Belden cooking communally for a People’s Alliance for Central America (PACA) event
What are we to make of the current horrors of a globally ascendent authoritarianism, an authoritarianism bred in the toxic soil of neoliberalism and the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Latin America that sent desperate migrants knocking on the United States’ and Western Europe’s doors? Arguably these developments support longstanding arguments that late capitalism’s trajectory is ultimately incompatible with democracy as well as with a state’s ability to provide for the material needs of all its citizenry. This is the barbarism before us, but given how this brand of barbarism also ignores the existential climate crisis, it is not just barbarous but apocalyptic in its implications.
Belden Fields was someone who believed that there was an alternative to capitalism, an alternative that he identified as democratic socialism. Belden did not always wear his socialist perspective on his sleeve, a stance that any good organizer in contemporary America is wise to adopt. Indeed, I am sure there are many in our community, including many who worked with him in the multiple social justice campaigns he engaged in, who had no idea of this aspect of his identity. Even I, who worked with Belden in two socialist-identified organizations, never had a full-blown, in-depth conversation with him in which he elaborated his views. To understand Belden’s democratic socialist perspective, one must look at his engagement with these two local organizations, as well as examining his writings on human rights in which his socialist outlook, to my mind, is embedded.
Socialist Forum and C-U Democratic Socialists of America
Belden offered a critique of capitalism in an article he penned on behalf of the local Socialist Forum during the period he was engaged in this organization. He argued, “the system {capitalism] aims to treat everything, including people, as commodities to maximize profits. Wages must be depressed. Basic needs such as food, water, shelter, and education must be subject to the private market.”
As an alternative to a profit-driven capitalism that fails to fulfill the essential needs of all its members, democratic socialists support a society incorporating political democracy and a socially owned and administered economy. This economy would embrace economic democracy, workplace democracy, and worker self-management. Democratic socialist societies work to guarantee the fulfillment of the basic material needs of its populations. Although there is no set approach to how such a society is established, democratic socialists seek a gradual nonviolent transition to socialism, and their emphasis on democracy is of a piece with their rejection of a Leninist vanguard party mode of social change.
Socialist Forum shared and Democratic Socialists of America currently espouses such an alternative model of how to organize society and how to avoid a descent into a Soviet-style authoritarianism in building it. Belden’s membership in these organizations in and of itself is suggestive of the broad outlines of his socialist idea. One other characteristic can be discerned from recognizing that, like him, both organizations emphasized, often at his behest, what is often called “theory and practice.” In both organizations, members participated in educational activities covering current social justice campaigns but also examining material that elaborated on topics like “What is socialism?” and “What would a transition to it look like?”
Belden (left) at the Labor Day parade around 2014, with fellow Socialist Forum member the late Gene Vanderport and Gene’s wife Germaine Light, also a member
The practice was there in activities like supporting striking unions in the area with food drives or mounting a Medicare for All campaign. Belden was involved in both such efforts. He was never what some have termed an “armchair socialist”; he was committed to getting his hands dirty. There is a story that Jim Barrett tells about how upon his retirement from U of I, Belden said to Jim that he was happy now that he could spend more time in the local social justice organizations and campaigns he championed.
Democracy in the Workplace
Not least because it was a countervailing institution that challenged capitalism’s dominance, Belden was a champion of the labor movement, as well as a union member when he had the opportunity. In line with his vision, however, Belden was particularly enthusiastic about worker cooperatives. In his writing for this paper, Belden identified three overarching types: retail consumer coops, service coops, and producer coops. He thought of the local Common Ground Food Coop as an example of a consumer coop. His example of service coops included the Cooperative Home Care Associates, whose 1700 home health workers are worker-owners providing services to New Yorkers. It was producer coops, especially industrial worker coops, that most interested him—not surprising given the role that workplace democracy plays in a democratic socialism.
His favorite example of an industrial worker coop was Mondragon, operating in the Basque region of Spain and founded in 1956, it employs roughly 84,000 in a conglomerate of 256 companies that are all worker-controlled. The Mondragon model also influenced the United Steelworkers to initiate efforts to start, among other entities, worker-controlled laundries, solar installers’ cooperatives, and food-producing greenhouse coops. These were identified as union worker coops. In his own words, “in Union Co-ops the worker becomes the active agent in determination of the conditions of his or her working life rather than being a tool of corporate capitalists.”
Daniel, Rosa, and Belden
Belden was a great admirer of the Polish-born and longtime Paris resident Daniel Singer, and talked about how he shared Singer’s views on a number of questions. Singer was a democratic socialist in this same vein. An admirer of Rosa Luxemburg and her critique of Lenin’s vanguard-party approach to social transformation, Singer spoke approvingly of how she took Lenin to task on the question of democracy in a socialist state. She argued that “without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion . . . only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.” Singer maintained that underpinning Luxemburg’s faith in democracy in a socialist state was her concept of the building of a socialist society as not something that could be rushed and led by a small cadre of revolutionary elites. Instead, the road to socialism was the outcome of a long drawn-out process built on the development of a mass movement coinciding with the growth of political consciousness among working people.
All democratic socialists share Singer and Luxemburg’s emphasis on the importance of democratic political processes in a new society. What is not typically understood is the role of a slowly expanding mass movement built out of institutions and struggles that mobilize populations to actively challenge the inequalities, racism, poverty, and deprivation that a capitalist system sustains—thus moving individuals to an understanding of the source of the problems they face and increasing their own sense of agency.
That Belden shared in this conceptualization is suggested by his deep and ongoing commitment to multiple social justice struggles, perhaps holding out the hope that someday one or more such campaigns could be cells in a class-conscious mass movement. But Belden was a realist, keenly aware that such a movement had not emerged in the post-war United States, and that organizations like unions that might play a critical role in the emergence of a capitalist alternative were if anything in a weakened state.
Finally, like Singer, Belden generally disavowed political violence on the road to a new society, assuming that at some stage a mobilized citizenry could effectively overwhelm a capitalist state, thus sparing the need for prolonged civil war.
Belden’s Understanding of Human Rights and What It Reveals
As I read Belden’s book on human rights, I came to realize that he had an expansive understanding of what is required for each human being to live a heathy and dignified existence. His analysis of human rights is discussed in more detail by Wally Feinberg in this issue. Here I just want to point out how Belden offered what he called a holistic framework for understanding human rights. His conception goes much beyond the basic needs of food, shelter, and clothing that have often been the focus of socialist concern. Indeed, Belden argues for viewing human rights as including all elements required to fully realize human potentialities and a fully developed capacity for co- and self-determination in opposition to domination and oppression. This ideal inherently incorporates the importance of political and economic freedoms, but also access to quality education and cultural offerings that underwrite the capacity for agency and the struggles against racism, ethnic hatred, sexism, and homophobia.
In this sense, I see Belden’s book as his special contribution to socialist theory offering us new insights into what an alternative society should offer its citizens.
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