Political Taboos and the Failures of Conflict Resolution
EDITORIAL, 20 Jan 2025
#884 | Richard E. Rubenstein – TRANSCEND Media Service
Thirty-five years ago, the great American peacemaker Elise Boulding offered a group of scholars and activists essential advice on how to practice effective conflict resolution. Envision as wide an array as possible of proposed solutions to the problems generating the conflict, she said, and – most importantly – do not engage in “costing” or determining which solutions are most practical until ALL the options for resolution have been envisioned and described. To do otherwise – to let notions of “feasibility” define the field of possible solutions – is to cripple the imagination and, often, to make resolvable conflicts seem intractable.
This advice, I am sorry to say, is systematically undermined by the existence of effective political taboos and by would-be conflict resolvers who exclude tabooed solutions from consideration by the parties in conflict. Not enough attention has been paid by scholars and practitioners to ideological taboos whose main function is to protect social systems that generate structural violence from overthrow or radical reform. This is a form of what Johan Galtung meant by “cultural violence,” but it is not as recognizable as “positive” ideologies of violence such as racism and sexism. Tabooed ideas and practices often go unrecognized because their function is exclusionary. The taboo is intended to put certain social and political conceptions out of contention and out of mind.
A key example is the taboo that aims to eliminate socialist ideas and practices from consideration as solutions to the systemic, conflict-generating problems created by late capitalist systems like that currently dominant in the United States and much of the industrially developed world. By “socialist,” I refer to a sociopolitical system in which key productive facilities and operations are publicly owned and democratically controlled by working people. The term is contested, since it is used to refer both to potential and historical (“actually existing”) sociopolitical arrangements. Historical arrangements can be thought of along a spectrum ranging from publicly controlled modifications to capitalist systems (“social democracy” and “state capitalism”) to deformed workers states (“Stalinism” and “Maoism”). Potential arrangements also vary widely, and these are the real targets of taboos that operate by equating them with discredited historical arrangements and by grossly misrepresenting these systems.
Three examples clearly show the counter-resolutionary results of implementing the socialism taboo.
First, consider “polarized” conflicts involving capitalist interest groups or identity groups that appear intractable because possible solutions involving socioeconomic planning at the national or community levels have been excluded. Bitter disputes over immigration now characterize political life in many nations that do not allow state- or community-directed economic planning to be considered as methods of resolving differences between native workers and immigrants. In the U.S., which suffers from a congenital labor shortage, it seems clear that there is an acute need for policies that would admit an adequate number of workers of various types to the country and direct them to useful locales and occupations, while guaranteeing native workers’ wage rates and increasing support for strained social welfare systems. Clear possibilities of accomplishing these goals are eliminated by the taboos of economic planning and community autonomy though in this case the degree of socialization of production could theoretically be quite modest.
Second, consider the highly destructive systemic conflicts that are rendered “invisible” and insoluble by the anti-socialism taboo. In the U.S., for example, more than 40,000 people are killed and more than one million seriously injured each year – the equivalent of losses in a major war – by traffic injuries and fatalities that are generally considered an “inevitable” concomitant of the existing automobile/highway/gas complex. Furthermore, a system of privately owned and operated automobiles that systematically starves public transportation of needed funds produces a significant lengthening of the working day in which commuting workers pay an increasing share of uncompensated costs of production. The conflict rendered invisible in this case is between private and public systems of transportation, and the option of significantly limiting or abolishing the private sector is put beyond discussion. In this case, as in the others discussed here, the failure of conflict resolution produces deep dissatisfaction of basic human needs and generates a search for scapegoats.
Third, consider the general extreme increase in social inequality, which is now accepted by a wide range of analysts as a root cause of various forms of structural violence, including crime, suicide, and culturally inspired political militancy. Liberal and “progressive” forces have lost significant ground politically by virtue of their limited response to inequality-related problems. The measures that they propose, from increasing taxes on the rich to raising the minimum wage and increasing public works expenditures, are demonstrably ineffective to end inequality, especially because the primary beneficiaries of programs like these are oligarchical enterprises and their managers and stockholders. We never get to conceive of or consider much less debate proposals to expropriate great wealth, to nationalize major industrial sectors like the Military-Industrial Complex, Big Pharma, Big Tech, and the banks, or to deal with the crucial question of how workers control of production can be established and maintained. As a result, the working class in the U.S. and other nations has tended to abandon the centrist and left-center parties and to accept nostrums offered by the Right. With socialism tabooed, softened but still dangerous versions of “national socialism” reappear to exploit working people’s frustration and anger.
The last and in some ways most critical note relates to workers’ control. The ideological basis for the taboo discussed here is the experience of “actually existing socialism,” which is linked with economic inefficiency and political autocracy. New generations of socialists believe that neither of these results is an organic product of Marxist or post-Marxist ideas and practices. Rather, they are correlatives of the industrial and political backwardness of certain self-declared socialist nations, the pre-information revolution “backwardness” of the advanced nations in the twentieth century, and the military and ideological power of late-capitalist elites determined to secure their position in an age of intensifying global contradictions and challenges.
In my view, the immediate imperative for those interested in systemic change is to offer working people a credible socialist alternative to a decaying late-capitalist system, and this requires imagining and, wherever possible, practicing systems of democratic workers control that work. Meanwhile, whether or not one shares this perspective, those trying to theorize and practice conflict resolution must recognize the existence and imagination-killing impact of political taboos such as the socialism taboo. Elise Boulding was right: truncating one’s vision for allegedly “practical” but actually ideological reasons makes conflict resolution a method of maintaining systems, not transforming them.
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Richard E. Rubenstein is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment and a professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution. A graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar), and Harvard Law School, Rubenstein is the author of nine books on analyzing and resolving violent social conflicts. His most recent book is Resolving Structural Conflicts: How Violent Systems Can Be Transformed (Routledge, 2017).
Tags: Capitalism, Change, Conflict Analysis, Conflict Resolution, Conflict Transformation, Elise Boulding, Johan Galtung, Paradigm change, Post-capitalism, Socialism
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 20 Jan 2025.
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One Response to “Political Taboos and the Failures of Conflict Resolution”
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Elise Boulding spoke to ‘scholars’. A waste of time. Scholars have nothing to do when politicians concoct, negotiate and agree on having wars. They have their own war club, with 2 main branches, one in New York the other in Geneva. They pay a “Secretary” General to ensure he helps them carry out all wars in the world.
Do we give a gun each to every child at school to ensure Peace and harmony in the class room?
Peace will only come to the world the day politicians have no machine guns, bombs, guided and cruise missiles, rocket launchers, bombing helicopters and drones, air-fighters, warships to sell and to buy.
If they don’t organise wars, the industry collapses and mass unemployment follows.
UNLESS we replace the war economy (which benefits politicians but increases the countries’ debt) for an Economy of Peace, we’ll continue to destroy humanity and the planet.