ABSTRACT
If I could add a second subtitle to my recent book, Economic Justice and Democracy: From Competition to Cooperation (Hahnel 2005), it would be “Speaking Truth to Ourselves.” The truth is that we did not do well in the twentieth century. By “we” I mean all who seek economic justice, economic democracy, and environmental preservation – both those of us who hope to eventually replace capitalism with a different system of economic cooperation to achieve those goals, and also those who accept a system dominated by corporations and driven my market forces, but seek to make it more humane. All of us – progressive activists and academics alike – have failed miserably over the past quarter century. While there was notable progress during the middle third of the twentieth century, it now appears that those few decades may have been an anomaly, not the trend we once so innocently presumed could be relied upon to continue. The truth is that after three decades of defeats, the progressive economic movement is arguably worse off at the beginning of the twenty-first century than it was at the beginning of the twentieth. Moreover, we have hastened many of our own defeats through misconceptions about capitalism, lack of clarity about what economic justice and economic democracy require, ill-conceived programs and strategies, and seriously flawed visions of more desirable alternatives. This chapter addresses three areas in which we need to shed debilitating misconceptions and develop a better understanding, namely: (1) the nature of the epic struggle we are engaged in, (2) the necessity as well as the pitfalls of organizing for economic reforms within capitalism, and (3) the importance as well as the limitations of “pre-figurative” organizing.
