SL: Are you concerned at all about a crisis of ideas on the left? One segment of the left seems to be pushing for a return to the Keynesian welfare state, which characterized the social democracies following WWII and to a lesser extent the U.S. And, on the other hand, you have those focusing very specifically on local struggles and less on a wholesale, systemic agenda for transformation. Does it concern you that there aren't ideas currently in circulation that really would be able to address this crisis?
DM: Yes... There's a danger that ... those who are speaking to what we may call systemic alternatives are really trying to do that in Keynesian terms. That is to say they are really imagining that we can go back to, say 1940s, 1950s, early 1960s styles of capitalism with much more regulation. ... I think that it does not address the world in which we live. It's just a dead end for the left. ...
The danger then is that the alternative is seen as a certain kind of local activism, and believe me, I'm a big believer in digging in and ... building resistance movements where we are ... But I think we ... actually squander certain opportunities right now if we're not putting forward a wider anticapitalist systemic approach. In other words, raising issues about:
- how an economy might be reorganized,
- how global relations between North and South might be reorganized,
- popularizing ideas like social ownership, workers' self-managed production, the reduced work-week across the board,
- the redistribution of wealth from North to South,
- the green economy, and so on
[T]hat discussion is clearly happening in other parts of the world. The statement by the World Social Movement's meeting in Brazil as part of the World Social Forum was very much exactly to that point. They are trying to move toward that kind of analysis and perspective. But I think in North America in particular we've tended to lag behind. I think the Latin American movements are ahead of us on that in particular. I think the activist left in some of the European countries, particularly France, are ahead of us on that.
[L]ocal activism is crucial because that's where you build the actual resistance movements of the day, but at the same time this is a moment for the really serious left to think on a much wider scale as to how to begin to popularize alternative economics and anticapitalist forms of organization. Because this is an opportunity where we don't want our voices to be either lost because we're only doing the local activism or to be speaking in the outmoded language of Keynesianism.
In that sense, the slogan which has come out of Venezuela about a socialism for the twenty-first century seems to me to be more urgent than ever before. It's an opportunity to really redefine socialism and anticapitalism in terms of its original democratic commitments and its internationalist commitments. I think there's a lot of space for that if we can figure out how to do it.
