Socialism with Sober Senses: Developing Worker's Capacities

Abstract

Recent waves of protests, encompassing a broad range of countries and led by the working class, seem to suggest that there is a new basis for socialist renewal. And yet to see in these developments the seeds of a socialist reawakening is to express a hope, not an argument. Socialists have played a role in this revival of militancy, but that role has been based on their credibility as individual militants rather than as socialists (even if, over the years, it was their socialism that inspired and sustained that militancy). As exciting and crucial as the new level of resistance is, there is still nothing in its scope which convincingly suggests that the working class will go beyond resistance to transform capitalism. The best we can argue is that the resistance which capitalism engenders leaves the door ajar to the possibility of socialism.