(Salon) — “My hope is that we arrive at a common-ist revolution before we hit capitalist collapse,” novelist and essayist Benjamin Kunkel told Salon. In an era of Tea Party denunciations of Obama as a socialist, and increased mainstream talk about “capitalism” and Marx, Kunkel’s new book, “Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis,” sets out “to contribute something in the way of intellectual orientation to the project of replacing a capitalism bent on social polarization, the hollowing out of democracy, and ecological ruin with another, better order.” Salon spoke with Kunkel about feminism’s relationship with Marxism, radicals’ relationships with reformers, and Michele Bachmann’s “quite absurd” warning’s about Obama socialism.
At the start of your book, you say that for a long time your “belief in my beliefs” was weakened by an “ideological consensus” that “socialism of any kind was a recipe for political oppression and shoddy goods, whereas free markets could be counted on to foster democracy and other forms of consumer choice.” Why don’t you believe that?
I think that it’s pretty clear that in Western countries in the 19th century … a conflict between democracy and capitalism was widely recognized. And the fact that the socialist movement came to be associated in the 20th century with these party-state dictatorships meant that the natural affinity, as I see it, between socialism and democracy was forgotten about by a lot of people.
