The development of the productive forces and the relations of production, in any theoretical variant, has in technology a point of inflection. The technological revolution of recent years is provoking a new era where economic relations are undergoing profound transformations. One of the most important in digital communication that has moved from mass communication prevailing until the end of the twentieth century to individual intercommunication, with all the qualitative consequences represented by this change, as the Spanish theorist Manuel Castells pointed out.
If in the last hundred years capitalism has demonstrated its creativity by creating products of universal value, exporting culture and even ways of life, socialism, supposedly its historical counterpart, must demonstrate creative potential at least equal. Or it will be defeated, in this area, like the Soviet socialism that proved incapable of creating brands and products able to compete with the products of capitalism, especially in the area of the creative economy, intensive in design.
In other words, modern capitalism will only be effectively overcome by creative socialism.
This medium- and long-term perspective is already on the agenda of the world’s most advanced socialist society, China, which aims to replace the “Made in China” brand with “Design in China”. There is no doubt that the one-party regime, classic of the old dictatorships of the proletariat, attests to the socialist character of China. Perhaps, in the case of the ZEES (Special Economic Zones) where foreign industries were established, it is impossible to maintain the eternal maintenance of this political regime and the low wages paid, that “market socialism” has taken this new step towards Economy Creative.
And if creativity has already been strategically incorporated into planning in at least one of the socialist societies, it should be incorporated as a new value in the agenda of parties fighting for democratic socialism in the world. Especially in the emerging and developed countries, where the productive forces have already reached a certain degree of development.
Creative socialism includes not only the creative economy, but innovation in its broadest sense, environmental sustainability, entrepreneurship as one of the new forms of work organization, and new forms and methodologies of social and political organization. These new forms of social and political organization include the parties, especially the socialist parties.
If capitalist creativity has as its main objectives the expansion of the market and profit, socialist creativity must have as its objectives the expansion of spaces of freedom in society and the well-being of people.
Capitalism sees technological evolution only as a way to increase its profits, caring little for what lies behind the forms of production surpassed by technology. Already the struggle of the socialists must take into account that it is necessary to replace and requalify workers whose work was surpassed by the new forms of production. For the socialists, it is necessary, for example, to think creatively about how to replace the taxi drivers replaced by the UBER and, in the future, by the robot cars without drivers. The same for factory workers replaced by robots.
Without betting and investing in innovation, much less trying to prevent technological advances, socialist creativity will be used to innovate socially in the expansion of work spaces, workers and entrepreneurs. Extend, also, the services of the third sector where the State and the companies are not present.
In simple and schematic reasoning, if creative capitalism is geared toward corporate profit, creative socialism should turn to social well-being and the valuing of work, including creative work.
Capitalism has in the force of technological innovation and in the development of the creative economy a way of reproducing and perpetuating itself. Creative socialism has this same force, a way of achieving a socialist society where the means of production are socially owned and labor liberated from exploitation.
In other words, creative socialism must be the human dimension of the development of the productive forces and the technological revolution.
In other words, the humanist dimension, according to the young Israeli thinker Yuval Noah Harari, humanism is a “new and revolutionary creed that conquered the world in the last century,” a process he called the Humanist Revolution.
Thus modern socialists see the creative economy not only as the set of activities in which human talent is the main raw material, but also as a development strategy, to guide public policies of incentives and to support technological innovation and culture, basic components of that economy.