system claiming to represent their interests. He extends this line of critique to Yugoslavia, whose worker-managed firms were sometimes seen as an alternative to the Soviet dictatorship of the politburo. And while it is undeniably true that socialism in Yugoslavia was less heavy-handed than its Soviet counterpart, it also suffered from a focus on self-interest because capitalism’s private property was replaced by some kind of group property, in which the workers owning one firm would compete against those owning another firm. Individual competition in the marketplace was thus replaced by competition among groups of workers. In the face of these competitive struggles, the state proved increasingly unable to articulate and pursue any interests going beyond income maximization of individual firms, for example redistributing resources from richer to poorer regions.

Lebowitz uses the Soviet and Yugoslavian experiences to support his theoretical argument that socialism requires a complete overhaul of the division of labour inherited from capitalism. In order to do this, it is key to connect workplaces and communities, and to expand the commons that include public health care, education, and utilities. To acquire the economic...

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