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Published March 25, 2022
In the United States, the term “socialism” has been widely misunderstood and used to discredit even modest reforms. To enhance understanding of socialism’s successes and failures, and its relationship to human rights, experts from universities from around the country will come together for a hybrid symposium on April 7 at UB.
The annual Alison Des Forge Symposium will explore achievements and missteps in implementing socialism in China, India, Scandinavia and Latin America. It will also weigh socialism’s value in addressing global challenges of climate change, economic inequality and human rights abuses.
Presenters will include Robert Pollin, professor of economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Lane Kenworthy, professor of sociology, University of California San Diego; and Kenneth Roberts, professor of government, Cornell University.
The free, public event will take place from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. (lunch break: 11:30-12:30) April 7. Registration is required. Email dussourd@buffalo.edu to sign up. Sessions will be held in 10 Capen Hall at UB for those attending in person.
The symposium honors the memory of Alison L. Des Forges, a member of the UB community who fought to call the world’s attention to another great humanitarian crisis: the genocide in Rwanda.
Des Forges, an internationally known historian and Buffalo native, was an adjunct member of the UB history faculty during the 1990s and received a SUNY honorary doctorate during UB’s 155th general commencement ceremony in 2001.
She was one of the world’s leading experts on Rwanda, serving as an expert witness in 11 trials at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Her award-winning book, “Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda,” was a landmark account of the 1994 genocide, and her tireless efforts to awaken the international community to its horrors earned her a MacArthur Fellowship in 1999.
The symposium will open with welcoming remarks at 9:15 a.m., followed by panels on “Understanding Socialism: Achievements and Missteps,” “Socialism as a Response to Global Problems” and “Socialism and Human Rights.”
The Understanding Socialism panel will run from 9:30-11:30 a.m. and will include the following presentations:
Distinction between socialism in theory and in practice must be marked when discussing the concept of socialism. This talk will feature China as the main case study in discussing how socialist ideas were implemented in a specific historical context and the resulting contradictions. Additionally, after more than four decades of neoliberal dominance in the global economy, interest in socialist ideas seems to be on the rise in the world, especially among young people, including in China. In light of this recent development, this talk will offer some reflections on the possible contradictions for future socialism.
Two states in India have had fairly prolonged rule by socialist/communist parties: West Bengal (for 35 years) and Kerala (intermittently over the past half century and currently). There are obvious difficulties in implementing socialist policies in a sub-national federal context, where most economic and political powers remain with the (typically antagonistic) central government. Nevertheless, the different experiences in the two states reveal some of the possibilities and problems of socialist strategies, which have special relevance in the 21st century. Some of the problems that emerged have much wider resonance, such as the rigidity of bureaucratic structures, lack of recognition of other forms of discrimination than those based on class, continued exploitation of nature and reliance on the support of large capital to achieve economic development. Some experiences also point to the possibilities of creative solutions, such as the emphasis on decentralization, new forms of promoting democratic accountability, recognition of social discrimination, etc.
The case for a modern democratic socialism is that capitalism is bad, or at least not very good, and that socialism would be an improvement. To fully and fairly assess democratic socialism’s desirability, we need to compare it to the best version of capitalism that humans have devised: social democratic capitalism, or what is often called the Nordic model. Kenworthy will take a close look at the evidence about how capitalist economies have performed on an array of outcomes, concluding that social democratic capitalism achieves most of what contemporary democratic socialists say we should want.
The Socialism as a Response to Global Problems panel will run from 12:30-1:50 p.m. and will include the following presentations:
Advancing a global Green New Deal is the focus of this lecture. This is a realistic program for both advancing climate stabilization and egalitarianism on a global basis. It therefore is fully aligned with the main aims of eco-socialism. The program begins with phasing out, on a global scale, the consumption of fossil fuels to produce energy. It correspondingly entails creating a new clean energy infrastructure in all regions of the globe. The clean energy investments will be a large-scale source of new job opportunities, and thus of also raising job-quality standards and organizing efforts. The program also includes just transition measures for the workers and communities that currently depend on the fossil fuel industry.
Socialism, like capitalism, constantly changes. Over the past century socialism mostly meant varying kinds and degrees of government intervention in economies ranging from regulating them (Scandinavia) to having the government replace private owners and operators of enterprises (USSR). That socialism had successes but also failures and problems. The resulting self-criticism generated a new kind of socialism that refocuses not on the government versus private debate, but rather toward a radical democratization of workplaces (factories, stores, offices). This new socialism for the 21st century advocates transition to worker coops as the basis of economies instead of the typical capitalist hierarchy where a tiny minority number of “owners” or corporate boards of directors decided — exclusively — what, how and where the workplace produces and what is to be done with its revenues. Then all persons engaged in the workplace will each have one vote with majority rule governing. The basic idea is that to make an economy serve all the people, one needs to put the people in charge of its workplaces and processes.
The Socialism and Human Rights panel will run from 2-3:20 p.m. and include the following presentations:
The early decades of the 21st century have seen 14 of Latin America’s 18 democracies elect a left-of-center president, many of them from parties or movements with roots in the region’s socialist tradition. This so-called “left turn” is a product of widespread social and political mobilization against the economic inequalities associated with Latin America’s free market, or “neoliberal” economic restructuring in the 1980s and 1990s. Although it has proven to be exceedingly difficult to translate this mobilization into well-defined socialist alternatives to neoliberalism, Latin America’s leftist governments have experimented with a wide range of social reforms intended to recognize or expand social citizenship rights, going well beyond the market-based programs of the neoliberal era. These experiments shed new light on the processes by which democratic citizenship rights can be extended to new spheres of social and economic relationships in highly unequal societies with large informal economies and dualistic labor markets.
The desire for an economic system that advances social justice motivates demands for a transition to socialism. Yet the ethical foundations of a call for socialism are often not well developed or explored. There is frequently an assumption that all proponents of socialism share a common understanding of what is meant by social justice. Yet this assumption is questionable. The human rights approach represents a normative framework for evaluating economic outcomes and institutions that incorporates an explicit definition of social justice. However, the human rights framework is frequently dismissed as being too individualistic and reformist. This mistrust of human rights represents a misunderstanding of the radical potential of this approach. In this presentation, Heintz will explore the relationship between human rights, with an emphasis on economic and social rights, and the relationship to concepts of socialism.
Symposium sponsors include the Alison Des Forges Memorial Committee; UB departments of Comparative Literature, History, Political Science and Africana and African-American Studies; UB Gender Institute; UB Humanities Institute; James Agee Chair in American Culture, UB Department of English; UB Office of the Vice Provost for International Education, The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, UB School of Law; and Jack Walsh in honor of Connie Walsh.