So in this struggle to ask yourself what life would be like if you were in the first kind
of society (a socialism a la Scandinavia) versus the next kind of socialism (the communist
variety as you had it in Russia and China), working people, you and I, would have to ask
what would life be like in that kind of arrangement?
We don't have mass unemployment, we have government services on a scale we don't in other society
and we have economic growth.
But we also have the uncertainties, the instabilities and the concentration of power that might
be a problem.
Now let's ask what the third kind of socialism would mean for us, a socialism that focused
on the enterprise and the workplace more than on the overall running of the society.
What would it mean for you and I to go to work every day, 5 days a week 9-5, and walk
into a place where we don't just have a particular assigned function, do this, work there with
that machine, do this activity.
We would have a particular function but we would also be part of what owns and operates
the enterprise.
We would have to be a leader, not a choice.
Just as it's not a choice for most people to go to work and do the particular function
at the job, you would not have a choice here either in the sense that a job also means
both a particular activity within the division of labor at your workplace but also your participation
in making all of the basic decisions; what to produce, how to produce, where to produce,
and what to do with the profits that you helped to produce, just like every other worker.
You'd be part of a community, at the workplace.
You'd have 1 vote for each person.
Decisions would be made democratically.
The design of the work, the pace of the work, how you interact with other people on the
job, all of those things would be decided collectively and not imposed by a minority.
You'd have to think is that a better way to work?
Is that kind of workplace something that has attracted people for centuries to co-ops,
to worker co-ops, to collective forms of labor.
What does it mean in your own life?
I think the idea of this third socialism is to achieve something in your daily life that
the other two socialisms never did.
That when the first kind had the government regulation or the second kind (the communist
kind) had the government take over, the transformation of the workplace never happened.
You were still the worker who comes and does what he or she is told for the 8 hours and
then goes home.
This is a new world, this third kind of socialism.
That's why it's probably the one you're gonna hear most about in the years ahead, cause
it is new and it doesn't have quite the problems that the other ones do.
But here are some problems that the new one will have too.
How do these worker co-ops, these communities in each factory, in each store, in each office,
how do they interact with one another?
Will they use markets to buy and sell from one another?
Will they employ some kind of collective planning of how they interact with one another?
It will be a new world, this socialism, because it is composed of people who are really in
charge of their economic lives in a way that was never true under capitalism and not true
under other forms of socialism either because they were focused on running the system on
the overall and not on the particular in each workplace.
We'll have to discover in this new socialism, if and when it happens, how we interact with
one another when all the details of the work are collectively designed.
When everybody is a boss as well as a bossed person.
When we rotate whatever particular functions have to be in leadership so that we don't
get one group that are leaders all the time and everybody else who isn't.
All of those things will change.
We will have to learn new ways of interacting with one another.
But if they idea of socialism really is, as it was once said it would be, to go beyond
capitalism, to do better than capitalism, we'll then that third one is by far the most
transformative for peoples lives, of the three that are contesting.