David North's opening speech to May Day 2015: Socialism and the Struggle Against War

II.

“The "Stalinists"? I assume you mean the Russians.” No, I mean the bureaucratic stratum that arose in the USSR and found is spokesman in Stalin and his interiors form Khrushchev to Brezhnev and the Communist Parties that were instruments of their foreign interests.
Yes, they have and despite their problems, they don't have to wait in lines for toilet paper. “‘The essence of a socialist society is the planned control of the economy by the producers themselves’ “Democracy tolerates chaos. Planned economics is not freedom, nor is it wise, because ultimately only the planners will have control, not every individual worker. What are you going to do? Consult every worker in the country about a trade agreement? Can't work. Not in the U.S. or countries with millions of people.”

The great Marxist Rosa Luxemberg argued that most early class society’s (Egypt, Sumer) were planned, for what it’s worth. Does the market create democracy in Athens? Probably It creates the wealthy peasant who demands his participation in the state.

Some degree of planning is essential to all mass societies, certainly to modern capitalist ones, and Bourgeois democracy in the classical period of the rise of capitalist tolerated democracy. Monopoly capitalism in its imperialist phase, which is the only kind of capitalism you get now, cannot tolerate democracy, and missions of American are quite aware that is it is visibly disintegrating. Constitutional protections mean less and less (done assassination, indefinite detention mass surveillance), the police are militarized, and, in spite of the recent appeals court decision, mass surveillance will continue because you cannot have 1 percent of the population owning 40 percent of the wealth without some reaction by millions of working people. The state knows that.

Look, socialism is not established overnight. The day after a revolution, there will be an administrative apparatus that regulates a workers-state controlled nationalized an planned sector. Not all of the economy will state-controlled and it will surely not want to eliminate the market, for say, the chain of laundromats or the pizza parlor, or, in parts of the world where there is still a peasantry (Pakistan) small-scale land ownership.

I say this with some reservation because socialists do not have blueprints. These decisions are up to the democratic will of an informed working class public. But there is such a thing as a socialist program and this more-or-less what we advocate. I can see no reason why an ideal state apparatus cannot be under the control of the democratic will of the working class. The USSR is no example, and in any case, the victory of a bureaucracy that acted in its own interests arose in very specific historical circumstances. And it was not inevitable. Trotsky’s Left Opposition had a considerable following among workers and intellectuals, and there was no guarantee that soviet democracy and control over economic planning would be crushed.

Most of human existence has not included much that we would recognize as a market. Why is that the final fate of humanity?

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