{"id":285463,"date":"2025-01-20T12:00:16","date_gmt":"2025-01-20T12:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=285463"},"modified":"2025-01-19T06:22:01","modified_gmt":"2025-01-19T06:22:01","slug":"political-taboos-and-the-failures-of-conflict-resolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/01\/political-taboos-and-the-failures-of-conflict-resolution\/","title":{"rendered":"Political Taboos and the Failures of Conflict Resolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

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. \u00a0Envision as wide an array as possible of proposed solutions to the problems generating the conflict, she said, and \u2013 most importantly \u2013 do not engage in \u201ccosting\u201d or determining which solutions are most practical until ALL the options for resolution have been envisioned and described. \u00a0To do otherwise \u2013 to let notions of \u201cfeasibility\u201d define the field of possible solutions \u2013 is to cripple the imagination and, often, to make resolvable conflicts seem intractable.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This is a form of what Johan Galtung meant by \u201ccultural violence,\u201d but it is not as recognizable as \u201cpositive\u201d ideologies of violence such as racism and sexism.\u00a0 Tabooed ideas and practices often go unrecognized because their function is exclusionary.\u00a0 The taboo is intended to put certain social and political conceptions out of contention and out of mind.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 By \u201csocialist,\u201d I refer to a sociopolitical system in which key productive facilities and operations are publicly owned and democratically controlled by working people.\u00a0 The term is contested, since it is used to refer both to potential and historical (\u201cactually existing\u201d) sociopolitical arrangements.\u00a0 Historical arrangements can be thought of along a spectrum ranging from publicly controlled modifications to capitalist systems (\u201csocial democracy\u201d and \u201cstate capitalism\u201d) to deformed workers states (\u201cStalinism\u201d and \u201cMaoism\u201d).\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Three examples clearly show the counter-resolutionary results of implementing the socialism taboo.<\/p>\n

First,<\/strong> consider \u201cpolarized\u201d 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. \u00a0Bitter 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.\u00a0 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\u2019 wage rates and increasing support for strained social welfare systems.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Second,<\/strong> consider the highly destructive systemic conflicts that are rendered \u201cinvisible\u201d and insoluble by the anti-socialism taboo.\u00a0 In the U.S., for example, more than 40,000 people are killed and more than one million seriously injured each year \u2013 the equivalent of losses in a major war \u2013 by traffic injuries and fatalities that are generally considered an \u201cinevitable\u201d concomitant of the existing automobile\/highway\/gas complex.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Third,<\/strong> 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.\u00a0 Liberal and \u201cprogressive\u201d forces have lost significant ground politically by virtue of their limited response to inequality-related problems.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 With socialism tabooed, softened but still dangerous versions of \u201cnational socialism\u201d reappear to exploit working people\u2019s frustration and anger.<\/p>\n

The last<\/strong> and in some ways most critical note relates to workers\u2019 control.\u00a0 The ideological basis for the taboo discussed here is the experience of \u201cactually existing socialism,\u201d which is linked with economic inefficiency and political autocracy.\u00a0 New generations of socialists believe that neither of these results is an organic product of Marxist or post-Marxist ideas and practices.\u00a0 Rather, they are correlatives of the industrial and political backwardness of certain self-declared socialist nations, the pre-information revolution \u201cbackwardness\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 \u00a0Elise Boulding was right: truncating one\u2019s vision for allegedly \u201cpractical\u201d but actually ideological reasons makes conflict resolution a method of maintaining systems, not transforming them.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Richard E. Rubenstein is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/em><\/a> and a professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at George Mason University\u2019s 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 <\/em>Resolving Structural Conflicts: How Violent Systems Can Be Transformed (Routledge, 2017).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. \u00a0Envision as wide an array as possible of proposed solutions to the problems generating the conflict, she said,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[232,631,1778,680,442,1671,809,984,2198,874],"class_list":["post-285463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial","tag-capitalism","tag-change","tag-conflict-analysis","tag-conflict-resolution","tag-conflict-transformation","tag-elise-boulding","tag-johan-galtung","tag-paradigm-change","tag-post-capitalism","tag-socialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285463"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":285465,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285463\/revisions\/285465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}