Is There a Future for Social Democracy?

Karl Marx was right! That was the valuable lesson that Thomas Piketty unwittingly delivered with his celebrated book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century.¹ While Piketty should be credited with bringing inequality back into the popular spotlight, his most significant contribution was the powerful empirical proof that the historic trajectory of capitalism was, in the final analysis, to reward the owners of capital and beggar those who produce it.

For the post-World War II generations, a different “truth” was fostered. The period of relative prosperity (roughly defined as the growth of broad-based living standards in close step with robust productivity growth) that endured into the early 1970s was believed to be a new, permanent feature of capitalism. Attached to this belief was a confidence that the policy tools afforded by the economic doctrines of John Maynard Keynes would guarantee that this prosperity would continue.

But this “truth” was challenged by the explosion of inequality that began and persisted over the subsequent forty years and beyond.

Looked at from the perspective of Piketty’s data, centuries of growing global inequality is broken only by the Great Depression and the later post-war interlude, what the French call les trente glorieuses-- the 30 presumably happy years of economic levelling. In light of the historic arc, they are exceptions to the rule.

In the decade before World War II, there was a dramatic collapse of economic growth and a shifting of resources to the various governments’ temporary employment-maintenance programs. These two factors slowed the persistent concentration of wealth channeled toward the highest tiers. The 1930s were a time of desperate efforts to restore collapsing mass demand and to answer the utter despair of the unemployed through projects that were, in effect, modestly redistributive. Throughout the world, preparing for and conducting war soon replaced these projects, substituting military spending and the military absorption of the unemployed (and their subsequent slaughter) for the earlier welfare-centered economic stimulation.

But the post-war period was an entirely different matter. A proper explanation of the post-war anomaly remains contested.

It is only in recent years (and bolstered by the work of Piketty and his colleagues) that the notion of capitalism’s fundamental tendency toward inequality seeped back into the mainstream and commanded attention. The recent memory of post-war “prosperity” leads many to falsely view the most recent era of mounting inequality, tattering social safety nets, crumbling infrastructure, forced austerity, debt, and falling living standards as a mere “correction” of the profligacies and inefficiencies of the earlier period. To Piketty’s credit, his unequalled research into the historical long-term global tendencies of capitalist economies demonstrates the opposite. Twenty-first century capitalism and its massive inequalities constitutes the capitalist norm and not a correction.

Piketty and Social Democracy

If it is true that, except under temporary, extraordinary circumstances, capitalism uniformly produces and reproduces wealth and income inequality, then Piketty’s findings present the social democratic left with great, seemingly insurmountable challenges. Understanding social democracy, broadly speaking, as an ideology that accepts capitalism as either reformable or as a possible institutional platform for the gradual transformation of the social order into something different, the prospects for its success would seem dim at best². Capital’s overwhelming domination of today’s political institutions and the monopolization of the channels of mass influence would likely foreclose any new gains from collaborating with or conceding capitalism.

The last quarter of the twentieth century and our twenty-first century experience find social democracy declining nearly everywhere in both effectiveness and popular legitimacy. With its “golden era” coinciding with the post-war “golden era” of crisis-free economic growth, social democracy not only failed to advance a substantive agenda after the crisis-ridden decade of the 1970s, but actually surrendered the gains won in the past.

Toward the end of the last century, the traditional hosts of social democratic ideology-- the US Democrats, the UK Labour Party, the French, Italian Socialists (and Communists), and most similar parties-- cast the classic tenets of social democracy into history’s dustbin, embracing the dominance of markets, private-over-public initiatives, growth over redistribution (“a rising tide lifts all boats”), the inefficiency of the public sector, and homage to the market as a rational and moral calculator.

As the public soon found most social democratic thinking a cheap imitation of conservatism, the traditional social democratic parties sought a new “progressivism” based upon promoting civil inclusion over aggressively fighting for economic and political inclusion. Unlike economic inclusion, civil inclusion-- the embracing of individual diversity and civil tolerance-- does not address economic inequality; it requires no change in the balance of power between capital and labor; it makes no consequential demands or sacrifices on the rich and powerful; and it requires no redistribution of material assets.

The economic crisis that began in 2007-2008 demonstrates emphatically the inadequacy of such a narrow approach. Millions of people were and are directly or indirectly wounded by the economic chaos generated by a global financial collapse and by its collateral damage. Social democracy had no answer and was justly rewarded for its policy bankruptcy. The traditional bearers of the banner were drastically diminished in popular support, in some cases, reduced to irrelevancy.

Understandably, an effort was made to invigorate social democracy by shoring up its economic program, adopting a critical stance toward markets-- especially financial markets, advocating regulation of capital, imposing progressive taxation, strengthening the social nets-- in short, returning to elements of the social democratic agenda of the post-war “golden era.”

In the face of the discrediting of the traditional parties, new parties, political alliances, or formations arose-- like SYRIZA, PODEMOS, and the Bernie Sanders movement.

But the twenty-first century was not the 1950s with its war reconstruction, the Marshall Plan, massive increases in military spending, Cold War compacts, its unleashed wave of consumerism, strong unions, and most importantly, a powerful revolutionary current to which social democracy could leverage its offer of moderation toward capital. There is no useful role for social democracy in the eyes of 21st century capitalists.

Twenty-first century capital-- absent a life-and-death struggle against socialism-- is merciless and ruthless, offering no compromise or social compact with social democracy. The youthful leaders of SYRIZA learned this lesson when they sought to reason with the custodians of European capital. They experienced the harsh aggression of financial predators, reducing SYRIZA militants to compliant middle-managers of Greek capitalism.

Sanders and his loyalists are being similarly schooled in the realities of the Democratic Party and US capitalism in the twenty-first century. The Democratic Party is owned by monopoly capital, and monopoly capital has no intention of surrendering its property rights to anyone else.

The Last Gasps of Social Democracy?

The hope for finding an effective strategy between resignation to capitalism and revolutionary socialism will always inspire utopian schemes. Social democracy will always survive for those frightened by the prospect of eliminating the scourge of capitalism, but appalled by its pillage of working people. Despite the failings of the latest incarnations, there are new theories waiting in the wings, new models of social democracy.

Beyond his celebrated book, Thomas Piketty has championed a social democratic agenda to address the persisting inequalities deeply embedded in capitalism. In a new book, Chronicles, he returns to these inequalities in the context of current events as addressed in a collection of columns he wrote for Libération and Le Monde. To his credit, he still adheres closely to his central thesis: “During the postwar decades, we mistakenly believed that we’d moved on to a new stage of capitalism, a sort of capitalism without capital. In reality, it was only a passing phase… In the long run, patrimonial capitalism is the only kind that can exist.”³

But if “patrimonial” capital (i.e., capital that persistently churns out inequality) is “the only kind that can exist,” how can there be enduring capitalism without obscene inequality? That-- put simply-- is the paradox of Piketty.

Indeed, that is the paradox of social democracy.

To anyone who has read Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Piketty’s answer to inequality is a colossal disappointment: We must have a global wealth tax. Magically, therefore, we could have both capitalism and less inequality. Of course Piketty does not tell us how we can overpower or coax “patrimonial” capitalism into accepting such a tax.

His answers in Chronicles, written specifically to address the crisis in the European Union, are more specific: The EU should be “federalized, tighter, centralized” so that the existing debt and tax structures could then also be federalized. To his way of thinking, a more tightly structured, integrated, and centrally ruled EU could overcome national disparities and-- not surprisingly-- institute a union-wide wealth tax!

But this answer is even more paradoxical. Would anyone believe that a union constructed to institutionalize, to protect and promote “patrimonial” capital would, by strengthening and centralizing that union, be more inclined to have its predatory character tamed? Would the EU, constructed upon the pillars of free markets, privatization, and the sanctity of profits, be more likely to surrender the fruits of free markets, privatization, and the sanctity of profits if given even greater power?

Clearly, there is more “wish list” in Chronicles than policy map. He joins the ranks of the neo-utopians⁴ who hope for a revival of social democracy through strategies that call for capital to concede its domination simply through moral suasion or dazzling intellect. Other neo-utopians like Yanis Varoufakis share Piketty’s commitment to globalism and supranational organizations, but with little acknowledgement that these policies and institutions are the product of powerful elites indisposed to heed the wise council of intellectuals. The EU, like the global market, is a construct born from the womb of Piketty’s “patrimonial” capitalism. The midwives will not surrender to clever ideas or an appeal for political “democratization.”

The State and Modern Monetary Theory

Others believe that they have found the social democratic holy grail in Modern Monetary Theory.⁵ William Mitchell and Thomas Fazi advocate this approach in their recent book, Reclaiming the State.⁶ Interestingly, they take the opposite tack to Piketty. Rather than calling for a strengthening of supranational institutions towards a global taxing body, they advocate a return to state projects free of supranational fetters. For Mitchell and Fazi, “reclaiming the state” is a necessary condition of reviving the social democratic project.

The title’s subscript gives away the game: “A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World.” It is not a vision for a post-capitalist world or a socialist world, but for a “post-neoliberal world,” a world like the world before the dominance of the unfettered, market-dominated, deregulated, private-ownership-worshiping capitalism that emerged in the 1970s. There is more than a hint of nostalgia for that earlier time, with the sincere hope that Modern Monetary Theory would open the door to radical reforms of capitalism-- capital controls, a new international framework, job guarantees, nationalization of “natural monopolies” and banks, the outlaw of non-productive financial transactions, and other measures.

In truth, the Mitchell and Fazi book is impressive. The first section, The Great Transformation Redux: From Keynesianism to Neoliberalism-- and Beyond, is a serious and well researched description of the course of capitalism from the end of World War II to the present. The authors fully recognize the important changes that events, parties, and persons made in that critical period. They also address some of the theories purporting to explain the changes without advocating strongly for one over another. For those reasons alone, the book is strongly recommended. No understanding of today’s capitalism is possible without a comprehensive understanding of the seventy-five years that preceded it.

But the history offered, though richly recounted, lacks a central motif, an underlying logic, linking and explaining developments. It is not enough to string together a list of factors that may, to a greater or lesser degree, shape the dramatic changes between the confident economic celebration of the fifties and sixties and the intractable problems of the 1970s. Despite a number of suggestive hints, the question “but why?” looms over the analysis. Without a deeper explanation, the account courts becoming a naked “just-so” story.

But more seriously, there is virtually no reference to the Soviet Union, the clash of post-war ideologies, the Cold War, or the threatening growth of the socialist world in size and influence (there is no citation for the Soviet Union in the index-- or to socialism for that matter). To discuss the post-war period without referencing the impact of Communism is like explaining the decline of the Roman Empire without reference to the rise of the Goths or of Christianity; it’s like explaining the US revolution without referencing the rivalries between Britain and France; or it’s like an explanation of the US Civil War without mention of slavery. It is at best incomplete; at worst, distorted.

US and European post-war social, political, and economic history arguably is the history of relations with Communism, domestically and internationally. Yet it is a commonplace for left and leftish academics to largely ignore the role of the Soviet Union, the Socialist world, and Communist Parties as though they were a mere sideshow.

The US and Western European left, especially in the universities, never accepted the reality that theory and practice were necessarily and inescapably located in political space by their proximity to twentieth-century Leninism. Consequently, the non-Leninist left failed to grasp the impact of state-sponsored anti-Communism in determining that space.

The left never appreciated that Western social democracy was not triumphant in the post-war decades, but permitted to taste political power by a capitalist ruling class in need of allies in the struggle against Communism.

To this day, non-Leninist theorists struggle with the contradiction that a social democratic program could be implemented in a state that is itself wholly captured by the capitalist class. A compromise with social democracy is made possible when the capitalist state is itself engaged in a life-or-death struggle with socialism. Accordingly, radical social democratic reforms that limit capital’s penetration, that retard or redress the march of inequality, or that shift the balance of power are only possible when the capitalist ruling class sees capitalism gravely under siege, a condition that social democracy, by its very definition, is unwilling to pursue to the demise of capitalism.

Mitchell and Fazi correctly identify supranational formations, institutions, and organs as obstacles to social change. Unlike Piketty and Varoufakis, they recognize that the EU, the IMF, the World Bank, the multilateral trade agreements, etc., are fundamentally created to strengthen the stranglehold of monopoly capital on the state. They are not impartial arbiters or equal-opportunity tools for shaping a progressive destiny.

They also grasp that a part of the globalization myth-- the claim that the state was in fatal decline-- is nonsense. Heavily promoted by academic leftists in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, the rise of US exceptionalism, the US project of policing and dominating the world, and the 2007-2008 collapse, marked “paid” on the notion that the state was receding in power and significance. It’s noteworthy that as early as 1998, Linda Weiss demonstrably refuted this once fashionable position with her The Myth of the Powerless State.

Mitchell and Fazi fall on the right side of history with their defense of the resilience and centrality of the capitalist state.

But it is a capitalist state.

It is one thing to reclaim the state as the nucleus of capitalist social, political, and economic relations; it is quite another to reclaim the state from the tentacles of monopoly capitalism. Mitchell and Fazi succeed in achieving the former, but fail to open a path to the latter.

They are not alone in seeing Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as a tonic for social democracy.⁷ They, like other liberals and social democrats, lament an opportunity lost when public policy is dictated by debt scolds. (“Debt scolds” are alarmist economists and policy makers who believe that debt is always dangerous, if not evil.)

Conservative Monetarists have fostered the notion that growing debt leads invariably to serious economic mayhem, a notion that constitutes a myth of tragic proportions in the eyes of Modern Monetary theorists. Put crudely, the Monetarist fear springs from a category mistake-- the conflation of contemporary state budgets (those not legitimized by precious metal reserves) and accrued debt with the budget and debts of an ordinary household. Unlike an individual household, a state’s central bank faces no natural or institutional limit on the issuance of credit and the incurrence of debt. The fears of the debt scolds are, therefore, unfounded.

And, they argue, embracing MMT can, as a result, break the stranglehold that debt-rating agencies, financial speculators, Monetarist pundits, and market-obsessed politicians have on government spending and social democratic programs.

But Mitchell and Fazi, like other MMT advocates, mistake the debt rating agencies, the financial speculators, the Monetarist pundits, and the market-obsessed politicians for honest intellectual brokers. They are not swayed by the avenues available to advance social democratic reforms. Their interest is in solely growing profits.

Clearly that point is driven home by the failure of prominent economists like Nobel laureate Paul Krugman who have loudly advocated against the austerity and fiscal abstinence of the Monetarist debt scolds for well over a decade. And to no avail. In the teeth of the gale winds unleashed by the 2007-2008 crash, capitalist policy makers steered the course of austerity, espousing a deep fear of debt-- every increase in government spending threatened catastrophe. Never mind that their fears were never realized.

The adherents of the continuing centrality of the state and MMT surely underestimate the death grip that the capitalist class has on all aspects of the state, especially over policy. Whether government spending may cross a dangerous threshold or not, whether MMT offers new life to the social democratic program, today’s capitalist rulers show no inclination to allow their hired politicians and servile journalists to engage or promulgate challenging ideas.

The growth of inequality (and the extreme concentration of wealth), the monopolization and subsequent conformity of the media, the continual erosion of the institutionally limited bourgeois democratic system, the deterioration of public education, and the other marks of the tightening grip of elites constitute a disappearing opportunity for social democracy.

It is not that social democracy will wane; it will always offer a promise to those too timid for revolutionary change. But it will offer, at best, a rear guard action to an increasingly powerful capitalist ruling class. It may retard the gains, slow the rot, but it will offer no reversal of capitalism’s course. That can only come from a revolutionary movement for socialism.

Taking issue with a venerated, sincere, but short-sighted advocate of the working class, Karl Marx mounted a measured defense of the value of trade union action to secure higher wages:

The general tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages, or to push the value of labour more or less to its minimum limit. Such being the tendency of things in this system, is this to say that the working class should renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital and abandon their attempt at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken down wretches past salvation…

...the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of these effects; that they are retarding the downward movement but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady…

They ought to understand that, with all the miseries that it imposes on them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economic reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!” ⁸

Piketty and others have likewise shown that the “general tendency of capitalistic production is…” to increase inequality, paraphrasing Marx. Like trade union activism for higher wages alone, social democracy can only succeed in “...retarding the downward movement but not changing its direction; ...applying palliatives, not curing the malady…”

Instead of futilely seeking to turn the clock back to before “neo-liberalism,” our modern day warriors for social justice must embrace the revolutionary slogan: “Abolish capitalism!”

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

 
1 Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, 2014

2 Where social democracy doesn’t occur as a movement or party under its own name, it is represented from time to time or as the left wing of another movement or party (eg. UK Labour Party or US Democratic Party).

3 Chronicles On Our Troubled Times, 2017, p. 3-4.

4 In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels describe utopian socialism as arising when the working class “...offers to them [the advocates of utopian socialism] the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political movement.” For practitioners of utopian socialism, “[h]istorical action is to yield to their personal inventive action; historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones; and the gradual, spontaneous class organization of the proletariat to an organization of society specially contrived by these inventors.”
Cooperatives, for example, are among the neo-utopian “fantastic conditions of emancipation” visited on today’s left. Academic leftists are leading neo-utopian spinners of “society specifically contrived by these inventors.”
5 For a clear and concise explanation of Modern Monetary Theory, see Modern Money, Robert Hockett, in Dollars and Sense, March/April, 2018, pp. 7-14. Hockett explains MMT in its social, legal, historical context.
6 Thanks to Tony Coughlan for recommending this important book.

7 Modern Monetary Theory springs from the notion that after the break with the Bretton Woods system tying currencies to gold and the shift to the dollar as a fiat currency in 1971, the issuance of currency becomes solely a matter of central bank decision making. MMT essentially uncouples money from any objective theory of value and makes its creation, its use, and its purpose a matter of convention or social choice.
The grizzled Howard in  the book/movie Treasure of the Sierra Madre as well as Karl Marx would be appalled by this view.
Its proponents overlook the danger of assets bubbles when any reasonable objective measure of value is lost. 

8 Value, Price and Profit, addressed to Workingmen, Karl Marx, 1935, p. 61.

The Collapse of the Center, Where is the Left?

With both the Italian elections and the German effort at a so-called “Grand Coalition” in the recent news, much attention has turned to political developments in Europe. For those of us in the US, interest comes not only from the impact of European politics on our own affairs, but also from the fact that US and European trends have often traveled parallel tracks.

For example, in much of the post-war period, governance in Europe has revolved around two centrist political poles that can be roughly characterized as Christian democracy and social democracy. Insofar as both poles defend capitalism and oppose Communism, support capitalist institutions, and are content to peacefully alternate rule, they mirror the US two-party system without the stricter institutional backstops that preserve the electoral system for the Republican and Democratic Party in the US.

Certainly, the Western European political systems were nominally multi-party after the war, but the dynamics of those systems steered political developments toward the center. The far right was appropriately neutered by the discrediting of Nazism and fascism as a consequence of World War II. The revolutionary left-- the Communists-- were overtly and covertly thwarted by the Cold War, the NATO consensus. Where the Communists enjoyed formal legality, the centrist parties, the US, and the NATO allies worked hand-in-glove to deny participation in government.

While both European Christian democracy and social democracy were firmly committed to the capitalist course, social democracy wittingly served as a buffer against the attraction of a workers’ state by advocating a kind of faux-socialism, a socio-economic safety net. As an insurance policy against the ascendency of European Communist Parties, Christian democracy tempered the right’s conventional economic liberalism of minimalist government, unfettered markets, and austere budgets, grudgingly accepting social spending and a more “humane” social contract.

Frustrated with the de facto barrier against Communist parliamentary success, many European Communist Parties began a process of concessions, of shedding revolutionary principles and prospects, creating a left-social democracy dubbed “Euro Communism.” A few Parties resisted this opportunistic path.

The demise of the Soviet Union and the European socialist states proved to be a watershed for European politics and, particularly, the left. The Euro Communist left, stripped of its untenable raison d'être-- Communism without Communism-- collapsed, leaving a void to the left of social democracy. Social Democracy, in turn, cast off faux-socialism for public-private partnership under the direction of monopoly capitalism: markets, and not social policies, were to provide for the masses. And, without the threat of Communism, the right returned to its fundamental character, aggressively pressing unrestrained class politics: anti-unionism, fiscal austerity, deregulation, privatization, and chauvinism.

Without the fear of Communism, capitalism found no need for an accommodation with the working class.

In the 1990s, Continental Europe followed the path blazed in the UK and US over a decade earlier by the Thatcher/Reagan axis. Faced with shifting alignments and the 1970s failure of Old Labour/New Deal policies (specifically, the Keynesian economic framework underlying both approaches), a new consensus began to emerge in both countries.

From the mid-1980s into the next decade, the new consensus spread to nearly all major political parties and around the globe. In its essence, it was a return to Whiggism, the political, social, and economic ideology of the bourgeoisie: parliamentarism, negative rights, and the economic liberalism of minimal regulation, preference for private over public initiative, and markets as decisive of all matters and in the last instance.

Pundits are fond of labeling this development “neo-liberalism,” a statement of the obvious. But the superficiality of that term obscures the fact that the turn is more than a mere policy. In fact, it is a response to the failings of the previous consensus and it constitutes the capitalist norm when the specter of Communism does not loom large over the future.

Social democrats in the US and Europe promoted the notion of a “third way” to mask their capitulation to classical capitalism and its totalizing influence over all aspects of society, over every global nook and cranny. In fact, after the demise of the Soviet Union and its socialist neighbors, there was the one way in the US and EU.

With capitalism marching triumphantly into the twenty-first century, most of the US and European left conceded that capitalism was resilient and here to stay. An inflated memory of a kinder, gentler capitalism might be the best that could be imagined.

But the triumphant project ran aground, crashing on the rocks of economic crises. The capitalist accumulation process imploded in 2000 and, again, even more severely, in 2007-2008. “Recovery” re-established accumulation, but left millions of broken, desperate people in its wake. Inequality, unemployment, underemployment, poverty, insecurity, and alienation afflicted millions in the US and the EU (and, of course, the rest of the world). Capitalism recovered, but the people did not. For the people, the entrenched ideological options of conservatism and social democracy offered only the thin gruel of austerity.

Mesmerized by rising equity values and restored profitability, and impressed with the growing wealth and well-being of the bourgeoisie and the visible and vocal petty bourgeoisie, ruling elites labor under the illusion that all is going well. In Europe and the US, the never-changing meal of celebrity-worship, sports, anti-social social media, and other distractions nourish a false sense of security and satisfaction.

But in towns and villages, neighborhoods and suburbs, people are suffering. Alcoholism, drug abuse, and other addictions are taking a demographic toll, unseen by high-income, physically segregated elites. As insecurities and dysfunctionality grow, millions feel a growing difference-- an often poorly expressed class difference-- between the beneficiaries of the capitalist economy and themselves, the losers.

Anger seethes.

Without the compass of a revolutionary ideology, without the vision of socialism, this anger remains unfocused, directed vaguely at government, the media, existing political parties, and, too often, convenient scapegoats.

As the anger emerges politically, it is met with elite derision, contempt, or condescension. It is seen by their “betters” as a product of the uneducated, the backward, the uncultured. As Hillary Clinton so famously put it: “the deplorables.”

The insularity of US and European elites-- divided from the masses by culture, social practices, power, status, and wealth-- leads directly to the political crisis that spawned Brexit, Trump’s election, the rise of “populist” or alternative political parties, and most decidedly, the discrediting of historically centrist parties. This last week’s desperate attempt to preserve a coalition of the center in Germany and the collapse of the center left and the shocking success of the Five Star Movement and extreme right in Italy only underscore the distance between the masses and the political parties carefully crafted by the bourgeoisie to contain the aspirations of those masses.

Behind these political developments lies a stagnant, sputtering global economy. It is apparent that segments of the ruling classes are uneasy with or reject the globalist ideology of open markets and are moving towards economic nationalism. The failure of growth to return has led many in the capitalist class to call for a change in direction: protectionism. The emergence of support for nationalism and protectionism has energized the Euro-skeptics, the extreme right, and Trump.

Of course, the other side of this political coin is the failure of the left, especially the left that is yet untainted by the stain of ineffectual social democracy. For the most part, the non-establishment left has failed to deliver a militant, persuasive message to the working people in Europe and the US. And where there is a still a credible militant Communist left, the waters have been muddied by false prophets-- for example, SYRIZA in Greece.

In many countries, the retreat from Marxism became a rout after the fall of the Soviet Union. In its place, ideologies like anarchism, utopian socialism, and cooperativism-- ideologies that had long been discredited by Marx himself-- are revived. The peculiarly North American mania for procedural democracy-- the view that justice will flow spontaneously like a natural spring when we unleash a radical version of Robert’s Rules of Order-- has returned to prominence as shown by to the now collapsed Occupy movement. And of course, left-lite liberals immerse themselves in the battles for self-identity and against “micro-aggressions” while minority identities are actually ravaged by the macro-aggressions of class war and capitalist exploitation.

In light of recent poor electoral showings, some have sought to explain the sorry state of the US and European left as a result of structural changes in capitalism. They see a new working class, the “precariat,” as superseding the traditional proletariat (even The Wall Street Journal has fancied the term). The “precariat” notion derives from the realities of a changing workplace of part-time, contract, temporary, and dispersed employment, an optimal realization of the classical liberal economic dream. This trend in employment has made organizing workers difficult, certainly more challenging than with the world of the traditional worker engaged in one lifetime or semi-lifetime job under a factory roof.

Of course, the structural changes cited are, to a great extent, the result of the failure of trade unions and political parties to defend the interests of workers against predatory capitalists. Moreover, the difficulties that these changes bring forth are obstacles to union organizing, less so to political parties. And history teaches that establishing militant political parties precedes organizing militant trade unionism. No task before the union movement today presents greater impediments than was the task of building industrial unions in the US in the 1930s. The challenge of establishing the CIO was only met, was only possible, because of the leadership and effort of Communist and socialist workers.

Needed is the return in influence of historically informed workers’ parties that draw upon the social theory of Marx and the organizational insights of Lenin (that is to say, parties that reject the backward Cold War dogma of Anything but Communism), Without the strong option of Communist or Workers’ Parties, the European and US working class will continue to face the repellent choice between decadent, rotting centrist parties and a host of new charlatan parties offering fool’s gold policies, magic elixirs, and vulnerable scapegoats. 

Only an independent, working class-oriented movement informed by Marxism-Leninism can provide a “third way” apart from the disaster of free-market globalism or the trap of economic nationalism.

The old saw that workers deserve their own party is more true today than ever-- an authentic anti-capitalist party that returns to the revolutionary legacy surrendered to opportunism and parliamentary illusions.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Ellen Meiksins Wood: Against the Tide

Ellen Meiksins Wood died on January 14.

Ms. Wood was a prolific academic, writing many books and articles from a Marxist perspective. Among her peers, her work on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the advocacy of so-called “political Marxism,” and her views on Ancient modes of production are remembered.

With a broader audience, she will be remembered for her staunch defense of classical Marxism at a time of full retreat.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, most of Western Marxism—both Party-based and otherwise—lost its way. Disillusionment and despair held sway. In academic circles, a period of “rethinking” Marxism grew like a virus. The fundamentals of classical Marxism were challenged by the supposed rigor of rational choice theory on one hand and the wildly wielded scalpel of post-modernism on the other.

Rational choice theory announced ominously that the Marxist foundation was not and could not be built on the basis of homo economicus, a result that was both obvious and welcome to any serious student of Marx. Nonetheless, so-called “Analytical Marxism” took a toll.

A wave of epistemological relativism penetrated Western political thought from its pretentious and esoteric perch in European-- especially French-- universities. The idea that we could not defend any foundation for our world views apart from our own subjective and uniquely shaped perspective took hold. The fact that thinkers formerly associated with Marxism promulgated these views carried considerable weight in the English-speaking world. The unity that Marxism had striven to achieve between workers and other oppressed groups was shattered into a multitude of self-reflecting identities by the post-modern turn. Students and budding intellectuals hurled the epithet of “reductionism” at every effort to reveal underlying structures or processes.

The expansion of world markets to previously market-adverse economies dramatically boosted trade and investment to new levels. Theorists dubbed this quantitative burst “globalization” and hastily heralded it as a new stage of capitalism. Some went further, counting it as a harbinger of a world with transnational corporations overruling the governance of historically constructed states.

Indeed, it was an ugly time. Nonsense abounded.

The intellectual climate fed a similar floundering of the activist left in the nineties. Socialism, as a societal vision, was diluted into a regimen of “social markets” or receded behind the allure of anarchism and spontaneity. The fuzzy, unfocussed anti-globalization movement replaced anti-imperialism as the organizing principle of the left. A nostalgic yearning for the supposed golden era of post-World War Two prosperity and a thread-bare safety net substituted for the quest for full social justice—“revolution” was retired.

It was in this context that Ellen Meiksins Wood declared war on the navel-gazers, the timid, and the opportunists abandoning Marxism. Even before the fall of the Soviet Union and the ensuing Western ideological Great Plague, she exposed the “new,” eviscerated Marxism in her Retreat from Class (1986). Reflecting upon it years later in a new introduction, she wrote:

People have, in their various ways, moved on, in ways that have very little to do with Marxism, or even socialism, except to repudiate it. It seems clear that Post-Marxism was just a short pit-stop on the way to anti-Marxism. The Retreat from Class (1998)

She carried out much of her struggle against traitors, slackers, and opportunists in the pages of Monthly Review while serving as co-editor with Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff from 1997 to 2000.

Her stinging attacks on the globalization thesis (‘Globalization’ or ‘globaloney’?), along with the equally biting polemics by Doug Henwood, were aimed at anyone who would dare to defend it: “…globalization…is the heaviest ideological albatross around the neck of the left today.” (MR, February 1997)

Wood saw the global dominance of markets not as a defeat, but as an opportunity for the left:

Now capitalism has no more escape routes, no more safety valves or corrective mechanisms outside its own internal logic… So maybe it’s time for the left to see the universalization of capitalism not just as a defeat for us but also as an opportunity—and that, of course above all means a new opportunity for that unfashionable thing called class struggle. (Back to Marx, MR, June, 1997)

The recurring theme in Ellen Meiksins Wood’s writings was the centrality of class struggle. Against the tide of New Leftism, neo-Marxism, post-Marxism, post-modernism, and other wooly, confused departures from Marxism, she saw the working class as the essential agent for change.

When Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward engaged her on the pages of Monthly Review (January, 1998), challenging her “nostalgia for the working-class formations of the industrial era” and asserting that “We are all social democrats now,” she responded sharply:

‘There are no social-democrats now.’ People are waking up to the fact that social democracy is not a viable option. For those who have tended to identify social democracy with socialism, there seems to be no other alternative to capitalism—in fact no alternative to the more inhumane, neoliberal forms of capitalism. So the loss of social democracy is for them indeed an awesome one. It is for them a more cataclysmic and perhaps even final loss than for those who, while certainly supporting the welfare state or any amelioration of capitalism’s destructive consequences, have always doubted the long term sustainability of capitalism “with a human face.” Those who used to place all their hopes in social democracy are inclined to explain their awesome loss not by conceding that a humane capitalism was never sustainable in the long term but by invoking some massive epochal shift which had destroyed what used to be, but no longer is, a real possibility.

In answer to the then fashionable skepticism toward the socialist project, Ms. Wood asserted that the naysayers could offer nothing beyond “a better and maybe more humane management of ‘flexible’ capitalism,” an insight that presages by nearly two decades the principled refusal of Greek Communists today to join SYRIZA in the management of capitalism.

Lest anyone believe that Wood harbored any illusions about reformism apart from the goal of socialism, she offered the following thoughts to a 1999 forum in South Africa which included participants from the ANC, COSATU, and the South African Communist Party:

My main point is that there can be struggles and objectives short of a socialist transformation, but there can’t be such a thing as a Third Way. There really is no middle ground between capitalism and socialism.

That’s not a paradox. It simply means that all oppositional struggles… should be informed by one basic perception: the class struggle can’t, either by its presence or by its absence, eliminate the contradictions in the capitalist system, even though it can ultimately eliminate the system itself… without falling into the hopeless trap of believing that the left can do a better job of managing capitalism. Managing capitalism is not the job of socialists, but, more particularly, it’s not the job that can be done at all. (MR, September, 1999)

No doubt events have played the largest role in washing away much of the ideological fashions that enjoyed such popularity with the Western left in the 1990s. Endless wars, exploding inequality, and an epochal economic crisis make what appeared to be learned assessments and ominous projections appear little more than naïve.

We should not forget, however, how important it was to have a few courageous voices defend principle against the current, to stand firm while others were in full retreat.

Ellen Meiksins Wood was one.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Hope for a Left Revival?

Fifteen years have passed since the zenith of capitalist triumphalism, the peak moment of capital's successful penetration of nearly every inhabitable area of the globe. Not unlike the beginning of the last century, the wealthy and privileged saw few storm clouds on the horizon, a future of unlimited accumulation and placid rule. While there were some risings in the hinterlands and some rebelliousness in the air, they were easily suppressed or marginalized.

At the center of this capitalist utopia stood the world's gendarme-- the US Goliath-- with bases, military power, and unmatched technology, ensuring that the world was a secure haven for monopoly corporations. Moreover, the US sought and enforced international dominance. They pledged to bring “democracy” to the world with the same self-righteous hypocrisy and hubris that the earlier imperialists had masked their economic voraciousness behind religious missionary zeal.

But matters went awry in the new century.

The support for religious zealots organized by the US, NATO, and their allies against Middle Eastern secular, independent movements boomeranged. Unlike earlier puppets who were quickly jettisoned when their usefulness was exhausted, Islamic fundamentalists struck their erstwhile masters before they could be betrayed by them. Under the guise of a “war on terror,” a perpetual overt and covert war against Middle Eastern states and populations-- a veritable modern-day crusade-- continues to this day. The US, NATO, the EU, and a motley collection of scavengers cynically used the excuse of terrorism to reconfigure an entire region, destroying stable societies, killing millions, and leaving millions homeless.

At the same time, a global economy resting on the triumph of nineteenth-century bourgeois economic thought and practices began to falter. Faith in the bright future was shaken by the destruction of trillions of dollars of nominal value, a disaster brought on by the foolish speculations of a gang of the oracles of a new era of technological advance.

Before the effects of the so-called “dot-com” crisis subsided, the global economy was struck with another downturn, shaking the capitalist underpinnings like no other blow since the Great Depression. To answer this catastrophe, capitalism spun off millions of workers, stripped wages and benefits, and shredded an already meager social safety net. The wake of the 2007-2008 collapse continues to drown the hopes and aspirations of millions, with even more turbulence on the horizon.

To any sober observer, capitalism is in the throes of a deep, profound, multi-faceted crisis. The celebration of fifteen years ago was a hollow and unwarranted declaration of the unstoppable success of capitalism. War, deprivation, and uncertainty are the legacy of those hailing that moment. Few alive today know a time when the future looked so unsure.

The Basis for a Left Revival?

Years of disillusionment following the decline of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies produced an era of navel-gazing and an extreme dilution of the socialist vision for the left, especially in the US and Europe. Murky enemies like “globalization” or “empire” replaced “imperialism” and “capitalism” in public discourse. Gradualist programs, market-centered reforms, and a trivialization of diversity toward micro-identities guided a dispirited left. Revolutionary politics were smothered by a sense that a “humane capitalism” was the best that could be gotten.

Sure, the left rallied around the anti-imperialist project in Latin America, particularly the heroic rise of Hugo Chavez, and later, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa. The broad-based defiance of the North American gendarmerie served to inspire millions who had lost hope. But the leftist “Spring” that swept through the South has yet to spawn a real replacement for capitalist economic relations, not to mention, a rock-solid socialism, such as that in Cuba.

Now with capitalism on the ropes, one might expect a left upsurge. With political and economic crisis-- endless war and near-depression-- one would expect a revitalized left to emerge today.

It hasn't happened.

In Europe and North America, two flawed, failed currents dominate the left ideological landscape: anarchism and social democracy. The anarchist tendency is not the revolutionary anarchism of Bakunin, but a tame version based on the utopian idea that all that stands in the way of a just and fair society is restraint on the freedom of the masses-- authority, and not capitalism, is the ultimate oppressor. For the modern day anarchists, social change lies in radical democracy, removing the encrusted bureaucracies that rule over our society-- civil servants, agencies, union leaders, politicians, etc.

Of course there is some truth in this critique, but without a greater vision, without a plan to replace capitalism, overturning a bureaucracy simply invites another one. And insofar as its enemy is authority, modern anarchism differs little from its anti-government counterpart on the extreme right. The social base for this contemporary strain is, as it was in the 1960s, students and the economically marginalized. The failures of the 1960s New Left are reproduced today in the meteoric rise and quick collapse of the Occupy Wall Street movement and its European counterparts. Its clarion calls, as in the past, are spontaneity and “horizontalism.”

A second dominant strain in our time is social democracy, a posture that traces its origins and draws its life from hostility to Bolshevism. As an antidote to revolutionary socialism, it attempts to awkwardly straddle the divide between working class advocacy and accommodation to capitalism. It offers an evolutionary road map-- a socialism-lite-- that depicts capitalism as gradually eroding and giving way to a growing public sector. Moreover, the mechanisms established to insure capitalist rule are to be somehow harnessed to this end. The social base for social democracy is the ossified union leadership, opportunist politicians, and a neutered, cowed working class made impervious to revolutionary ideology.

For much of the twentieth century, social democracy rivaled Marxism-Leninism. But after decades of advocating market solutions and supporting imperial belligerency, social democracy-- in the form of center-left political parties-- stands discredited and unpopular.

Where successful campaigns of anti-Communism and fear-mongering had taken root, social democratic parties did thrive. However, when periods of deep crisis appear, social democracy invariably fails the working class. We are in such a period now.

The last gasp of social democracy arose with the election of SYRIZA in Greece. Garbed in a militant swagger and an outlaw persona, SYRIZA quickly became both the darling and flag-bearer for the left wing of social democracy. For Die Linke, France's Left Party, Spain's PODEMOS, and other European movements seeking to revive the social democratic corpse, the Tsipras government of open-collared and casual intellectuals promised the rescue of a spent political philosophy.

But as quickly as SYRIZA rose, it crashed and burned, delivering the Greek people a fate even more onerous than that delivered by earlier governments. But more than a failure, the SYRIZA tenure was a fiasco with an ill-considered national referendum giving the party a mandate to resist, only to be followed immediately by a humiliating surrender.

Not to be deterred by the debacle, the admirers of SYRIZA--- the last bastions of social democracy-- spun a web of apologetics, excuses, and obfuscations worthy of the best confidence artists. Where sober-minded observers drew critical lessons, these sycophants chose to deflect and deny.

Writing in the Peoples World (9-11-2015), Sam Webb, recently retired chair of the Communist Party USA, wrote: “Nevertheless Tsipras still hoped that the large ‘no’ vote of the Greek people in a referendum a week before the negotiations began might give German leaders reason to pause, to reconsider their draconian bargaining posture, and maybe, just maybe, consider some form of debt relief.

Or, alternatively that the vote would nudge France and Italy, as well as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to show some backbone and stand up to the German capitalist juggernaut.” (my emphases)

“Nudge”? “Reason to pause”? “Reconsider”? “Maybe, just maybe...”?

Are these the considered negotiating objectives of serious leaders confronting the resolute and naked power of European monopoly capital? Do you “nudge” a bully? Do you chance that “maybe just maybe” a ruling class will show compassion? Webb sees history as not the history of class struggles, but the history of class “nudges.”

And then there is Oscar La Fontaine, the godfather of Germany's Die Linke party, writing on Jean-Luc Melanchon's blog (Melanchon is the leader of France's Left Party): “We have learned one thing [from the SYRIZA debacle]: while the European Central Bank, which claims to be independent and apolitical, can turn off the financial tap to a left government, a politics that is oriented towards democratic and social principles is impossible.

It is now necessary for the European left to develop a Plan B for the case where a member party arrives in a comparable situation.” (my emphases).

“Claims to be independent”? Did La Fontaine only recently discover that the ECB is a tool of monopoly capital? Like the cynical Captain Renault in the film Casablanca, La Fontaine is shocked, shocked that the ECB is neither independent nor apolitical! And how dare the ECB deny “a politics that is oriented toward democratic and social principles...” That's not cricket! Like Webb, La Fontaine does not see monopoly capital as the enemy, but as a partner acting unreasonably.

It should be no surprise, accordingly, that La Fontaine's “Plan B” depends upon the EU oligarchs agreeing to disarm the ECB, an outcome as likely as their acceptance of SYRIZA's original plan. Thus, the circle is complete: the Euro-left needs to secure an agreement from the very same forces that “shockingly” denied a moderate agreement in the first place. Could anything be more futile?

Curiously, the former Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, sees things differently and yet the same! In a long-winded speech in France (Festival of the Roses, 9-23-2015), Varoufakis locates the roots of Europe's problems in its unification: “Why? Because we let our rulers try to do something that cannot be done: to de-politicise money, to turn Brussels, the Eurogroup, the ECB, into politics-free zones.” (my emphasis). So where Germany's La Fontaine faults the European oligarchs for politicizing their decisions, his Greek counterpart faults Europe for de-politicizing its institutions! He goes on incoherently: “When politics and money are de-politicised what happens is that democracy dies. And when democracy dies, prosperity is confined to the very few who cannot even enjoy it behind the gates and the fences they need to build to protect themselves from their victims.

To counter this dystopia the people of Europe must believe again that democracy is not a luxury afforded to creditors and declined to debtors.”

So the debacle arose from a shortage of democracy. And the remedy is for the people of Europe to “...believe again that democracy is not a luxury afforded...” to the few. Varoufakis conveniently deflects the blame that he and his colleagues share for the Greek tragedy onto the people of Europe and their lost belief in democracy. “We do not have to agree on everything. Let us make a start with an agreement that the Eurozone needs to be democratised.”

If only there were more democracy! If only Europe's rulers would see the need to cooperate! And if only the people of Europe would make them act democratically! Smothered by Varoufarkis' petulant burst of disconnected ideas is the simple truth that rulers rule. They rule for their own interests and not to please or recognize supposed oppositional forces like SYRIZA or their ilk.

All three commentators, like many others who fawned after SYRIZA, are now left harboring wild illusions and offering shallow, unimaginative answers to the crises of capitalism.

A Path of Renewal

SYRIZA's harshest critic offers a different answer to the challenge of a wounded, but ruthless capitalism. From surveying most of the left press in Europe and North America, one would not know that the leaders of a Greek political party clearly analyzed the SYRIZA program and accurately predicted its failure. One would not know that only one Greek party now offers the only program even remotely hopeful of resisting the further impoverishment of the Greek people. One would not know that only one political force in Greece gives the Greek people a dignified path forward that does not depend on the “fair-mindedness” of monopoly capital or the condescension of European elites.

That party is the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), a party with both a long history and deep ties with the Greek people.

Shamefully, most of the leaders of the Western left ignore the KKE and its alternative program, a reflection of the deep strains of anti-Communism infecting political thought and the obdurate close-mindedness of the neo-anarchists and social democrats. Thus, the KKE is objectively blacklisted from the Western discussion of a road forward.

With Greek elections coming on September 20, KKE has adopted the campaign slogan: “You have tried them… Now the solution is to be found on the path to overthrow the system, joining forces with the KKE.” This slogan reminds the Greek people and others that finding a solution within capitalism is not only a bad idea, but a proven failure.

“KKE is stressing that the people must not give a 'second chance' to the parties that support the path of capitalist development and the EU, the path that brings the memoranda and the anti-people measures. They must not approve the implementation of the new anti-people memorandum with their votes. They must not give a 'second chance' to those who, in the recent past as well, sowed illusions about the ‘humanization’ of capitalism.” With the Greek people's standards of living approaching the tragic levels found after the Second World War, we are witnessing a preview of where the capitalist crisis is taking the rest of the world. For those who are open to seeing it, the collapse of SYRIZA is a demonstration of the futility of finding a way out of the crisis within the system of capitalism. KKE understands this and offers an alternative; not an easy road, but one more promising than following the dead ends traveled in the past.

KKE electoral success this coming weekend will shorten that road immeasurably as well as provide an inspiration for those of us seeking an alternative to the bankrupt model of social democracy.

KKE gains will improve the chances for a real left revival.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com