The 2012 Elections Have Little To Do With Obama’s Record

… Which Is Why We Are Voting For Him

The 2012 election will be one of the most polarized and critical elections in recent history.

By Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Carl Davidson
Alternet.org

August 9, 2012 – Let’s cut to the chase. The November 2012 elections will be unlike anything that any of us can remember.  It is not just that this will be a close election.  It is also not just that the direction of Congress hangs in the balance.  Rather, this will be one of the most polarized and critical elections in recent history.

Unfortunately what too few leftists and progressives have been prepared to accept is that the polarization is to a great extent centered on a revenge-seeking white supremacy; on race and the racial implications of the moves to the right in the US political system. It is also focused on a re-subjugation of women, harsh burdens on youth and the elderly, increased war dangers, and reaction all along the line for labor and the working class. No one on the left with any good sense should remain indifferent or stand idly by in the critical need to defeat Republicans this year.

U.S. Presidential elections are not what progressives want them to be

A large segment of what we will call the ‘progressive forces’ in US politics approach US elections generally, and Presidential elections in particular, as if: (1) we have more power on the ground than we actually possess, and (2) the elections are about expressing our political outrage at the system. Both get us off on the wrong foot.

The US electoral system is among the most undemocratic on the planet.  Constructed in a manner so as to guarantee an ongoing dominance of a two party duopoly, the US electoral universe largely aims at reducing so-called legitimate discussion to certain restricted parameters acceptable to the ruling circles of the country. Almost all progressive measures, such as Medicare for All or Full Employment, are simply declared ‘off the table.’ In that sense there is no surprise that the Democratic and Republican parties are both parties of the ruling circles, even though they are quite distinct within that sphere.

The nature of the US electoral system–and specifically the ballot restrictions and ‘winner-take-all’ rules within it–encourages or pressures various class fractions and demographic constituency groups to establish elite-dominated electoral coalitions.  The Democratic and Republican parties are, in effect, electoral coalitions or party-blocs of this sort, unrecognizable in most of the known universe as political parties united around a program and a degree of discipline to be accountable to it. We may want and fight for another kind of system, but it would be foolish to develop strategy and tactics not based on the one we actually have.

The winner-take-all nature of the system discourages independent political parties and candidacies on both the right and the left.  For this reason the extreme right made a strategic decision in the aftermath of the 1964 Goldwater defeat to move into the Republican Party with a long-term objective of taking it over.  This was approached at the level of both mass movement building, e.g., anti-busing, anti-abortion, as well as electoral candidacies.  The GOP right’s ‘Southern Strategy’ beginning in 1968 largely succeeded in chasing out most of the pro-New Deal Republicans from the party itself, as well as drawing in segregationist Democratic voters in the formerly ‘Solid South.’

Efforts by progressives to realign or shift the Democratic Party, on the other hand, were blunted by the defeat of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964, and later the defeat of the McGovern candidacy in 1972, during which time key elements of the party’s upper echelons were prepared to lose the election rather than witness a McGovern victory.  In the 1980s a very different strategy was advanced by Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow insurgencies that aimed at building—at least initially—an independent, progressive organization capable of fielding candidates within the Democratic primaries.  This approach—albeit independent of Jackson himself—had an important local victory with the election of Mayor Harold Washington in Chicago.  At the national level, however, it ran into a different set of challenges by 1989.

In the absence of a comprehensive electoral strategy, progressive forces fall into one of three cul-de-sacs: (1) ad hoc electoralism, i.e., participating in the election cycle but with no long-term plan other than tailing the Democrats; (2) abandoning electoral politics altogether in favor of modern-day anarcho-syndicalist ‘pressure politics from below’; or (3) satisfying ourselves with far more limited notions that we can best use the election period in order to ‘expose’ the true nature of the capitalist system in a massive way by attacking all of the mainstream candidates.  We think all of these miss the key point.

Our elections are about money and the balance of power

Money is obvious, particularly in light of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision.  The balance of power is primarily at the level of the balance within the ruling circles, as well as the level of grassroots power of the various mass movements.  The party that wins will succeed on the basis of the sort of electoral coalition that they are able to assemble, co-opt or be pressured by, including but not limited to the policy and interest conflicts playing out within its own ranks.

The weakness of left and progressive forces means we have been largely unable to participate, in our own name and independent of the two party upper crust, in most national-level elections with any hope of success.  In that sense most left and progressive interventions in the electoral arena at the national level, especially at the Presidential level, are ineffective acts of symbolic opposition or simply propaganda work aimed at uniting and recruiting far smaller circles of militants.  They are not aimed at a serious challenge for power but rather aim to demonstrate a point of view, or to put it more crassly, to ‘fly the flag.’ The electoral arena is frequently not viewed as an effective site for structural reforms or a more fundamental changing of direction.

Our politics, in this sense, can be placed in two broad groupings—politics as self-expression and politics as strategy. In an overall sense, the left needs both of these—the audacity and energy of the former and the ability to unite all who can be united of the latter. But it is also important to know the difference between the two, and which to emphasize and when in any given set of battles.

Consider, for a moment, the reform struggles with which many of us are familiar.  Let’s say that a community is being organized to address a demand for jobs on a construction site.  If the community is not entirely successful in this struggle, it does not mean that the struggle was wrong or inappropriate.  It means that the progressives were too weak organizationally and the struggle must continue.  The same is true in the electoral arena.  The fact that it is generally difficult, in this period, to get progressives elected or that liberal and progressive candidates may back down on a commitment once elected, does not condemn the arena of the struggle.  It does, however, say something about how we might need to organize ourselves better in order to win and enforce accountability.

In part due to justified suspicion of the electoral system and a positive impulse for self-expression and making our values explicit, too many progressives view the electoral realm as simply a canvass upon which various pictures of the ideal future are painted.  Instead of constructing a strategy for power that involves a combination of electoral and non-electoral activity, uniting both a militant minority and a progressive majority, there is an impulsive tendency to treat the electoral realm as an idea bazaar rather than as one of the key sites on which the struggle for progressive power unfolds.

The Shifts within the Right and the Rise of Irrationalism

Contrary to various myths, there was no ‘golden age’ in our country where politicians of both parties got along and politics was clean.  U. S. politics has always been dirty.  One can look at any number of elections in the 19th century, for instance, with the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876 being among the more notorious, to see examples of electoral chicanery.  Elections have been bought and sold and there has been wide-spread voter disenfranchisement. In the late 19th century and early 20th century massive voter disenfranchisement unfolded as part of the rise of Jim Crow segregation. Due to gains by both the populist and socialists is this era, by the 1920s our election laws were ‘reformed’—in all but a handful of states—to do away with ‘fusion ballots’ and other measures previously helpful to new insurgent forces forming independent parties and alliances.

What is significant about the current era has been the steady move of the Republican Party toward the right, not simply at the realm of neoliberal economics (which has also been true of much of the Democratic Party establishment) but also in other features of the ‘ideology’ and program of the Republicans.  For this reason we find it useful to distinguish between conservatives and right-wing populists (and within right-wing populism, to put a spotlight on irrationalism).  Right-wing populism is actually a radical critique of the existing system, but from the political right with all that that entails.  Uniting with irrationalism, it seeks to build program and direction based largely upon myths, fears and prejudices.

Right-wing populism exists as the equivalent of the herpes virus within the capitalist system.  It is always there–sometimes latent, at other times active—and it does not go away.  In periods of system distress, evidence of right-wing populism erupts with more force.  Of particular importance in understanding right-wing populism is the complex intersection of race, anti-immigrant settler-ism, ‘producerism,’ homophobia and empire.

In the US, right-wing populism stands as the grassroots defender of white racial supremacy.  It intertwines with the traditional myths associated with the “American Dream” and suggests that the US was always to be a white republic and that no one, no people, and no organization should stand in the way of such an understanding.  It seeks enemies, and normally enemies based on demographics of ‘The Other’.  After all, right-wing populism sees itself in the legacy of the likes of Andrew Jackson and other proponents of Manifest Destiny, a view that saw no inconsistency between the notion of a white democratic republic, ethnic cleansing, slavery, and a continental (and later global) empire. ‘Jacksonian Democracy’ was primarily the complete codification and nationalization of white supremacy in our country’s political life.

Irrationalism is rising as an endemic virus in our political landscape

Largely in times of crisis and uncertainty, virulent forms of irrationalism make an appearance.  The threat to white racial supremacy that emerged in the 1960s, for instance, brought forward a backlash that included an irrationalist view of history, e.g., that the great early civilizations on Earth couldn’t have arisen from peoples with darker skins, but instead were founded by creatures from other planets.  Irrationalism, moreover, was not limited to the racial realm. Challenges to scientific theories such as evolution and climate change are currently on the rise.  Irrationalism cries for a return to the past, and within that a mythical past.  A component of various right-wing ideologies, especially fascism, irrationalism exists as a form of sophistry, and even worse. It often does not even pretend to hold to any degree of logic, but rather simply requires the acceptance of a series of non sequitur assertions.

Right-wing populism and irrationalism have received nationwide reach anchored in institutions such as the Fox network, but also right-wing religious institutions.  Along with right-wing talk radio and websites, a virtual community of millions of voters has been founded whose views refuse critique from within.  Worse, well-financed and well-endowed walls are established to ensure that the views are not challenged from without.  In the 2008 campaign and its immediate aftermath, we witnessed segments of this community in the rise of the ‘birther’ movement and its backing by the likes of Donald Trump.  Like many other cults there were no facts that adherents of the ‘birthers’ would accept except those ‘facts’ which they, themselves, had established.  Information contrary to their assertions was swept away.  It didn’t matter that we could prove Obama was born in the US, because their real point, the he was a Black man, was true.

The 2012 Republican primaries demonstrated the extent to which irrationalism and right-wing populism, in various incarnations, have captured the Republican Party.  That approximately 60% of self-identified Republicans would continue to believe that President Obama is not a legitimate citizen of the USA points to the magnitude of self-delusion.

The Obama campaign of 2008 at the grassroots was nothing short of a mass revolt

The energy for the Obama campaign was aimed against eight years of Bush, long wars, neoliberal austerity and collapse, and Republican domination of the US government.  It took the form of a movement-like embrace of the candidacy of Barack Obama.  The nature of this embrace, however, set the stage for a series of both strategic and tactical problems that have befallen progressive forces since Election Day 2008.

The mis-analysis of Obama in 2007 and 2008 by so many people led to an overwhelming tendency to misread his candidacy.  In that period, we—the authors of this essay—offered critical support and urged independent organization for the Obama candidacy in 2008 through the independent ‘Progressives for Obama’ project. We were frequently chastised by some allies at the time for being too critical, too idealistic, too ‘left’, and not willing to give Obama a chance to succeed.  Yet our measured skepticism, and call for independence and initiative in a broader front, was not based on some naïve impatience. Instead, it was based on an assessment of who Obama was and the nature of his campaign for the Presidency.

Obama was and is a corporate liberal

Obama is an eloquent speaker who rose to the heights of US politics after a very difficult upbringing and some success in Chicago politics.  But as a national figure, he always positioned himself not so much as a fighter for the disenfranchised but more as a mediator of conflict, as someone pained by the growth of irrationalism in the USA and the grotesque image of the USA that much of the world had come to see.  To say that he was a reformer does not adequately describe either his character or his objectives.  He was cast as the representative, wittingly or not, of the ill-conceived ‘post-Black politics era’ at a moment when much of white America wanted to believe that we had become ‘post-racial.’ He was a political leader and candidate trying to speak to the center, in search of a safe harbor.  He was the person to save US capitalism at a point where everything appeared to be imploding.

For millions, who Obama actually was, came to be secondary to what he represented for them.  This was the result of a combination of wishful thinking, on the one hand, and strongly held progressive aspirations, on the other.  In other words, masses of people wanted change that they could believe in. They saw in Obama the representative of that change and rallied to him.  While it is quite likely that Hillary Clinton, had she received the nomination, would also have defeated McCain/Palin, it was the Obama ticket and campaign that actually inspired so many to believe that not only could there be an historical breakthrough at the level of racial symbolism—a Black person in the White House—but that other progressive changes could also unfold.  With these aspirations, masses of people, including countless numbers of left and progressive activists, were prepared to ignore uncomfortable realities about candidate Obama and later President Obama.

There are two examples that are worth mentioning here.  One, the matter of race.  Two, the matter of war.  With regard to race, Obama never pretended that he was anything other than Black.  Ironically, in the early stages of his campaign many African Americans were far from certain how ‘Black’ he actually was.  Yet the matter of race was less about who Obama was—except for the white supremacists—and more about race and racism in US history and current reality.

Nothing exemplified this better than the controversy surrounding Rev. Jeremiah Wright, followed by Obama’s historic speech on race in Philadelphia.  Wright, a liberation theologian and progressive activist, became a target for the political right as a way of ‘smearing’ Obama.  Obama chose to distance himself from Wright, but in a very interesting way.  He upheld much of Wright’s basic views of US history while at the same time acting as if racist oppression was largely a matter of the past.  In that sense he suggested that Wright’s critique was outdated.

Wright’s critique was far from being outdated.  Yet in his famous speech on race, Obama said much more of substance than few mainstream politicians had ever done. In so doing, he opened the door to the perception that something quite new and innovative might appear in the White House.  He made no promises, though, which is precisely why suggestions of betrayal are misplaced.  There was no such commitment in the first place.

With regard to war, there was something similar.  Obama came out against the Iraq War early, before it started. He opposed it at another rally after it was underway. To his credit, US troops have been withdrawn from Iraq.  He never, however, came out against war in general, or certainly against imperialist war.  In fact, he made it clear that there were wars that he supported, including but not limited to the Afghanistan war.  Further, he suggested that if need be he would carry out bombings in Pakistan.  Despite this, much of the antiwar movement and many other supporters assumed that Obama was the antiwar candidate in a wider sense than his opposition to the war in Iraq.  Perhaps ‘assumed’ is not quite correct; they wanted him to be the antiwar candidate who was more in tune with their own views.

With Obama’s election, the wishful thinking played itself out, to some degree, in the form of inaction and demobilization.  Contrary to the complaints of some on the Left, Obama and his administration cannot actually be blamed for this.  There were decisions made in important social movements and constituencies to (1) assume that Obama would do the ‘right thing,’ and, (2) provide Obama ‘space’ rather than place pressure on him and his administration. This was a strategic mistake. And when combined with a relative lack of consolidating grassroots campaign work into ongoing independent organization at the grassroots, with the exception of a few groups, such as the Progressive Democrats of America, it was an important opportunity largely lost.

There is one other point that is worth adding here.  Many people failed to understand that the Obama administration was not and is not the same as Obama the individual, and occupying the Oval Office is not the same as an unrestricted ability to wield state power.  ‘Team Obama’ is certainly chaired by Obama, but it remains a grouping of establishment forces that share a common framework—and common restrictive boundaries.  It operates under different pressures and is responsive–or not–to various specific constituencies.  For instance, in 2009, when President Zelaya of Honduras was overthrown in a coup, President Obama responded–initially–with a criticism of the coup.  At the end of the day, however, the Obama administration did nothing to overturn the coup and to ensure that Honduras regained democracy.  Instead the administration supported the ‘coup people.’ Did this mean that President Obama supported the coup? It does not really matter.  What matters is that his administration backtracked on its alleged opposition to the coup and then did everything in their power to ensure that President Zelaya could not return.  This is why the focus on Obama the personality is misleading and unhelpful.

No Struggle, No Progress

President Obama turned out not to be the progressive reformer that many people had hoped.  At the same time, however, he touched off enough sore points for the political Right that he became a lightning rod for everything that they hated and feared.  This is what helps us understand the circumstances under which the November 2012 election is taking place.

As a corporate liberal, Obama’s strategy was quite rational in those terms.  First, stabilize the economy.  Second, move on health insurance.  Third, move on jobs.  Fourth, attempt a foreign policy breakthrough.  Contrary to the hopes of much of his base, Obama proceeded to tackle each of these narrowly as a corporate ‘bipartisan’ reformer rather than as a wider progressive champion of the underdog.  That does not mean that grassroots people gained nothing.  Certainly preserving General Motors was to the benefit of countless auto workers and workers in related industries.  Yet Obama’s approach in each case was to make his determinations by first reading Wall Street and the corporate world and then extending the olive branch of bi-partisanship to his adversaries on the right.  This, of course, led to endless and largely useless compromises, thereby demoralizing his base in the progressive grassroots.

While Obama’s base was becoming demoralized, the political right was becoming energized

It did not matter that Obama was working to preserve capitalism. As far as the right was concerned, there were two sins under which he was operating: some small degree of economic re-distributionism and the fact that Obama was Black.  The combination of both made Obama a demon, as far as the right was concerned, who personified Black power, anti-colonialism and socialism, all at the same time.

The Upset Right and November 2012

We stress the need to understand that Obama represents an irrational symbol for the political right, and a potent symbol that goes way beyond what Obama actually stands for and practices.  The right, while taking aim at Obama, also seeks, quite methodically and rationally, to use him to turn back the clock.  They have created a common front based on white revanchism (a little used but accurate term for an ideology of revenge), on political misogynism, on anti-‘freeloader’ themes aimed at youth, people of color and immigrants, and a partial defense of the so-called 1%.  Rightwing populism asserts a ‘producer’ vs. ‘parasites’ outlook aimed at the unemployed and immigrants below them and ‘Jewish bankers and Jewish media elites’ above them. Let us emphasize that this is a front rather than one coherent organization or platform.  It is an amalgam, but an amalgam of ingredients that produces a particularly nasty US-flavored stew of right-wing populism.

Reports of declining Obama support among white workers is a good jumping off point in terms of understanding white revanchism.  Obama never had a majority among them as a whole, although he did win a majority among younger white workers. White workers have been economically declining since the mid-1970s.  This segment of a larger multinational and multiracial working class is in search of potential allies, but largely due to a combination of race and low unionization rates finds itself being swayed by right-wing populism.  Along with other workers it is insecure and deeply distressed economically, but also finds itself in fear—psychologically—for its own existence as the demographics of the USA undergoes significant changes.  They take note of projections that the US, by 2050, will be a majority of minorities of people of color. They perceive that they have gotten little from Obama, but more importantly they are deeply suspicious as to whether a Black leader can deliver anything at all to anyone.

Political misogynism—currently dubbed ‘the war on women’—has been on the rise in the US for some time.  The ‘New Right’ in the 1970s built its base in right-wing churches around the issue in the battles over abortion and reproduction rights, setting the stage for Reagan’s victory.  In the case of 2012, the attacks on Planned Parenthood along with the elitist dismissal of working mothers have been representative of the assertion of male supremacy, even when articulated by women.  This in turn is part of a global assault on women based in various religious fundamentalisms that have become a refuge for economically displaced men and for gender-uncomfortable people across the board.

The attack on ‘slacker,’ ‘criminal’ and ‘over-privileged’ youth, especially among minorities, is actually part of what started to unfold in the anti-healthcare antics of the Tea Party.  Studies of the Tea Party movement have indicated that they have a conceptualization based on the “deserving” and “undeserving” populations.  They and many others on the right are deeply suspicious, if not in outright opposition, to anything that they see as distributing away from them any of their hard-won gains.  They believe that they earned and deserve what they have and that there is an undeserving population, to a great extent youth (but also including other groups), who are looking for handouts. This helps us understand that much of the right-wing populist movement is a generational movement of white baby-boomers and older who see the ship of empire foundering and wish to ensure that they have life preservers, if not life-boats.

The defenders of the 1% are an odd breed.  Obviously that includes the upper crust, but it also includes a social base that believes that the upper crust earned their standing.  Further, this social base believes or wishes to believe that they, too, will end up in that echelon.  Adhering to variations of Reaganism, ‘bootstrapping’ or other such ideologies, they wish to believe that so-called free market capitalism is the eternal solution to all economic problems.  Despite the fact that the Republican economic program is nothing more or less than a retreading of George W. Bush’s failed approach, they believe that it can be done differently.

Empire, balance of forces and the lesser of two evils

The choice in November 2012 does not come down to empire vs. no-empire.  While anyone can choose to vote for the Greens or other non-traditional political parties, the critical choice and battleground continues to exist in the context of a two-party system within the declining US empire.  The balance of forces in 2012 is such that those who are arrayed against the empire are in no position to mount a significant electoral challenge on an anti-imperialist platform.

To assume that the November elections are a moment to display our antipathy toward empire, moreover, misses entirely what is unfolding.  This is not a referendum on the “America of Empire”: it is a referendum pitting the “America of Popular Democracy”—the progressive majority representing the changing demographics of the US and the increasing demands for broad equality and economic relief, especially the unemployed and the elderly—against the forces of unfettered neoliberalism and far right irrationalism.  Obama is the face on the political right’s bull’s eye, and stands as the key immediate obstacle to their deeper ambitions.  We, on the left side of the aisle, recognize that he is not our advocate for the 99%.  Yet and quite paradoxically, he is the face that the right is using to mobilize its base behind irrationalism and regression.

That’s why we argue that Obama’s record is really not what is at stake in this election

Had the progressive social movements mobilized to push Obama for major changes we could celebrate; had there been progressive electoral challenges in the 2010 mid-term elections and even in the lead up to 2012 (such as Norman Solomon’s congressional challenge in California, which lost very narrowly), there might be something very different at stake this year.  Instead what we have is the face of open reaction vs. the face of corporate liberalism, of ‘austerity and war on steroids’ vs. ‘austerity and war in slow motion.’

This raises an interesting question about the matter of the “lesser of two evils,” something which has become, over the years, a major concern for many progressives.  Regularly in election cycles some progressives will dismiss supporting any Democratic Party candidate because of a perceived need to reject “lesser evil-ism”, meaning that Democrats will always strike a pose as somewhat better than the GOP, but remain no different in substance. In using the anti-‘lesser evil-ism’ phraseology, the suggestion is that it really does not matter who wins because they are both bad.  Eugene Debs is often quoted—better to vote for what you want and not get it, than to vote for what you oppose and get it. While this may make for strong and compelling rhetoric and assertions, it makes for a bad argument and bad politics.

In elections progressives need to be looking very coldly at a few questions:

Are progressive social movements strong enough to supersede or bypass the electoral arena altogether? Is there a progressive candidate who can outshine both a reactionary and a mundane liberal, and win? What would we seek to do in achieving victory? What is at stake in that particular election?

In thinking through these questions, we think the matter of a lesser of two evils is a tactical question of simply voting for one candidate to defeat another, rather than a matter of principle.  Politics is frequently about the lesser of two evils.  World War II for the USA, Britain and the USSR was all about the lesser of two evils.  Britain and the USA certainly viewed the USSR as a lesser evil compared with the Nazi Germany, and the USSR came to view the USA and Britain as the lesser evils.  Neither side trusted the other, yet they found common cause against a particular enemy.  There are many less dramatic examples, but the point is that it happens all the time. It’s part of ‘politics as strategy’ mentioned earlier.

It is for these reasons that upholding the dismissal of the ‘lesser evil-ism’ is unhelpful.  Yes, in this case, Obama is aptly described as the lesser of two evils.  He certainly represents a contending faction of empire.  He has continued the drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  His healthcare plan is nowhere near as helpful as would be Medicare for All.  He has sidelined the Employee Free Choice Act that would promote unionization. What this tells us is that Obama is not a progressive.  What it does not tell us is how to approach the elections.

Approaching November

The political right, more than anything, wishes to turn November 2012 into a repudiation of the changing demographics of the US and an opportunity to reaffirm not only the empire, but also white racial supremacy.  In addition to focusing on Obama they have been making what are now well-publicized moves toward voter suppression, with a special emphasis on denying the ballot to minority, young, formerly incarcerated and elderly voters.  This latter fact is what makes ridiculous the suggestion by some progressives that they will stay home and not vote at all.

The political right seeks an electoral turn-around reminiscent of the elections at the end of the 19th century in the South that disenfranchised African Americans and many poor whites.  This will be their way of holding back the demographic and political clocks.  And, much like the disenfranchisement efforts at the end of the 19th century, the efforts in 2012 are playing on racial fears among whites, including the paranoid notion that there has been significant voter fraud carried out by the poor and people of color (despite all of the research that demonstrates the contrary!).

Furthermore, this is part of a larger move toward greater repression, a move that began prior to Obama and has continued under him.  It is a move away from democracy as neo-liberal capitalism faces greater resistance and the privileges of the “1%” are threatened.  Specifically, the objective is to narrow the franchise in very practical terms.  The political right wishes to eliminate from voting whole segments of the population, including the poor.  Some right-wingers have even been so bold as to suggest that the poor should not be entitled to vote.

November 2012 becomes not a statement about the Obama presidency, but a defensive move by progressive forces to hold back the ‘Caligulas’ on the political right.  It is about creating space and using mass campaigning to build new grassroots organization of our own.  It is not about endorsing the Obama presidency or defending the official Democratic platform. But it is about resisting white revanchism and political misogynism by defeating Republicans and pressing Democrats with a grassroots insurgency, while advancing a platform of our own, one based on the ‘People’s Budget’ and antiwar measures of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. In short, we need to do a little ‘triangulating’ of our own.

Why do we keep getting ourselves into this hole?

Our answer to this question is fairly straight forward.  In the absence of a long-term progressive electoral strategy that is focused on winning power, we will find ourselves in this “Groundhog Day” scenario again and again.  Such a strategy cannot be limited to the running of symbolic candidates time and again as a way of rallying the troops.  Such an approach may feel good or help build socialist recruitment, but it does not win power.  Nor can we simply tail the Democrats.

The central lesson we draw from the last four years has less to do with the Obama administration and more to do with the degree of effective organization of social movements and their relationship to the White House, Congress and other centers of power.  The failure to put significant pressure on the Obama administration–combined with the lack of attention to the development of an independent progressive strategy, program and organizational base–has created a situation whereby frustration with a neo-liberal Democratic president could lead to a major demobilization. At bottom this means further rightward drift and the entry into power of the forces of irrationalism.

Crying over this situation or expressing our frustration with Obama is of little help at this point. While we will continue to push for more class struggle approaches in the campaign’s messages, the choice that we actually face in the immediate battle revolves around who would we rather fight after November 2012: Obama or Romney? Under what administration are progressives more likely to have more room to operate? Under what administration is there a better chance of winning improvements in the conditions of the progressive majority of this country? These are the questions that we need to ask.  Making a list of all of the things that Obama has not done and the fact that he was not a champion of the progressive movement misses a significant point: he was never the progressive champion.  He became, however, the demon for the political right and the way in which they could focus their intense hatred of the reality of a changing US, and, indeed, a changing world.

We urge all progressives to deal with the reality of this political moment rather than the moment we wish that we were experiencing.  In order to engage in politics, we need the organizations to do politics with, organizations that belong to us at the grassroots. That ball is in our court, not Obama’s. In 2008 and its aftermath, too many of us let that ball slip out of our hands, reducing us to sideline critics, reducing our politics to so much café chatter rather than real clout. Let’s not make that mistake again.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a racial justice, labor and international writer and activist.  He is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum, an editorial board member of BlackCommentator.com, the co-author of Solidarity Divided, and the author of the forthcoming “They’re Bankrupting Us” – And Twenty other myths about unions.  He can be reached at billfletcherjr@gmail.com

Carl Davidson is a political organizer, writer and public speaker. He is currently co-chair of Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a board member of the US Solidarity Economy Network, and a member of Steelworker Associates in Western Pennsylvania. His most recent book is ‘New Paths to Socialism: Essays on the Mondragon Cooperatives, Workplace Democracy and the Politics of Transition.’ He can be reached at carld717@gmail.com.

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
SolidarityEconomy.net via Freedomroad.org

This article was originally published on the website: Philosophers for Change, philosophers.posterous.com.

June 28, 2012 – A discussion of the future of socialism and social transformation must be grounded in two realities.  The first reality is the broader economic, environmental and state-legitimacy crises in which humanity finds itself.  In other words, the convergence of these three crises means that the necessity for a genuine Left capable of leading masses of people is more pressing than ever.  It means that while one cannot sit back and wait for the supposed “final” crisis of capitalism to open up doors to freedom — since capitalism is largely defined by its continual crises — it is the case that the convergence of these three crises brings with it a level of urgency unlike any that most of us have experienced.  Not only is there a need for a progressive, if not radical set of answers to these crises at the level of immediate reforms, but the deeper reality is that capitalism — as a system — is incapable of providing legitimate, sustainable answers to these crises, whether individually or collectively.

The second reality, and the central focus of this essay, is that any discussion of a progressive post-capitalist future must come to grips with the realization of the crisis of socialism in which every trend in the global Left has been encased.  This has been a crisis at the levels of vision, strategy, state power and organization. It is a crisis that cannot be avoided by either a retreat to pre-Bolshevik Marxism or slipping into the abyss of post-modernism.  The reality of the crisis of socialism can only be avoided at our own peril.

The crisis of socialism can be said to have emerged in the context of the Stalinist hegemony over the international communist movement, creating challenges for the global Left (and not just the orthodox communist movement) at multiple levels.  One level has been that of the question of the post-capitalist socialist state.  The revelations regarding the authoritarian rule of the Stalinist Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) shattered the sense of a genuine socialist democracy, even if one applauded the social accomplishments of the Soviet Revolution and its courageous sacrifices in the struggle against fascism.

In addition to the question of the socialist state, there emerged also the question of socialist strategy.  There was the matter of strategy in what has come to be known as the “global South” and the “global North.” In the global South, the Left-led national democratic revolutions, based on the alliance of workers and peasants, represented a major breakthrough in what had been a very Eurocentric Marxism.  The impact of the Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban Revolutions, to name only three, not only reshaped Marxism, but also had an impact on other Left as well as progressive nationalist political tendencies.  Yet by the 8th decade of the 20th century, these revolutionary currents seemed to have stalled.  The Chinese Revolution, with the death of Mao, altered course and ultimately embraced what can only be described, non-rhetorically, as a capitalist road.  Movements and state systems that Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin has described as “national populist projects,” i.e., anti-imperialist projects led by elements of the nationalist petty bourgeoisie (and in some cases the national bourgeoisie) that never fully broke with capitalism, found themselves drifting either back toward the global North or following a cynical embrace of the Soviet bloc.

Strategy plagued Marxist-led movements in the global North.  Parties and movements that embraced social democracy all but abandoned anything other than the rhetoric of socialism and quite comfortably assumed the role of guardians of the welfare state under democratic capitalism.  In many cases such parties, e.g., the British Labour Party; the French Socialist Party, while championing progressive social legislation and popular rights in their respective nation-states, also advanced a rabid defense of ‘enlightened’ colonialism and imperial privilege for countries they came to govern.

Communist parties in the global North followed a different trajectory, but in general came to develop a strategy for achieving power based largely on a non-revolutionary interpretation of the theoretical approach of Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci.  This interpretation, what the Maoists considered “revisionism” and what many other revolutionary Leftists saw as simply patently reformist, involved a protracted and largely electoral route to power.  But this route, even when it involved the creation of alternative institutions, e.g., worker cooperatives, was very gradualist and rarely able to accommodate itself to sudden shifts in the mass movements.  In fact, this approach placed a premium on the control of mass movements, and in many cases, the pacification of such movements, e.g., the French Communist Party in 1968.  These parties, not always unlike those out of social democracy, while rhetorically anti-imperialist, were inconsistent in practicing anti-imperialism against their own state/empire.

Yet the radical challenges to reformist approaches to the struggle for power had their own sets of flaws.  For much of what came to be known as the radical or revolutionary Left, there was a failure to distinguish the political vs. the ideological struggle.  As a result, there was — and in many cases continues to be — a premium placed on purity.  The anti-capitalist struggle is all too often seen as the articulation of the “correct” direction and the denunciation of anything that is perceived as inconsistently revolutionary (that is, articulation by one or another super-revolutionary group-let or self-important individual).  Such an approach, even where it has gained appeal, has been temporary, grounded in subjectivism, and inevitably led to sectarianism, and ultimately marginalization.

The crisis of socialism has also played itself out at the level of Left organization.  In the social democratic tradition the tendency became clear even before World War I with the creation of mass parties that were almost alternative universes but where there was little internal democracy.  These parties were very self-contained but were not structured to even consider the possibility of a non-electoral struggle for socialism.

The communist tradition, on the other hand, largely based itself on the mythology of the Bolshevik Party, as advanced by the Stalinist bloc within the CPSU.  Admittedly this conception of the party was applied differently in different settings, but these parties tended to be highly centralized and frequently resistant to organized, principled internal struggle.[i] That said, in many countries communist parties became truly mass parties with varying levels of internal participation and membership activities.  In the global North they moved away from a self-conception of being insurrectionist parties. In many countries these communist parties, particularly those influenced by Soviet Marxism, paid less and less attention to the lower strata of the working class and agricultural populations. The radical Left, in response, sought a pure form of revolutionary organization to stand in contrast to the so-called revisionist or reformist formations that they perceived were misleading the masses.  Such pure organizations were ideally suited for individuals in their teen years or twenties but not for those who had a more protracted view of struggle.  They were also not conceptualized in such a way that they could build the sorts of strategic alliances necessary in order to conduct a serious struggle for power.

Efforts at renewalThe crisis of socialism has met with various efforts at renewal since the 1950s.  Maoism, for instance, represented an effort, from the Left, to address the stagnation of Soviet-based Marxism and the bureaucratization of the Soviet state and party (and the resulting creation of a new, dominating class).[ii] And while Maoism pushed the limits on Marxist-Leninist theory, it retreated at key moments, such as on the nature of the role of the masses in a revolutionary state, and the legitimacy (or otherwise) of a multi-party socialism.  Neo-Trotskyism saw itself also as a force for renewal.  Other Left tendencies that arose in the 1960s and 1970s, such as the Autonomists (in Italy and elsewhere), additionally positioned themselves as forces for socialist and/or Left renewal.

Despite the strengths of many of these tendencies, in the global South and global North, the fact remained that the radical Left failed to find a ‘remedy’ to the crisis of socialism, at least in its entirety.  Instead these political tendencies declined by the 1980s and while the case can certainly be made that there are countries where the Left movements of the 1960s have continued (and in some cases grown), as a global phenomenon there has been decline on the part of the radical Left that arose out of the 1960s/1970s, sometimes with the result that other non-left-wing, though seemingly radical currents have emerged to fill the void.

Yet a new set of Left renewal efforts began to surface beginning in the 1980s, sometimes introducing innovative theories and strategies while other times stalling (if not collapsing).  There is no consistency to such renewal efforts and they must all be understood in their particular circumstances.  That said, such efforts can be said to include but not be limited to: the rectification efforts that took place in the Communist Party of the Philippines (beginning in the early 1990s); the collapse of the Italian Communist Party followed by the emergence of the Rifondazione Communista (Communist Refoundation) tendency; the formation of the Brazilian Workers Party (PT); the rise of the Nepalese Maoists; the reformation within the South African Communist Party; liberation theology as it rose in both Latin America and, in a different variant, within the Black Freedom Movement in the USA; the emergence of Germany’s Die Linke (party of the Left); and more recently, pro-socialist movements in Latin America (advocating what they describe as being “21st Century Socialism”) as well as the construction of the Front de Gauche in France.

Regardless of the answers that they offered, what these and other efforts have shared in common has been a willingness to confront some of the major challenges in the crisis of socialism and move to articulate answers, and in some cases, new paths for exploration. This does not suggest that any of them have come up with ‘The Answer’ or that they have necessarily been correct in their analyses.  What is admirable is the courage at the level of theory to face what, to many, has been the Gorgon.  Several of these formations have been reexamining the role of electoral politics in the struggle for socialism, and more generally examining the alliances necessary in order to defeat capitalism and win a popular-democratic victory.  Some of the formations have been exploring the limits of armed struggle in the current age, particularly when contrasted with other forms of more non-violent though highly militant struggle.  And in almost every case, the limitations of the notion of a single, revolutionary party to both conduct the popular struggle but to also lead in a post-capitalist situation have been recognized, though what is left unanswered is the question of what are the real parameters that must exist for democratic, political discourse and action in a progressive, post-capitalist social formation.

These efforts at renewal have been largely within the context of the organized Left or what Chilean theoretician Marta Harnecker defines as the “party Left.” Other efforts have emerged within progressive social movements, such as Brazil’s famous Landless Workers Movement (MST) or the poor people’s movements in South Africa.  What distinguishes these efforts is that they are largely initiated or led by a core of Leftists but not necessarily individuals affiliated with an existing national Left organization or party.  The leftists in these formations did not necessarily emerge themselves from these struggles but in either case have made these struggles and movements their base.  Their framework is also not necessarily one that involves an over-arching narrative or strategic orientation, though this does not mean that they are opposed to such frameworks/orientation.  Rather, their principal ‘universe’ is that specific social movement.  In these progressive social movements, however, they tend to push for what was once termed “non-reformist reforms” (Andre Gorz) that challenges the nature of the system.  Such reforms, it should be quickly noted, are not pie-in-the-sky or ideological platitudes.  Rather they exist as visionary but eminently practical mass actions for social transformation, albeit focused in one sector.

Left renewal efforts within this sector in part reflects disenchantment and skepticism concerning the capacity of the organized Left to address the questions that have emerged from within the crisis of socialism.  In Latin America, for instance, movements among the Indigenous and the African descendant populations have frequently concluded that Left party and party-type efforts have either ignored them outright or marginalized their issues in the name of class or national sovereignty.  In many cases, the Left’s leadership has lacked real representation and a base from within the Indigenous and African descendant populations, as well as from among women.

As a result the mass formations that have emerged in these progressive social movements are very different from parties. They seek autonomy from parties and are not particularly interested in being perceived as instruments of party formations.  Many of them will coalesce, certainly in defensive battles, but also for certain offensive struggles, but this is not necessarily the same thing as the building of a national Left front fighting for power.

Harnecker has correctly argued that the future for genuine renewal rests with the unity of the organized Left/party Left and the Left that exists within the social movements.  The ultimate nature of that unity remains a question, but this writer would suggest that it would necessarily be a party-like formation or front that exists at a higher level than a confederation.

We should add that another source of renewal that has existed in relationship to the Left of the social movements has been the global justice movement.  Weakened in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks (and the repression, both physical and ideological immediately following), the global justice movement launched a serious challenge to neo-liberal globalization.  The mass demonstrations, such as in Seattle (1999) and Quebec (2001), to name just two, opened up a public discourse on the manner in which wealth and power were reshaping the planet.

The 11th September attacks took the wind out of the sails of this movement, in part by making, at least in the USA, such mass expressions of outrage appear to be “unpatriotic.” Additionally, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, increasingly repressive legislation was introduced throughout the capitalist world in order to weaken or suppress outright militant activism, all in the name of fighting alleged terrorism.  While the global justice movement was not crushed altogether, it had to shift gears.  Some elements of it made a successful transition into the global anti-war movements against US aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Some have been mobilized around Palestine and the growing Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions Movement.  But the thrust of the anti-neo-liberal globalization effort was blunted and no longer a focal point of discussion, at least until relatively recently.

The Arab democratic uprising and the rise of mass Left radicalismThe reshaping of the global Left, and quite possibly global politics, may have been found in the Arab democratic uprising (what some call the “Arab Spring” or Arab Democratic Revolution) that kicked off with the December 2010 rising in Tunisia. Though none of these uprisings can be described as “Left”, at least in traditional terms, and though in some places the Left played a role in the uprisings, e.g., Tunisia, the scale and scope of the uprisings has been so significant so as to send shockwaves around the planet that go beyond the Left.  In effect these uprisings were anti-neo-colonial and objectively anti-neo-liberal.  They were mass and were not religiously inspired (though drew upon various faiths for inspiration).[iii] And, contrary to many prior risings in the Arab World, they were not coups but rather were mass interventions that in many cases brought normal life to a halt.

The Arab democratic uprisings altered discussions about politics and resistance, much as did the Paris Commune in 1871.  The Paris Commune took the world by surprise.  It was a mass intervention rather than a coup in the middle of a crisis.  It was popular and democratic, and a rising of the urban poor and disenfranchised.  Both became major sources of inspiration.  And both raised or have raised significant questions regarding the struggle for power.  In the case of the Arab risings, the despairing populations in Europe and later the USA found encouragement in the scale of opposition to tyranny.  While the Arab risings were primarily aimed against authoritarian puppet regimes, the risings that started to spread across Europe (and later the USA in the form of both the Madison, Wisconsin demonstrations of early 2011 and later the Occupy Wall Street/Occupy Together Movement) were against economic tyranny.

The risings in Europe and the USA, although inspired by the Arab democratic uprising, illustrated the emergence of another, albeit complicated source of Left renewal, something we could define as mass Left radicalism.  “Mass Left radicalism” in this case refers to a phenomenon of non-specific, multi-tendencied radicalism that has a real, though somewhat amorphous popular base.  It is not glued to one or another social movement but it is also not a coherent project.  It is an expression of a progressive undercurrent of opposition to neo-liberal capitalism but it has not translated, at least so far, into a specific political party or force.  It has found expression in massive demonstrations against austerity but also challenges to gentrification in many major cities around the globe.  It has become the voice of the alienated, or at least a portion of the alienated, but is different in its fundamentals from the right-wing populism that has also arisen in the context of the crises facing the capitalist world.

The manifestations of mass Left radicalism tend to be ambivalent with regard to the objective of state power. In part influenced by both modern anarchism and Zapatatismo, the popular expressions of much of this radicalism have taken the form of open resistance to neo-liberalism and austerity rather than a concerted fight for power.  In fact, there are elements of the Left that contend that fighting for power itself is problematic and that it should not be the objective of a Left project to do so.

To use a historical reference point, the Paris Commune was an uprising of the Paris working class but it was not an uprising of the French working class.  In other words, the Communards succeeded in gaining control of Paris but they did not launch or catalyze a national revolution (national in the sense of national in scale) though they hoped that others would join their movement. But they did not see themselves as limiting their struggle to Paris alone.

Both the Zapatista uprising of 1994 in Chiapas, Mexico, but also the Occupy movement — at least in the USA — did not or have not set as objectives the winning of state power.  While one can argue that the Communards in 1871 would have eventually gone for national state power in France, in the case of the Zapatistas and much of Occupy, a conscious decision seems to have been made against such an objective.[iv] While these movements are all quite different in scale, strategy, etc., they, at least at the time of the writing of this essay, share a sense of resistance framed more in terms of building an alternative to which they wish people to rally rather than articulating an alternative vision in the context of the fight for power.  The Paris Commune, probably due to circumstances, began the creation of a new society while Paris was under siege by the Germans and later by the collaborationist forces of the newly formed Third Republic.  In Chiapas the Zapatistas made the strategic decision to not make a move toward national state power, though they exist in a dual power situation in that state.  The Occupy Movement represented a statement against the toxicity of neo-liberalism.  Its leaders chose to stay away from proclamations and program.

The difficulty with all efforts that shy away from platforms and the fight for state power is that they actually misdiagnose the nature and objectives of the capitalist ruling bloc and, in so doing, create problems for any Left renewal effort.  The capitalist ruling bloc has no interest in a dual power situation or a situation of gross instability.  If a progressive social movement is not advancing, it will find itself retreating, at least eventually.  So, occupying space, no pun intended, brings with it the inevitable challenge of being encircled by the enemy and the exhaustion of the mass movement.  The Paris Commune could only have succeeded to the extent to which the insurrection spread to other parts of France and, thereby, undermined both the Third Republic and the Germans.  This takes nothing away from the Commune, nor anything away from the Zapatista uprising or the Occupy Movement.  It speaks more to limitations that need to be considered from the standpoint of movement objectives and strategy.

Mass Left radicalism can become a current within which a more coherent Left can emerge.  By “coherent” we mean both organizationally cohesive but also a movement with more clearly defined objectives that focus on power.  That result, however, is not inevitable given the existence of an ideological approach that, as mentioned previously, discounts the notion of the fight for state power.

The question of who makes historyThe emergence of the Occupy movement, and similar such phenomena in other parts of the world, is both symptomatic of the crisis of socialism and an attempt at Left renewal.  It is symptomatic in the sense that it speaks to the skepticism regarding political parties and state structures.  The thesis of the Occupy movement, to the extent to which there is a consensual thesis, is that the system is so rotten that progressive and Left forces must reject it and build an alternative.  While the assertion of the rottenness of the capitalist system is certainly correct, the approach that has been advanced by many forces associated with the Occupy movement represents a problematic strategy.

From the standpoint of the radical Left (including, but not limited to anarchists, communists, revolutionary socialists, revolutionary anti-imperialists), the capitalist system is rotten and cannot be fundamentally repaired.  That is a basic truism.  Yet there is a long distance between that assertion or conclusion and the realization of a progressive/revolutionary alternative society.  That distance can only be traversed through the construction of a strategy, program and organization(s) in order to make it happen.

It is here that a distinction develops, both in theory and practice, between anarchism and revolutionary socialism.  Contained within anarchism is the notion of exemplary action as the cornerstone of all work and the worshipping of the spontaneous movement.  The true revolutionaries, from the standpoint of anarchism, must — through their own behavior and actions — demonstrate the alternative course to which the masses must gravitate.  For revolutionary socialism, while the actions of the organized forces are critical, they are so only and insofar as they unite with the actual experiences, concerns and hopes of masses of the oppressed and dispossessed.  In other words, it is the masses that make history rather than a committed few.  This is where revolutionary socialism and anarchism diverge.  Ideological anarchists[v] tend to privilege the activities of the committed few who, through exemplary action, will inspire the masses forward, as if no preparatory work (including political education) is necessary.

It is true that throughout the 20th century there were those who embraced Marxism though followed paths that were not altogether different from anarchists.  Regardless of their courage and commitment — or the courage or commitment of anarchists — the approach represented by ideological anarchism misses the point regarding change and social transformation.  Change and social transformation must be brought about through mass action and mass intervention.  This means that a critical proportion of the oppressed and dispossessed must not only be inspired by the conscious radical forces but must themselves understand and embrace the change process that they wish to see play out.

The Stalinist approach to change was to introduce change from above.  It assumed that the revolutionary party was the equivalent of a purist religious sect that held a monopoly on the truth.  The concerns of the masses were always to be interpreted through the Party, thus there was no need for any forms of real mass representation, and certainly no need for alternative political structures that might contest with the Party.

Anarchists, of course, rejected Stalinist theory and practice, but at the same time fell prey to two problems.  One error was that of spontaneism.  The second was that of exemplary behavior, as mentioned earlier.  The spontaneism of anarchism is a formulation that believes that the masses will come to revolutionary conclusions on their own.  Within this framework organizing and activity is important at the level of campaigns and struggle, but political education and organization, not to mention conscious strategy is ignored if not perceived as a problem.  Spontaneism dovetails with ‘exemplary action’ in that those who hold to the latter believe that through their own actions the masses will rally to the ‘correct’ course.  In neither case do the masses end up making history, however.  In the case of spontaneism, the impact of reactionary culture (depending on the society it could be bourgeois, feudal or pre-feudal) is ignored with respect to its bearing on the consciousness of the oppressed.  Action is given a premium at the expense of theory and consciousness.

As positive as have been the eruptions in Europe and North America in opposition to the worst features of neo-liberal globalization, they potentially run aground to the extent to which they are influenced by anarchist frameworks.  The massive actions against austerity, for instance, in the absence of a program and strategy for power means that those in action are presumed to have an understanding of what happens if mass demonstrations fail to halt the course of neo-liberalism.  There is no reason that one should believe this to be the case.  Masses of the dispossessed, after demonstrating in their hundreds of thousands and yet seeing the ruling elites pursue reactionary courses, can come to any number of conclusions, not the least being the erroneous conclusion that mass action does not work.  For this reason mass action, theory and strategy must be seen as integral components for a movement for social transformation.  No one component can stand alone.

To be clear, none of this is aimed at trivializing (or “trashing”) either the Occupy movement or the movements in Europe (and elsewhere) against austerity.  They have been visionary, courageous and audacious! The challenge, as it was for Marx and Engels in examining the experience of the Paris Commune, is to establish the lessons to be learned, not only in this case from the Occupy and anti-austerity movements, but from responses to the crisis of socialism, and from there to then suggest a path forward.

Refounding the Left In the aftermath of the defeat of the Paris Commune Marx and Engels had to reflect on that experience and question some of their own propositions.  This level of both self-analysis and self-criticism has been repeated occasionally in Left circles, but more frequently the radical Left holds onto certain ideological assertions as basic canon rather than making a concrete and exhaustive analysis.

Addressing the crisis of socialism is our ‘post-Paris Commune’ moment, that is, we on the Left are called upon to assess the socialist experience in the 20th century rather than assessing one specific instance of the class struggle (as important as was that examination in the case of the Paris Commune or today in assessing the Arab democratic revolutions, the anti-austerity movements and Occupy).  Several important theorists have begun doing this work, such as Samir Amin, Marta Harnecker and Michael Lebowitz, not to mention leaders in some of the parties and organizations noted earlier in this essay.  For the remainder of this essay we will suggest a few propositions for further exploration as part of a process of Left renewal or refoundation.

The theory and practice of socialism: How should we understand socialism? We need to answer this in two ways with the first being at the level of theory and practice; the second, at the level of society.  At the level of theory and practice, socialism must be a phenomenon which is revolutionary, Marxist and democratic.  This distinguishes or should distinguish 21st century socialism[vi], at both the levels of theory and practice, from much of what went by the name of socialism in the 20th century.

Revolutionary: In the 1960s and 1970s much of the Left defined “revolutionary” in terms of either armed struggle; the rejection of the reform struggle (and those who engaged in it); and the nature of demands.  In the 21st century we must break with one-dimensional thinking.  The “revolutionary” in socialism must involve the extent to which it is prepared to introduce new theory and penetrating critiques.  Revolutionary must exist at the level of experimenting with new forms of organization and engagement. Revolutionary must also exist at the level of being focused on social transformation rather than being limited to social reform, and as such the need for a prioritization of the organization of the masses to emancipate themselves from all forms of oppression.

Marxist: Marxism offers a frame of analysis which is, simply put, unparalleled in revolutionary theory.  The dialectical analysis and the materialist conception of history exist as frameworks without which a true revolutionary movement will be stymied. But to say that the socialism of the 21st century must be Marxist does not mean holding on, uncritically, to various propositions from the 19th and 20th centuries.  A case in point would be how one views imperialism.  The nature of global capitalism has changed significantly since the publication of Lenin’s Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, yet too many people on the Left insist that the current realities must be fit into Lenin’s framework rather than studying the current reality and trends of global capitalism in order to come to appropriate conclusions.  Samir Amin and, in a separate way, William Robinson, though coming to somewhat different conclusions, have worked to understand the nature of actually existing global capitalism rather than using Lenin’s conclusions as the starting point.  It is the framework that matters.

Democratic: The “d” word has been used and abused.  The states that were formed in the aftermath of World War II in Eastern Europe were self-defined “people’s democracies” yet, particularly from 1948 onward, they were anything but that, despite often remarkable social service programs and educational institutions.  This use of the world “democracy” did great damage to the work of the Left.  Separately, and particularly since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the “d” word has been used increasingly in the mainstream, capitalist media.  In bourgeois discourse the term really means multi-party elections in an environment that favors a capitalist economy.  From the standpoint of genuine socialism, “democratic” should have a different meaning.  Learning the painful lessons from the experience of Stalin’s Soviet Union or the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia/Kampuchea, we must appreciate that “democratic” is not a rhetorical term nor should it be simply a vague objective.  “Democratic” should reference both a practice and an objective.  That is, socialists must be the strongest advocates for what Lenin called “consistent democracy”, including at the economic and political levels, but also democratic at the level of the operations of socialist organizations and mass organizations.  The recognition of the need for independent organizations out of progressive social movements has been a major advance in socialist theory and practice, but it must be understood that such recognition is not only for the period of struggle under capitalism but also for socialism.  And the negative experiences that have emerged under so-called actually existing socialism should teach us that democracy means real popular control. The State: The contemporary Latin American Left, along with the Nepalese Maoists, South African Communists and others, has raised some significant questions regarding the matter of the capitalist state.  Marx and Engels, as one may remember, in reviewing the experience of the Paris Commune, suggested that one of the lessons of the Commune was the need for a worker’s movement to smash the capitalist state.  Lenin, in his famous treatise, State and Revolution, reiterated this point, emphasizing the need for the withering away of the state once the oppressed had gained power.

Antonio Gramsci, while not disagreeing with these conclusions, nevertheless focused his attention on the challenge of building up an historic bloc of popular-democratic forces in favor of socialism during non-revolutionary periods leading to the eventual seizure of power.  One of Gramsci’s great contributions was to frame much of his analysis in terms of the specificity of Italy and the challenge of the largely northern Italian working class allying with the southern Italian peasantry (in a situation where southern Italians and Sicilians were — and continue today — to be viewed by many northerners as a separate and despised nation).  Yet the overarching challenge for Gramsci was the notion of hegemony and the work of the popular-democratic bloc in becoming a counter-hegemonic force in the struggle for socialism.

Gramsci was interpreted by some in the communist movement and other parts of the Left as suggesting a more reformist go-slow approach to change.[vii] This would be a misreading of Gramsci.  Gramsci recognized that a Left strategy would collapse into reformism without a clear sense of conducting a total/all-round struggle against capitalist hegemony.  Contrary to many of the European Communist Parties that claimed to adhere to Gramsci’s framework, this struggle went beyond electoral politics but it placed a premium on the building of alliances and ultimately a bloc that would be capable of seizing power, representing the oppressed and dispossessed.

The actual practice of some of the newer Left forces in Latin America, by way of example, help one understand the complexity of such a course of action.  It begins with the recognition that the ideal opportunity for gaining power never arises.  There are, however, moments when the Left is better positioned to gain power, either as part of a coalition or leading a coalition, but where the mandate of such a coalition may not be for the complete elimination of the democratic capitalist state, at least not all at once.

A contrasting example may help to make the point.  In 1979 on the island of Grenada in the Caribbean, an uprising brought to power a revolutionary force known as the New Jewel Movement.  Led by Maurice Bishop, these were Left forces who took on a corrupt tyranny.  The uprising had widespread popular support.  Over the next four years the regime — referred to on the island as the “Revo” — encountered serious challenges.  They organized themselves along traditional Marxist-Leninist lines, despite the fact that this was not a socialist revolution and the NJM was not a Marxist-Leninist party.  But the NJM functioned more and more like one and created NJM-controlled mass organizations.  By 1983 the “Revo” was in trouble and the leadership knew this.  The coup against Bishop, which ultimately led to his murder, was carried out by pro-Soviet Marxists led by Bernard Coard.[viii] What Coard and his followers failed to acknowledge was the nature of the popular mandate that the NJM had won.  They were supported as an anti-imperialist/anti-corruption/anti-tyranny effort, but they did not have popular support for a transition to socialism.  Coard fell into a Stalinist framework and believed that a removal of the current leadership could force the Revo forward.  He was tragically wrong on so many levels.

Any Left movement that has the possibility of gaining power, whether at a national level or sub-national level, must assess the nature of the popular mandate.  In the cases of Venezuela and Bolivia, in particular, despite contradictions and challenges within the governing coalitions, they seem to have focused on just that question.  In other words, whether the Left is elected to office or gains office through an insurrection is not enough to ascertain the nature of the process that is to unfold.  The question that must be addressed is how do the masses understand the nature of the process and what mandate have they offered such a project.

For these reasons the Left coming to power in a democratic capitalist state brings with it a whole series of challenges.  To what extent is the radical Left (and we are making a distinction between a legitimate, radical Left and a reformist Left) placed in the position that is familiar to social democrats, i.e., of managing a democratic capitalist state? In the alternative, can the Left begin, even under the conditions of democratic capitalism, the process of a movement for social transformation?

A movement for social transformation cannot wait until the seizure of state power and the beginning of the construction of socialism.  It becomes the task of the Left to advance a project for social transformation even under democratic capitalism.  The framework for such an approach can be found in both Gramsci and, indeed, Lenin.  Lenin’s advocacy of the position of the Left as being the chief advocates for consistent democracy should mean that it is the radical Left that is advancing a program and practice for the democratization of society.  This includes, but is not limited to significant structural reforms that improve the basic lives of the people but also involves opening up the means and opportunities for the oppressed to educate and free themselves.  As has been seen in parts of Latin America, this necessitates a struggle over the very constitution of the state and a fight to democratize that constitution in such a way to begin to break the back of ruling elite.  To borrow from Harnecker, the rules of the “game” must be changed in favor of democracy and in favor of the oppressed.

This struggle, however, also necessitates the sorts of alliances that Gramsci suggested and a distancing of the Left from organizational or class sectarianism and instead favoring an approach toward strategic alliances or strategic blocs whose aim it is to build a power sharing relationship among the oppressed.

Dictatorship of the proletariat: Marx and Engels barely defined the notion of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and as a result it was largely Lenin and later Stalin who placed an imprint on the concept. In looking at the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat there are really two questions that emerge.  The first is whether the concept is basically correct.  The second is whether, largely for historical reasons, the term is compromised.The notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, when examined from the standpoint of Marx’s all too brief writings on the subject, has nothing to do with a “dictatorship” in the manner in which the term is commonly used.  The closest reference point would probably be “hegemony” as articulated by Gramsci. Even in Lenin’s State and Revolution the dictatorship of the proletariat comes across as something other than a traditionally defined dictatorship.  Instead it refers to the leadership of a class and suggests that at all points the state is used as an instrument of one class against another (or against several others).  The dictatorship of the proletariat, then, is supposed to be a state of the working class, organized in such a way as to ensure the widest democracy and the suppression not only of the bourgeoisie but of the reactionary practices that had been inherited from earlier eras.  It is also supposed to be a state during a period of transition, that is, a state structure for socialism which itself is a period of transition between capitalism and a classless society (and, as a result, the state will wither away).

While the theory is good, and was re-articulated in a very comprehensive manner in the 1970s by Etienne Balibar in his rigorous book On the dictatorship of the proletariat, the term is associated with authoritarianism.  While one can argue whether the Stalinist system was actually socialist vs. a perverse form of state capitalism, the fact remains that in the popular mind the dictatorship of the proletariat means one-party rule, secret police, Gulags, etc.  It seems, to the average person, to fly in the face of the Left’s historic practice of fighting in favor of democracy, civil liberties, equality and the rights of minorities.  It is with this in mind that one can say that in much of the global North there is a popular hatred of capitalism but there is a fear of socialism.

As a result the crisis of socialism compels the Left to examine the question of the process of socialism, but the terminology as well.  The Left cannot favor dictatorships.  It must favor popular, revolutionary democracies that expand the rights and activities of the oppressed and narrow the field for the oppressors.  It must be in favor of a system that takes on all forms of oppression but gives the means and opportunities for different views to contend without the fear that someone will end up dead or incarcerated for expressions of alleged heresy.  And, the reality is that it must do all of this under conditions that are less than favorable, conditions that include external capitalist forces/powers seeking to undermine socialism and internal reactionary forces that wish to turn back the clock.

Socialist organization: There have been a variety of organizational experiences within socialist movements.  One cannot come to sweeping conclusions about each and every form.  That said, one conclusion that can be arrived at is that structure follows function.  To put it another way, the actual form of an organization should flow from its purpose and from the actual conditions under which it is operating.  In that sense, the efforts carried out by the Communist (Third) International at what was called “Bolshevization” (an effort to transform all communist parties into a form dictated by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) were problematic in that they assumed that there was only one form of revolutionary organization.  It was additionally problematic in that this process was based on a mythical notion of what the Bolsheviks had looked like in their pre-revolutionary days.The form of organization must begin by an understanding of the state structure in the territory in which an organization or party is operating.  In that sense it is quite interesting that Marx and Engels did not focus their attention on one and only one form of organization, seemingly recognizing that organizations could exist in multiple forms.  Specifically, the form does not make an organization radical, revolutionary, or for that matter reformist.  The content of its theory and practice, however, do.

In a situation of high levels of state repression, Left forces cannot operate as openly as they would within less authoritarian variants of capitalism.  But even in situations of alleged democratic capitalism, such as the United States, the history of the repression of the Left and the repression of freedom movements of oppressed nationalities (e.g., African Americans, Chicanos/Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, Asian Americans), has meant that not all Left formations can operate openly.

Govt1

Relationship to anarchists: Anarchists have reemerged as a potent force on the Left particularly in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet bloc.  Their critique of actually existing socialism (what many of us would define as either a contradictory socialism or in some cases state capitalism) is frequently persuasive, viscerally if not analytically.  And they have become very active forces in the global justice movement, environmental movements, and certainly in the Occupy movement.It would be a mistake to dismiss anarchists (ideological or non-ideological anarchists) and/or to make reference to 19th century polemics between Marx and Bakunin.  The non-anarchist revolutionary Left must see in modern anarchism the results of our failures.  Modern anarchism is a product of the crisis of socialism.

The non-anarchist revolutionary Left needs to embrace anarchists as distant cousins rather than enemies.  This does not mean that we embrace anarchism.  We can and should continue to hold to a strong analysis of the problems with anarchism but we should look at most anarchists as comrades in a common struggle against capitalism.  To some extent they are our conscience in the struggle against bureaucracy and any and all forms of restoration of oppressive regimes.

None of this should suggest that the relationship is or will be easy.  There are significant strategic and tactical differences with anarchists, as there frequently are with other Left trends.  But to treat them as enemies runs many risks, not the least of which is sectarianism.  To the extent to which anarchists appeal to younger radicals, the non-anarchist revolutionary Left runs the risk of being perceived as oblivious to the criticisms of actually existing socialism shared by many younger activists.  It is our job to listen and respond to such concerns and criticisms.  Frequently there is a firm basis upon which to unite, while at the same time the non-anarchist revolutionary Left is compelled to struggle with the philosophical idealism inherent in anarchism, particularly its failure to recognize what is involved in the course of making a transition away from capitalism.

There are a host of other areas for deeper exploration, self-criticism and new theory, including but not limited to gender, race/nationality and the environment.  Time and space do not permit such an examination here.  Suffice it to say that a renewal of the radical Left must necessitate not a regurgitation of 19th and 20th century platitudes on these areas, as if that will reinforce our ideological lineage, but rather an examination of the structures and movements in these areas.  A renewed Left must establish that it can and will learn from the forces on the ground involved in such movements while at the same time utilizing the Marxist method in order to link these struggles and movements into an overall narrative that favors the oppressed.  Carrying out such work involves more than the circulation of ideas and even rigorous analyses; it necessitates well-grounded and clearheaded Left organization that can link the practioners and the theorists, making each both.

Notes:

[i] There are important qualifications to make here.  Internal struggle is inevitable and took place within Stalinist-influenced parties.  How the struggle unfolded and was resolved, however, was the critical question.  The parameters for internal struggle were increasingly narrowed as Stalinist Marxism gained hegemony.  Within the Trotskyist tradition, there was the theoretical justification for internal factions but this did not necessarily mean that the internal life was any more democratic.

[ii] “Maoism” must be understood as a term referencing both (1) a theoretical and ideological orientation of the ruling Communist Party of China from the middle 1950s through 1978 regarding the construction of socialism, and, separately, (2) a movement, set of theories, inspirations, etc., that people elsewhere drew from the Chinese experience regarding the questions of the struggle for and construction of socialism.

[iii] It is important to not analyze backwards and look at the rise of Islamist formations in the aftermath of these Arab democratic uprisings as somehow meaning that the uprisings themselves were religious.  The Islamists, often due to on-again/off-again complicity with the tyrannical regimes and the USA, were among the best organized of the forces on the ground.  Thus, even though the uprisings drew upon various political, religious and ideological tendencies, many of these tendencies had been severely repressed over the years and did not have the organizational strength to win mass leadership.  It should also be added that there was an ideological tendency in some of these movements that downplayed the actual need for coherent organization and believed that the mass uprisings would lead themselves.

[iv] To be clear, we are not suggesting that Occupy is a revolutionary movement on the scale of the Paris Commune.  Among other things, it is a movement inspired by radicalism.  Additionally, we are suggesting that there is a certain approach to the entire “power” question contained within much of the Occupy movement that is not dissimilar from interpretations of Zapatismo in much of the global North.

[v] We use the term “ideological anarchists” and “ideological anarchism” to differentiate those whose worldview is or has been shaped by a conscious embrace of the theory and practice of anarchism vs. those who emerge in various mass movements utterly disenchanted with mainstream politics, government and political forces and may spontaneously react against the errors of 20th century socialism.  The former group would be those we would define as “ideological anarchists”.

[vi] We are using the term generically.  The specific term “21st century socialism” became popularized in Venezuela under President Hugo Chavez.  For some it has come to mean a specific road as followed in Latin America by movements such as those in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador.  We are using the term far more generically as referencing a socialism for this century, including but not limited to the experiments underway in Latin America.

[vii] Beginning with the post-World War II Italian Communist Party led by Palmiro Togliatti.

[viii] “Pro-Soviet” in their ideological orientation.  This is not to suggest that they were operating under orders from the USSR. Dubois1

The writer is a racial justice, labor and international activist. He is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies (Washington, D.C.), serves on the editorial board of BlackCommentator.com, is the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum, and is the co-author (with Dr. Fernando Gapasin) of Solidarity Divided (a book which analyzes the crisis of the US trade union movement). He can be reached at billfletcherjr@gmail.com.

Tearing Away the Veils: The Communist Manifesto

The following essay is the introduction to the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of the Communist Manifesto, published this March.

TODAY, IN the early-twenty-first century, the Communist Manifesto is far less read than it once was. It is hard for people who are just growing up to grasp the way in which, for most of the twentieth century, Communist governments dominated much of the world. Communist educational systems were powerful and successful in many ways. But they were twisted in the way they canonized Marx and Engels as official patron saints. It is hard for people who have grown up without patron saints—Americans should not be too hasty to include themselves—to grasp this idea. But for decades, all over the world, any candidate for advancement in a Communist organization was expected to know certain passages and themes from Marx’s writings by heart, and to quote them fluently. (And expected notto know many other Marxian ideas: ideas of alienated labor, ideas of domination by the state, ideas of freedom.)

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the communist political system came apart remarkably fast. All over Central and Eastern Europe, Marx and Engels monuments were torn down. Pictures of people doing this were page-one material for a while. Some people noted skeptically that tearing down public monuments requires lots of organization, and wondered who was doing this organizing. Whatever the answers, it seems certain that, at the end of the twentieth century, there were plenty of ex-citizens of Communist police states who felt that life without Marx was liberation.

Ironically, this thrill was shared by people who were most devoted to Marx. Readers who love writers do not want to see them erected as Sunday-school sages. They can—I should say we can—only be thrilled by this loss of sanctity. Marx’s canonization after 1917 by Communist governments was a disaster. A thinker needs beatification like a hole in the head!

Intellectuals all over the world have welcomed this end-of-the-century crash as a fortunate fall. One of my old bosses at City College, who had grown up under Communist governments in Eastern Europe, said now that the Wall was down, I shouldn’t be allowed to teach Marx anymore, because “1989 proves that courses in Marxism are obsolete.” I told him today’s Marx, without police states, was a lot more exciting than yesterday’s patron saint. Now we could have direct access to a thinker who could lead us through the dynamics and contradictions of capitalist life. He laughed then. But by the end of the century, it seemed that the thrill had caught on. John Cassidy, the New Yorker magazine’s financial correspondent, told us in 1997 that Wall Street itself was full of study groups going through Marx’s writings, trying to grasp and synthesize many of the ideas that are central to his work: “globalization, inequality, political corruption, modernization, impoverishment, technological progress…the enervating nature of modern existence….” He was “the next great thinker” on the Street.

We can learn more about these things from the Communist Manifesto than from any book ever written. Much of its excitement derives from the idea that an enormous range of modern phenomena are connected. Sometimes Marx tries to explain the connections; other times, he just puts some things close to others, and leaves it for us to work it out.

What are Marx’s connections like? First—and startling when you’re not prepared for it—is praise for capitalism so extravagant, it skirts the edge of awe. Very early on, in “Part One: Bourgeois and Proletarians,” Marx describes the processes of material construction that it perpetrates, and the emotions that go with them. He is distinctive in the way he connects historical processes and emotions. He highlights the sense of being caught up in something magical, uncanny:

The bourgeoisie has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways…clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of he ground—what earlier century had any idea that such productive powers slumbered in the womb of social labor?

 

Or, a page before, on an innate dynamism that is spiritual as well as material:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society….Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air; all that is holy is profaned; and man is forced to face his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

 

This first section of the Manifesto contains many passages like these, asserted in major chords. Marx’s contemporaries didn’t miss them, and some of his fellow radicals, like Proudhon and Bakunin, saw his appreciation of capitalism as a betrayal of its victims. This charge is still heard today, and deserves serious response. Marx hates capitalism, but he also thinks it has brought immense real benefits, spiritual as well as material, and he wants the benefits to be spread around and enjoyed by everybody, rather than monopolized by a small ruling class. This is very different from the totalitarian rage that typifies radicals who want to blow it all away. Sometimes, as with Proudhon, it is just modern times they hate: they dream of golden-age peasant villages where everyone was happily in his place (or in her place just behind him). For other radicals, from the author of the Book of Revelation to Thomas Müntzer to Joseph Conrad’s Verloc to the Unabomber, it goes over the edge into something like rage against reality, against human life itself. Apocalyptic rage offers immediate, sensational cheap thrills. Marx’s perspective is more complex and nuanced, and hard to sustain if you’re not grown up. On the other hand, if you are grown up, and attuned to a world full of complexity and ambiguity, Marx may fit you better than you thought.

Marx is not the first communist to admire capitalism for its creativity. This attitude can be found in some of the great “utopian socialists” of the generation before him, like Robert Owen and Saint-Simon and their brilliant followers. But Marx is the first writer to invent a style that brings this creativity to light before the early-twentieth century. (In French, with Baudelaire and Rimbaud, poetic language was a few decades ahead.) For readers who have grown up on T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and their successors, it shouldn’t be a problem to see how the Manifesto is a great piece of poetry. It throws together an enormous range of things and ideas that no one ever thought to throw together before. If you can get a feeling for Marx’s horizon, it will help to make the modern world make sense.

We could call the Manifesto’s style a kind of expressionist lyricism. Paragraphs break over us like waves that leave us shaking from the impact and wet with thought. This prose evokes breathless momentum, plunging ahead without guides or maps, breaking boundaries, piling up and layering things, ideas, experiences. Catalogues play a big role for Marx—as they do for his contemporaries Dickens and Whitman. Part of the enchantment of this style is the feeling that the lists are never exhausted, the catalogue is open to the present and the future, we are invited to pile on things, ideas, and experiences of our own, to pile ourselves on if we can find a way. But the items in the pile often seem to clash, and sometimes it feels like the whole aggregation could crash. From paragraph to paragraph, Marx makes readers feel like we are riding the fastest and grandest nineteenth-century train through the roughest and most perilous nineteenth-century terrain, and though we have splendid light, we are pushing through to where there is no track.
ONE FEATURE of modern capitalism that Marx most admires is its global horizon and cosmopolitan texture. Many people today talk about the global economy as if it had only just come into being. Marx helps us see the ways in which it has been operating all along.

The need for a constantly expanding market chases the bourgeois over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.The bourgeoisie, through its exploitation of the world market, has given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption everywhere….All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are being daily destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every corner of the globe…

This global spread, Marx believed, offered a spectacular display of history’s ironies. The modern bourgeois were generally banal in their desires, yet their unremitting quest for profit forced on them the same insatiable drive-structure and infinite horizon as any of the great romantic heroes—as Don Giovanni, as Childe Harold, as Goethe’s Faust. They may think of only one thing, but their narrow focus opens up the broadest integrations; their shallow outlook wreaks the most profound transformations; their peaceful economic activity devastates every human society like a bomb, from the most primitive tribes to the mighty USSR. Marx was appalled at the human costs of capitalist development, but he always believed the world horizon it created was a great human achievement, on which socialist and communist movements must build. Remember, the grand appeal to unite, with which the Manifesto ends, is addressed to the “workers of all countries.”

One of the crucial events of modern times has been the unfolding of the first-ever world culture. Marx was writing at an historical moment when mass media were just developing. Marx worked in the vein of Goethe, who in his last year, speaking to Eckermann, described it as “world literature.” Writing more than a hundred and fifty years later, I think it is legitimate to call the new thing “world culture.” Marx shows how this culture evolves spontaneously from the world market:

In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants requiring for their satisfaction products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property…and from the numerous national and local literatures, there rises a world literature.

 

Marx believed that Shakespeare, writing at the very start of modernity, was the world’s first thoroughly modern writer. As a student, he learned many Shakespearean plays by heart. He didn’t realize, in the 1840s, how deeply involved with the English language he would become. After the failed 1848 Revolution in Germany, he spent about half his life in exile in London. He wrote hundreds of articles through the years, at first translated by Engels but increasingly in English, especially for the New York Daily Tribune, as “Our European Correspondent.” And he never stopped working on Capital, a book with footnotes from different languages and cultures on every page. In London his wife Jenny became a drama critic, writing for German papers about the London stage. His daughter Eleanor, the first English translator of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, and one of the inventors of “community organizing,” remembered growing up with the whole family on Hampstead Heath on Sundays, acting Shakespeare out. Meanwhile they were broke, desperate, evicted from apartments, unable to go out in the winter because so many of their clothes were in the pawnshop. But they kept on inventing the world.

Marx’s vision of world culture brings together several complex ideas. First, the expansion of human needs: the increasingly complex world market at once shapes and expands everybody’s desires. Marx wants us to imagine what it might mean in food, clothes, religion, love, and in our most intimate fantasies as well as our public presentations. Next, the idea of culture as “common property”: anything created by anyone anywhere is open and available to everyone everywhere. Entrepreneurs publish books (and e-books), produce plays and concerts, display visual art, and, in post-Marx centuries, create hardware and software for movies, radio, TV, and computers, in order to make money. Still, in this as in other ways, history slips through their fingers, so that people can possess culture—an idea, a poetic image, musical sound, Plato, Shakespeare, a Negro spiritual (his whole family learned them in the 1860s)—even if they can’t own it. If we can think about modern culture as “common property,” and the ways in which popular music, movies, literature, and TV can all make us feel more at home in the world, it can help us imagine how people all over the world could share the world’s resources someday.

This is a vision of culture rarely discussed, but it is one of the most expansive and hopeful things Marx ever wrote. In the last century or so, the development of movies, television, video, and computers have created a global visual language that brings the idea of world culture closer to home than ever, and the world beat comes through in the best of our music and books. That’s the good news. The bad news is how sour and bitter most left writing on culture has become. Sometimes it sounds as if culture were just one more Department of Exploitation and Oppression, containing nothing luminous or valuable in itself. At other times, it sounds as if people’s minds were empty vessels with nothing inside except what Capital put there. Read, or try to read, a few articles on “hegemonic/counterhegemonic discourse.”
BUT IF capitalism is a triumph in so many ways, what’s wrong with it? What makes it worth spending your life as Marx did, trying to fight it? In the twentieth century, Marxist movements have concentrated on the argument, made most elaborately in Capital, that workers in bourgeois society had been or were being pauperized. There were times and places (the Great Depression, for instance) where it was absurd to deny that claim. In other times and places (North America and Western Europe when I was young), it was pretty tenuous. Many Marxist economists went through dialectical gyrations to make the numbers come out. But the problem with that whole discussion was that it converted questions of human experience into questions of numbers; it led Marxism to think and talk exactly like capitalism.

The Manifesto occasionally makes some version of this claim. But it offers what strikes me as a much more trenchant indictment, one that holds up even at the top of the business cycle, when the bourgeoisie and its apologists are drowning in complacency. That indictment is Marx’s vision of what modern bourgeois society forces people to be: they have to freeze their feelings for each other to find a place in a cold world. Bourgeois society “has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment.” It has “drowned every form of sentimental value in the icy waters of egotistical calculation.” It has “resolved personal worth into exchange-value.” It has collapsed every idea of freedom “into that single, unconscionable freedom—free trade.” It has “torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.” It has “converted the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers.” “In one word, for exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.” It forces people to degrade themselves in order to survive.

Twentieth-century works in Marxist traditions tend to imagine a bourgeoisie with super-controlling powers: everything that happens is so the bourgeoisie can “accumulate more capital.” It is worth noticing that Marx’s vision of them is far more volatile. He compares them to a “sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world that he has called up by his spells.” Marx is reminding us of Goethe’s Faust, of course, but also of venerable traditions of magic that were supposed to make the bearers spectacularly rich. The magic never worked, of course. What happened instead, Marx said, only “pav[ed] the way for more expensive and more destructive crises, and diminish[ed] the means whereby crises are prevented.” Survivors of the fiscal crises of 2008 will remember the sense of magical power that seduced millions of people into giving up more than they had. It will be fascinating to see whether people learn anything from all the weird practices that names like Madoff came to signify. Marx feared they wouldn’t learn: in modern capitalism, the most sophisticated minds could be primitivized overnight; people who have the power to reconstruct the world still seem bound to deconstruct themselves. Marx was animated by great hopes, but driven by serious worries.

For more than 150 years, we have seen a huge literature that attacks the brutality of a class where those who are most comfortable with brutality are most likely to succeed. But those same social forces are also pressing on the members of that immense group that Marx calls “the modern working class.” This class has always been afflicted with a case of mistaken identity. Many of Marx’s readers have always thought that “working class” meant only men in boots—in factories, in industry, with blue collars, with calloused hands, lean and hungry. These readers then note the changing nature of the workforce: increasingly educated, white-collar, working in human services (rather than in growing food or making things), in or near the middle class—and they infer the Death of the Subject, and conclude that the working class is disappearing and all hopes for it are doomed. Marx did not think the working class was shrinking: in all industrial countries it was already, or in the process of becoming, “the immense majority.” Its swelling numbers, Marx thought, would enable it to “win the battle of democracy.” The basis for his political arithmetic was a concept that was both simple and highly inclusive:

The modern working class developed…a class of laborers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These workers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are commodities, like every other article of commerce, and are constantly exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition and the fluctuations of the market.

 

The crucial factor for Marx is not working in a factory, or working with your hands, or being poor. All these things can change with fluctuating supplies and demands in technology and politics. The crucial reality is the need to sell your labor in order to live, to carve up your personality for sale, to look at yourself in the mirror and think, “Now what have I got that I can sell?” and an unending dread and anxiety that even if you are OK today, you won’t find anybody willing to buy what you have or what you are tomorrow; that the changing market will declare you (as it has already declared so many) worthless; that you will find yourself physically as well as metaphysically out in the cold. Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman (1949), one of the great pieces of American writing, brings to life the consuming dread that may be the condition of most members of the working class in modern times. Existentialist writing, which I grew up on half a century ago, dramatizes this tradition with great depth and beauty; yet its visions tend to be weirdly unembodied. Its visionaries could learn from the Manifesto, which gives modern anguish an address.

Marx understands that many people in this class don’t know their address. They wear elegant clothes and return to nice houses, because there is great demand for their labor right now, and they are doing well. They may identify happily with the owners of capital, and have no idea how contingent and fleeting their benefits are. They may not discover who they are, and where they belong, until they are laid-off or fired—or outsourced, or deskilled, or downsized. And other workers, lacking credentials, not dressed so nicely, may not get the fact that many who push them around are really in their class, and, despite their pretentions, share their vulnerability. How can this reality be put across to people who don’t get it, or can’t bear it? The complexity of these ideas helped to create a new vocation, central to modern society: the organizer.

One group whose identity as workers was crucial for Marx was his own class: intellectuals.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to in reverent awe. It has converted the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers.

 

This does not mean that these activities lose meaning or value. If anything, they become more urgently meaningful. But the only way people can get the freedom to do what they can do is by working for capital. Marx himself had to live this way. Over a forty-year span, he wrote brilliant journalism. Sometimes he was paid, often not. Marx was brilliant in figuring out how workers could organize, and how their capacity to organize could make nineteenth-century life a great deal more human than it had been in the 1840s, the days of the Manifesto, when he was just starting out. But nobody then had figured out how the creators of culture could organize. When Marx, and every other writer and artist of those days, went up against capital, he went alone.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the scale of culture has immensely expanded. Intellectuals need to work for drug companies, movie studios, media conglomerates, HMOs, boards of education, politicians, and so on, always using their creative skills to help capital accumulate more capital. This makes intellectuals subject not only to the stresses that afflict all modern workers, but to a dread zone all their own. The more they care about their work and want it to mean something, the more they will find themselves in permanent conflict with the keepers of spreadsheets. In the twentieth century, the creators of culture started to get it, and to organize. But, as has happened repeatedly in capitalist history, technology learned to organize itself on a far vaster scale. In the twenty-first century, the Internet opened up a whole new dimension of conflict; publishers, newspapers and magazines began to collapse. Intellectuals today are forced to fight what we can see now is going to be a permanent “battle of democracy”: they are fighting to keep culture alive. We don’t know how this struggle is going to turn out. Many intellectuals have come to see the connections, and to recognize ourselves as workers—but plenty still don’t. Most of us can think of plenty of things we would much rather do. Marx argues that unless we learn to organize—and stay organized—and learn to fight this fight, there is a pretty good chance that neither we nor anybody else will be able to do these nice things anymore.
MARX HAD a wide horizon: he could imagine how life would unfold thousands of miles from anywhere he had ever been. Living in London, in what was then the most dynamic economy in the world, he was especially sensitive to the ambiguities of growth. Over the last twenty years, the word’s most dynamic economy has been China’s. A great deal of its power emanates from a working class with immense energy and yet, until very recently, total passivity. I spent a perplexing month in China in 2005. I attended a conference, at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. I walked through streets in many cities, met intellectuals of different ages. My conference included about thirty Chinese and three Americans; the Americans were the only ones willing to give the Chinese Revolution credit for accomplishing anything. Chinese talking about the country’s own history seemed to have dropped to an America-1950 level. They spoke as if “the Chinese Communists” were Martians, rather than their own parents and grandparents and sometimes themselves. I learned, too, that school and college courses in Western thought were forbidden to speak Marx’s name. I spoke about his life and work in late-nineteenth-century England, and I compared England to China today. I talked about the metamorphoses of the British working class, and argued that in a dynamic modern society, class passivity was not likely to last. I argued that a time like now in China was exactly the kind of moment when the explosive parts of the Manifestomight be prophetic. Most people I spoke with said China had no class system, no stratification, so Marx’s categories were meaningless there. A few suggested that no one believed this, but that today as in the past, Chinese people knew what they had to say.

Students told me, sadly, that my paper was being left out of the conference proceedings. Some said they would love to read Marx if they could. I told them the crucial idea was that they too were part of the working class, and the working class had the capacity to organize. I gave them some titles and websites, and wished them well. Now, in 2010, a collection has appeared in which not only am I included, but, more important, Marx is included. I saw this as a sign that Chinese workers had probably begun to organize and to act on a large scale. Who knows with what success? But it may be that another front in “the battle of democracy” has opened up.
MARX SEES the modern working class as an immense worldwide community waiting to happen. Such large possibilities give the history of organizing a permanent gravity and grandeur. The process of creating unions is not just an item in interest-group politics, but a vital part of what Lessing called “The Education of the Human Race.” As workers gradually come to learn who they are, Marx thinks they will see they need one another in order to be themselves. Workers will get it eventually, because bourgeois society forces them to get smart, in order to survive its constant upheavals. Learning to give yourself to other workers who may look and sound very different from you, but who turn out to be like you in depth, delivers the soul from dread and gives a man or a woman a permanent address in the world.

This is a vital part of the moral vision that underlies the Manifesto. But there is another moral dimension, asserted in a different key but humanly just as urgent. Many communist movements in history, starting with Plato, have aimed at social orders in which the individual self is crushed by some form of communal whole. The radical world of the 1840s, in which Marx grew up, was full of people who thought that way. His early writing is full of abuse toward what he called “crude, mindless communism.” He always insisted that communism meant liberation of the self. And this meant the Revolution of the future will end classes and class struggle, and will make it possible to enjoy a world where “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Marx is imagining communism as a way to make people happy. The first aspect of happiness, for him, is “development”—that is, an experience that doesn’t simply repeat itself endlessly, but that goes through endless phases of change and growth. This form of happiness is distinctively modern, informed by the incessantly developing bourgeois economy. But modern bourgeois society forces people to develop in accord with market demands: what can sell gets developed; what can’t sell gets repressed, or else never comes to life at all. Against the twisted development enforced by the market, he fights for “free development,” a mode of development that the self can control.

This insistence on free development, rather than development enforced by the market, is a theme that Marx shares with the smartest and noblest liberal of the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill. Like Marx, Mill came to see “free development” as a basic human value. But as he grew older, he became convinced that the capitalist form of modernization—featuring cutthroat competition, social conformity, and cruelty to the losers—blocked its best potentialities. The world’s greatest liberal proclaimed himself a socialist in his old age.

Ironically, the ground that liberalism and socialism share might be a problem for both of them. What if Mister Kurtz isn’t dead after all? What if authentically “free development” brings out horrific depths in human nature? Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Freud all forced us to face the horrors. Marx and Mill might both say that until we have overcome social domination, there is no way to tell how deep our inner degradation goes. The process of reaching that point—where Raskolnikovs won’t rot on Avenue D, and where Svidrigailovs won’t possess thousands of bodies and souls—should be enough to give us all steady work. And even if we do reach that point, and come to see our inner bad guys will never go away, we will have learned how to cooperate for our mutual defense. Trotsky in the 1920s came to believe that psychotherapy was a revolutionary right, to protect us from ourselves.
I’VE SAVED my favorite Manifesto story for the end. It comes from Hans Morgenthau, the great theorist of international relations who came to America as a refugee from the Nazis. I heard him tell it in the early 1970s, at the City University of New York. He was reminiscing about his childhood in Bavaria before the First World War. Morgenthau’s father, a doctor in a working-class neighborhood of the town of Coburg (mostly miners, he said), had begun to take his son along on house calls. Many of his patients were dying of TB; a doctor in those years couldn’t do much to save their lives, but might help them die with dignity. Coburg was a place where many people who were dying asked to have the Bible buried with them. But when Morgenthau’s father asked his workers for last requests, many said they wanted to be buried with the Manifestoinstead. They implored the doctor to see that they got fresh copies of the book, and that priests didn’t sneak in and make last-minute switches. Morgenthau was too young to “get” the book, he said. But it became his first political task to make sure that the workers’ families should get it. He wanted to be sure we would get it, too.

The twentieth century ended with the mass destruction of Marx effigies. It was said to be the “post-modern age”: we weren’t supposed to need grand narratives or big ideas. Twenty years later, we find ourselves in the grip of very different narratives: stories of a dynamic global society ever more unified by downsizing and deskilling—real work disappearing so company stocks can rise, so the rich can get richer and congratulate themselves on what they have done to our world. Few of us today share Marx’s feeling that a clear alternative to capitalism is there, right there. But many of us can embrace, or at least imagine, his radical perspective, his indignation, his belief that modern men and women have the capacity to create a better world. All of a sudden, the iconic may look more convincing than the ironic; that classic bearded presence, that atheist as biblical prophet, still has plenty to say. At the dawn of the twentieth century, there were workers who were ready to die with the Communist Manifesto. At the dawn of the twenty-first, there may be even more who are ready to live with it.

Marshall Berman teaches political theory and urbanism at CCNY/CUNY. He is the author of, among other books, Adventures in Marxism.

By Marta Harnecker

The journal Science and Society devoted a special number in April 2012 [Volume 76, No. 2] to explore central topics in the current discussion about socialism. Marta Harnecker and five other Marxist authors from different countries were invited to participate in this reflection by the editors Al Campbell and David Laibman, who prepared a set of five questions. This paper written in July 2011 presents her contribution with some foot notes that does not appear in the journal. The following topics are explored: 1. Why speak of socialism today?; 2. Central features of socialist organization of production; 3. Incentives and the level of consciousness in the construction of socialism; 4. Socialism and the transition to socialism; and 5. The centrality of participatory planning in socialism.

1. WHY SPEAK OF SOCIALISM TODAY?

1. Why talk about socialism at all if that word has carried and continues to carry such a heavy burden of negative connotations, after the collapse of socialism in the USSR and other Eastern European countries?

2. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union, Latin American and world leftist intellectuals were shocked. We knew better what we did not want in socialism than what we wanted. We rejected the lack of democracy, totalitarianism, state capitalism, bureaucratic central planning, collectivism that sought to standardize without respect for differences, productivism that emphasized the expansion of productive forces without taking into account the need to preserve nature, dogmatism, the attempt to impose atheism and persecution of believers, the need for a single party to lead the transition process.

3. But at the same time Soviet socialism was collapsing, democratic and participatory processes in local governments began to emerge in Latin America there, and these foreshadowed the “kind of alternative to capitalism that people wanted to build.” These processes not only foreshadowed the new society; they also demonstrated in practice that people could govern in a transparent, non-corrupt, democratic and participatory manner. Political conditions in several Latin American countries were thus prepared, making it possible for the left to come to power through democratic elections.

4. Those lights that radiated throughout our continent were enhanced by the resounding failure of neoliberalism and, most recently, by the global crisis of capitalism. An alternative to capitalism thus started to become more necessary than ever. What should it be called?

5. It was President Chávez who had the courage to call socialism this alternative society to capitalism He called it “21st-century socialism,” reclaiming the values associated with the word socialism: “love, solidarity, equality between men and women and equity among all,” but adding the adjective “21st century” to differentiate the new socialism from the errors and deviations present in the model of socialism that was implemented during the 20th century in the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries.

6. However, it must be remembered that 35 years earlier, in the early 1970s in Chile, the victory of President Salvador Allende, supported by the leftist Popular Unity coalition, began the world’s first peaceful transition to socialism. Although the Popular Unity government was defeated by a military coup three years later, it left important lessons. If our generation learned anything from that defeat, it was that peaceful progress towards that goal required us to rethink the socialist project applied until then in the world; that it was therefore necessary to develop a project that was more adequate to Chilean reality and more appropriate for a peaceful path. Allende’s folkloric expression, “socialism with red wine and empanadas,” seemed to capture this, pointing towards building a democratic socialist society rooted in national popular traditions.  And so I believe that the Chilean experience should be considered the first practical experience that tried to get away from the Soviet model of socialism and move toward what we now call 21st-century socialism.

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