What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk About The Next American Revolution, by Gar Alperovitz

This book, quite knowingly and intentionally, takes as its title a work from Trotsky advocating violent revolution in Russia, and uses it to support a “democratic” socialist approach in the United States that seeks to engage in deliberate Gramscian long march techniques to subvert American institutions, seeking an unconstitutional regionalist approach to planned economies that, the author vainly hopes, will be less ineffective than all the failed state socialist programs of the past. The author asks the reader, at the end, if someone does not support big corporate capitalism or state socialism–and for the record I support neither–what does one support? I will answer that question here, and give an answer that is nowhere found in this book: petit bourgeois capitalism focused on small private firms, widespread ownership and a high degree of personal freedom, with a resolute anti-Marxist attitude. This author, needless to say, studiously and intentionally avoids this beneficial solution, using the crony capitalism of left-leaning big businesses (whose general left-leaning and its massive problems for the well-being of people is not acknowledged or criticized as it ought to be) as a way of seeking to discredit capitalism as a whole, the author not seeing any capitalist approach that is not a rentier capitalism of large companies who seek to rule through politically dominated bureaucrats and elected but similarly captured politicians.

This book consists of a familiar approach on the part of the radical left when it comes to writing about proposed solutions to the widespread economic malaise of our time, and the general stagnation of the well-being of ordinary people. In the first part of the book, the author gives the bad news about the way things are. The author gives a discussion of expanding the Overton window of permissible discussion and gives a short introduction, then discusses how to detect systemic problems (1), points out the failures of conventional politics (2), comments on the lack of a Great Depression or World War II to provide a sense of crisis or mass unity to support big government in the vein of previous failed efforts at Progressive government (3), and looks at the fading power of traditional politics (4). The next part of the book looks at evolutionary change, with chapters about systems and what the author views as useful change (5), advice on how to think of system change (6), a praise of quiet examples of the growth of public ownership on the small scale (7), a discussion on worker ownership (8), and an attempt to redeem utopianism to discuss an ideal rather than something that is totally impractical (9). This is followed by a discussion of emergent municipal and state possibilities, such as the rejection of the invisible hand by those the author labels as conservatives (10), everyday socialism (11), and the author’s strategy for “checkerboard” strategies (12). After this, the author looks at banking (13), health care (14), a lack of countervailing power (15), and bigger possibilities for using crisis for progressive goals. The author spends a couple of chapters lambasting narrow-minded efficiency (17, 18), before finishing the book on his utopian (in the unrealistic way) views of a future America governed by the author’s progressive ideals, including a discussion of what he views as an emerging historical context (19), how to make progress despite the unlikelihood of the Great Depression’s misery happening again (20), the likelihood of economic stagnation for the medium term at least (21), and the author’s highly selective and biased view of the logic of our time in history and the author’s attempts to see almost inevitable victory for the left (22). After this the author ends with a conclusion (23), afterword, acknowledgements, notes, and an index.

Given the popularity of “democratic” socialism by those who are ignorant of the history of socialism and its practice as well as the fundamental reasons why it is that redistribution and efforts at mass public ownership tend to inevitably fail, it is worth pondering the failures of the author’s ideals and the reason why the author deliberately suppresses the petit bourgeois option. The author wants to present some form of socialism as the only alternative to the domination of the economic and political spheres by wealthy and corrupt elites, ignoring the possibilities of widespread private ownership on a roughly egalitarian level that nonetheless preserves the motivations for people to work hard and grow–the author is virulently anti-growth, it should be noted. Instead of seeking a world where people have widespread personal ownership and where property rights are expanded in ways that serve to benefit ordinary people, the author wants a future where there is the illusion of democracy in the form of worker ownership of the means of production but a soft control of workers (to say nothing of those who do not work and are supported by some sort of minimum income welfare system and socialized medicine regime) by a technocratic elite including the author and other fellow travelers of his ilk. The fact that the author titles his work after a Trotsky book indicates that this author wants the United States to have its own Russian Revolution, one where Trotsky instead of Stalin succeeds in taking power. As is generally the case on earth, leftist revolutionaries talk big rhetoric about making heaven a place on earth but only succeed in making this earth into a miserable hell where the only people who are able to escape death, imprisonment, and stagnation, and the soul-destroying life of a totalitarian state are those people who are in charge of the gulag.