• Media type: E-Article
  • Title: What Is Socialism for the Twenty-First Century?
  • Contributor: Lebowitz, Michael A.
  • Published: Monthly Review Foundation, 2016
  • Published in: Monthly Review, 68 (2016) 5, Seite 26
  • Language: Not determined
  • DOI: 10.14452/mr-068-05-2016-09_3
  • ISSN: 0027-0520
  • Origination:
  • Footnote:
  • Description: Often the best way to begin to understand something is to consider what it is not. Socialism for the twenty-first century is not a society in which people sell their ability to work and are directed from above by others whose goal is profits rather than the satisfaction of human needs. It is not a society where the owners of the means of production benefit by dividing workers and communities in order to drive down wages and intensify work…. Nor is it a statist society where decisions are top-down and where all initiative is the property of state office-holders or cadres of self-reproducing vanguards.… Also, socialism for the twenty-first century is not populism.… Further, socialism for the twenty-first century is not totalitarianism.… [S]ocialism for the twenty-first century does not dictate personal belief…. Nor does socialism for the twenty-first century worship technology and productive forces…. Finally, contrary to its self-proclaimed inventor (Heinz Dieterich), socialism for the twenty-first century is not "essentially a problem of informatic complexity" that requires cybernetic calculation of quantities of concrete labor as the basis for an exchange of equivalents.&hellp; So, let us explain what socialism for the twenty-first century is. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.
  • Access State: Open Access