An Overdue Look at the Environmental Crisis

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Our global environmental crisis is widely understood to be reaching a crucial moment; the danger signals are flashing almost daily. Yet a certain complacency follows the many catastrophic climate events attributable to a critically injured environment. People talk easily of a climate Armageddon, while maintaining business as usual.

Is this fatalism? Are there onerous sacrifices necessary to save the planet? Are there insurmountable obstacles to finding solutions? Are we beyond the point-of-no-return? 

These questions need urgent answers.

The truth is that some leftists have been addressing these problems and ringing the alarm for decades. But some of us, though recognizing the crisis, have paid only lip-service to its solutions, neglecting to apply the unique perspective that Marxism could bring. Looking at the crisis through the lens of class and exploitation surely offers a deeper understanding than the sensationalism and superficiality of the capitalist media and their punditry.

Mea culpa.

Hopefully, my own absolution began with acquiring a copy of Monthly Review’s July-August issue devoted to perspectives on the environmental crisis from a left, Marxist-friendly perspective. Entitled Planned Degrowth: Ecosocialism and Sustainable Human Development (volume 75, number 3), the volume offers eleven contributions, with an important, essential, introductory essay by John Bellamy Foster. Foster has labored productively in the vineyards of ecosocialism for some time. The journal number comes highly recommended.

Much of the popular response to the unfolding environmental disaster is reducible to cultural environmentalism. Advocates call for a change in consumption patterns-- switching from products whose production, reproduction, or disposal is most harmful to our land, water, or air. Some cultural environmentalists demand a radical overall cut in consumption, insist on the elimination of conspicuous consumption, or even pose a philosophical challenge to the very concept of consumerism so prevalent in capitalist societies. 

But cultural environmentalism alone does not thoroughly address the institutions that encourage or incur needless carbon emissions, senseless waste, and the depletion of precious resources-- institutions like the military, the security, judicial, and penal system, the sales and marketing effort, mass entertainment, etc. Nor does it challenge capitalism itself.

On a global level, conserving only the twentieth-century resources allocated for war making, the social wealth lost to the destruction of past wars and necessitated by the remedial costs of death and suffering would put us uncountable years behind our current rendezvous with disaster. Even eliminating today’s bloated military budgets and stopping the current wars would lessen the immediate crisis dramatically. 

Most of the mainstream liberal and social democratic cultural environmentalists ignore these institutions that are deeply embedded in the capitalist infrastructure, instead opting for campaigns to eliminate or recycle the most energy-soaked articles of convenience-- cans, bottles, plastic bags, etc. or forcing the issue into the thick, impenetrable muck of bourgeois politics, legislative decision-making, and state regulation.

The Green New Deal, the consensus approach of the techno-environmentalists, promises to restructure capitalism by rewarding positive changes in energy generation and use, while sanctioning corporate foot dragging and avoidance. Implementation rests with the commitment of political puppets of corporate power-- the political strata. Again, there is no substantial challenge to capitalism and its institutions with techno-environmentalism.

The contributors to the Monthly Review anthology more or less understand the shortcomings of the liberal/social democratic approach. They grasp that capitalism-- with its insatiable thirst for accumulation-- cannot meet the challenge of environmental catastrophe. That reality animates all of the selections in Planned Degrowth. Yet, among the writers, there is little agreement on how to move beyond capitalism (of all the contributors, Ying Chen makes the strongest case for a robust, planned socialist economy genuinely independent of the capitalist mode of production).

Resolving those differences is made all the more difficult by the ambiguities and confusions accompanying the central concepts of planning and degrowth. 

It is commendable that nearly all of the participants understand that market forces alone are inadequate to extract humanity from the catastrophe awaiting us. Moreover, the alternative to markets necessarily is some form of economic planning-- some form of conscious human-based decision making. This alone is a departure from the left’s post-Soviet love-fest with market mechanisms and market socialism-- indeed, a welcome departure opening the way to a more robust socialism. But what form should the planning take? Who should make the plan?

Foster wisely sees the cause of environmental disaster in the capitalist’s insatiable need to “accumulate! accumulate!” -- borrowing Marx’s succinct summation. Accordingly, the challenge is to organize the economy around social usefulness, and not profit-- “focusing on use value rather than exchange value,” to employ Foster’s words.

Certainly, contrasting use value against exchange value, advantaging the former, requires some exiting from the market mechanism and a turn toward a different mechanism for the allocation of resources: conscious human decision-making, i.e. planning.

This makes a neat, compelling argument for some form of planning.

Unfortunately, most of the contributors have little regard for the rich twentieth-century experience in planning afforded by the now-defunct European socialist community. It is fashionable, among Western academic Marxists (or Marxians, as they sometimes like to be called), to heap scorn on the Soviet central planning mechanism in its different iterations despite its relative successes even without the benefit of today’s astounding computational powers. Apart from Paul Cockshott and some of his colleagues, there is little interest in exploring how a similar planning mechanism could be optimized using available technologies.

Foster, to his credit, offers a very modest defense of Soviet planning, especially regarding its impact on the environment. But others acknowledge the need for planning without providing even a sketch of how that would be done. 

Instead, several writers revisit the old New Left fetish of participatory democracy, as though the more fingers in the planning pie, the better, regardless of the results. This reaches the limits of absurdity with the Venezuelan rural commune proposed as the model for a planning mechanism to rescue the world economy from the throes of environmental crisis, a utopian fantasy.

The other Western Marxist obsession is decentralization. Apparently, the political model beloved by the North American-European left is the Swiss canton, the landsgemeinde, combining the smallest possible political units with the most direct democracy. How such decentralized planning could successfully redirect a modern juggernaut economy to escape the tyranny of markets requires a giant leap of faith (As Nicolas Graham understates, “... it is quite difficult to imagine effective planning… without some coordinating authority and external arbiter.”) 

Planned Degrowth’s other key idea, degrowth, is also underdeveloped. Informing this concept is the looming disaster cited by Foster and implicit with all of the authors: 

The world scientific consensus, as represented by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has established that the global average temperature needs to be kept below a 1.5-degree Centigrade increase over pre-industrial levels this century-- or else, with a disproportionately higher level of risk, “well below” a 2-degree Centigrade increase-- if climate destabilization is not to threaten absolute catastrophe… All of this is predicated on reaching net zero (in fact, real zero) carbon emissions by 2050, which gives a fifty-fifty chance that the climate-temperature boundary will not be exceeded.

Understandably, faced with these limits, most of us recognize that, in some sense or another, we cannot have our cake and eat it, too. That is, growing carbon emissions, growing consumption patterns, more broadly-- growing GDP as support for growing consumption or growing population, and any and all other forms of growth that potentially increase carbon emissions cannot be simultaneously sustained without an existential threat to life on the planet.

But is it misleading, simplistic, and maybe even harmful to popularize degrowth in general as the solution to the life-or-death challenge of carbon-emission limits? Are there different kinds of “growth” -- minimal emissions, emissions-neutral, or even emissions-free-- that sidestep the rendezvous with climate disaster? Would not market-free, planned economic growth, itself, forestall that rendezvous? Can we not envision a growing, planned socialist economy that stems or reverses increases in emissions?

In the historically nuanced Marxist perspective, growth of the productive forces of society need not be coupled with an anarchical, unfettered, profit-driven economy, nor has it always been so associated. On the other hand, the preferred capitalist measuring stick of growth-- gross domestic product-- reflects that association: in the capitalist industrial era, growth (GDP), national wealth, the unregulated exploitation of carbon-based energy, and the exploitation of labor are inextricably bound. 

For Marxists, there is no such necessary link. Free of the wasteful uses of social wealth for class aggrandizement, class suppression, and endless accumulation, growth can be redefined as the unbounded improvement in both the quality and prospects of all human life. For example, the development of vaccines for Covid or future attacks of new viruses requires the further development of productive forces and constitutes a growth in social wealth, but with far less impact on the environment when undertaken outside the framework of the profit-driven capitalist system.

Marx and Engels gave us a different perspective on growth in The German Ideology, linking the development of forces of production directly to the improvement of humanity’s survivability and flourishing, while faced with ever-arising challenges from nature and other humans. They remind us that the mode of production is not only what people produce but how they produce. That ever-present, evolving challenge may, in some sense, at some time, require “growth,” but growth away from carbon emissions, waste, excess, inefficiency, and greed. Thus, we would define a new, humane concept of growth and production.

Foster comes close to recognizing this possibility by distinguishing “a quantitative as well a qualitative sense” of productive forces. But he seems to overlook that the qualitative expansion of productive forces might well be qualitative production, production independent of fossil fuels, carbon emissions, and environmental degradation-- production of new ideas, new living arrangements, new divisions of labor, etc. This would be a more refined notion of growth, far more useful than the BEA or OECD definition of gross domestic product that degrowth addresses. 

Two contributors, Isikara and Narin, are dismissive of the explanatory power of the second law of thermodynamics in the social world. Yet it does capture the fundamental struggle that only humans wage with ultimately limited, but astonishing success against a system’s tendency toward disorder. The development of productive forces was-- qualitatively or quantitatively-- the primary effective human response to this law: the law of entropy. The idea of degrowth, so superficially compelling in its simplicity, fails to account for this universal struggle. The environmental crisis is only the latest chapter in the perpetual struggle against species extinction. Like previous struggles, it will take development (and in the broadest sense, growth) of the productive forces to win, even if only temporarily from the inevitable disorder of closed systems.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to a just, viable solution to the environmental crisis is the gross inequalities found in the capitalist countries and found between the advanced capitalist countries and those less advanced. The weakness of the degrowth mantra aside, any immediate solution to the crisis will require limits to carbon emissions, limits that will fall unfairly upon the disadvantaged unless some compensatory distribution-- national and global affirmative action-- is established. In other words, should sacrifices be necessary, they must be fairly imposed. No poor country or poor population should be required or even asked to make commensurate sacrifices with wealthy countries or wealthy elites. More importantly, their development-- their ‘catching up’-- should not be delayed as long as they lag behind their wealthier counterparts. Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan make a powerful historico-empirical argument that capitalism can never meet this demand in their contribution. 

The only large-scale affirmative action program ever effectively actuated was the post-World War II collaboration of the socialist countries, coordinated by the Council on Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA, known in the West as Comecon). The CMEA based itself on the Leninist doctrine and the history of intensive investment of Soviet resources in the former Russian empire’s disadvantaged oppressed nations. Cognizant of the uneven development produced and reproduced by class society, the Soviet Union proportionately devoted far more resources to the “backward” constituent republics than to the more advanced Russian Republic.

The CMEA sought to continue this policy with the post-war socialist community. For example, the Soviet Union would offer an extended contract for oil to Cuba at the lowest market price of a previous period, while agreeing to purchase a fixed amount of sugar at the highest market price of that period. In addition, the Soviet Union would grant the poorer member state favorable, extended payment terms. It should be noted that the Soviet beet crop was more than adequate to supply Soviet sugar needs at a lower cost. At the same time, the Soviet Union would provide grants and low-interest, long-term loans for Cuban infrastructure and industrial development.

This, and most internal CMEA agreements, typified affirmative action on a massive scale to correct uneven development.

Given that capitalism has never known or even devised such a leveling, developmentally egalitarian approach in international affairs nor that any country today practices it (apart from socialist Cuba, generously, but with limited resources), the necessity for global affirmative action on the environment would seem to be a powerful argument for socialism among leftist activists. 

True to the history of Western Marxism, European-North American socialists find little worthwhile in the history of the Soviet Union, so the argument seldom sees the light of day.

That is not to say that the contributors to Degrowth Planning are unaware of the inequalities standing in the way of any fair and equitable answer to the environmental crisis. Foster is explicit: “At the same time, the poorer countries with low ecological footprints have to be allowed to develop in a general process that includes contraction in throughput of energy and materials in the rich countries and the convergence of per capita consumption in physical terms in the world as a whole.”

But what is lacking with all the participants’ accounts is agency. Who will tackle these challenges? Who will adopt a program that incorporates these considerations? Who will build a movement to move a program forward? 

It would be unfair to fault the twelve academics contributing to this issue for having no ready answer to these questions. Nonetheless, if theory is to matter, we must have practical answers (Isikara and Narin almost broach this issue, but deliver it in unnecessarily opaque academic language) and avoid utopia-spinning. Too often intellectuals deliver theory in the passive voice: “What is objectively necessary at this point in human history is therefore a revolutionary transformation… governing production, consumption, and distribution… a shift away from the system of monopoly capital, exploitation, expropriation, waste, and the endless drive to accumulation.”

Yes, but who is to accomplish this and how are they to do it?

It is far easier to say who will not do it! But surely it can be conceded that we need a class-based revolutionary party committed to a robust socialism that will wrest political and economic power from the capitalist class. Should we not be vigorously working toward that end if we want to avoid our date with doom?

Despite my reservations, I strongly recommend the special Monthly Review issue devoted to the environmental crisis, entitled Planned Degrowth: ecosocialism and sustainable human development.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

New Developments in Political Economy: The Demise of “Globalization”

Capitalism, Environmental Crisis, and Socialism

A hundred years from now, humans may remember 2014 as the year that we first learned that we may have irreversibly destabilized the great ice sheet of West Antarctica, and thus set in motion more than 10 feet of sea-level rise.

Meanwhile, 2015 could be the year of the double whammy — when we learned the same about one gigantic glacier of East Antarctica, which could set in motion roughly the same amount all over again. Northern Hemisphere residents and Americans in particular should take note — when the bottom of the world loses vast amounts of ice, those of us living closer to its top get more sea level rise than the rest of the planet, thanks to the law of gravity... (Washington Post, March 16)

The latest findings on climate change reported by the Washington Post mark another step on the path toward environmental catastrophe. Apart from philistines, apocalyptists, and other celebrants of ignorance, people understand that the growing degradation of our planet promises pain in the short run and disaster beyond. When humans first emerged on the planet, the environment, the climate, and other features of the natural world presented seemingly insurmountable obstacles to survival. The pre-history and early history of humankind was a tenuous struggle to construct bulwarks against natural calumny and a desperate effort to exploit nature's meager offerings.

Nearly two hundred thousand years after the appearance of homo sapiens, circumstances have turned full circle. Humanity has found the means to dominate nature (though far from in a humanitarian way), but with seemingly little regard for the sustainability of the human project. Today, the formerly vulnerable species threatens to render the earth inhospitable to itself, a kind of mindless suicide by the only species that genuinely claims to own a mind.

For those determined to avoid this suicidal path, locating the cause and finding solutions is an urgent task.

Is “Progress” or “Growth” the Enemy?

It is fashionable in some quarters to locate the cause of the environmental crisis in the insatiable lust for “progress,” a term as elusive as it is imprecise. Harking back to the sixties and the “counter-culture” era, many envision a world where consumerism and the fetish for the new are banished in favor of a simpler life style and intellectual, spiritual, or artistic values. There is much to admire in a commitment to modest consumption and arrested acquisitiveness.

However admirable this may be as a personal choice, it is extremely short-sighted social policy. Certainly, the upper-middle classes of the developed countries could benefit the environment by exiting the insane competition for larger houses, more luxurious cars, and the latest techno-gizmo. Unquestionably, the mindless quest for more and better is neither admirable nor sustainable. But before we condemn progress or growth, we must recognize that more is at stake in rejecting progress or growth than thwarting rampant consumerism in the US and Europe or the vulgar excesses of the upper classes.

Apart from consumption madness, billions of the world's population lack even the basics of sustainable life. They barely survive in the midst of poverty, disease, and inadequate shelter, food and water. Until the material means to rectify the sorry, inhuman plight of billions is available, progress and growth must be an imperative. To callously deny them a future out of scorn for hyper-consumerism is petty and, paradoxically, selfish. They cannot be made the scapegoat for Western privileged waste and excess. Those who so easily condemn progress or growth are shamefully blind to the inequities of class, race, and nationality.

Solutions

Prospective solutions come in many forms and many shades. Individual solutions are useful and defensible provided that they do no deny the disadvantaged the opportunity to achieve standards of living reasonably commensurate with the standards of the more privileged. For example, asking people without access to modern appliances to curtail usage of inefficient technologies is both irrational and unjust. Equality of sacrifice in the face of vast economic inequities cannot be the solution to environmental degradation. While recycling, re-use, and other personal conservation projects are necessary and meaningful, they are incapable of sufficiently slowing the global expansion and exhaustion of resources. Nor do individual, personal solutions offset the major sources of environmental destruction: corporations and governments.

Conventional policy solutions cluster around market-based and regulatory approaches to the environmental crisis.

Most environmental activists see the failure of either market-based or regulatory measures as a failure of political will. They believe that politicians and political movements have yet to recognize the dire consequences we face by ignoring the environmental crisis. While this may be true, it fails to recognize the acute limitations of market-based and regulatory solutions and the impossibility of their effectiveness in a global capitalist economy.

The political will is not absent because of ignorance, but because the political system is owned and nourished by the capitalists. Moreover, the global economy-- overwhelmingly a capitalist economy-- is fueled by profits and profits alone. And profits are sustained and expanded by turning everything material or immaterial into a commodity. As a commodity, nature's resources hold no value other than what can be attached to the pursuit of profit.

It is the exploitation of human and natural resources-- labor and nature's bounty-- that is the grist for profit's mill. And capitalism puts profits ahead of nature as well as ahead of people. Both history and the logic of capitalist accumulation and expansion demonstrate the inevitability of waste and destruction. Only when environmental degradation impedes the process of accumulation and profit expansion will the capitalist system respond to the crisis; environmental scientists tell us that will be too late.

And that is precisely the point acknowledged by Naomi Klein in her recent book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Klein's anti-capitalism, like so many versions associated with the social democratic, soft-left, has been somewhat fuzzy, vacillating between rejecting the neo-liberal incarnation of capitalism and something elusive, but more daring. But her current thinking is sharper, though still short of an endorsement of a coherent vision of socialism. She concedes: “But because we have waited as long as we have, and we now need to cut our emissions as deeply as we need to, we now have a conflict not just with neoliberalism, but a conflict with capitalism because it challenges the growth imperative.” (quoted in Monthly Review, Notes from the Editors, March, 2015). For this, Klein has been criticized widely by her liberal readers still anchored in fealty to capitalism.

The editors of Monthly Review perceptively point out that “Klein’s argument here is irrefutable. To be sure, in criticizing neoliberalism for removing the tools needed to address climate change she deftly avoids the issue of whether capital as a system could ever have seriously mitigated the problem.” (op. Cit.)

Capital cannot mitigate the problem.

The MR editors go on to persuasively argue:

Klein is realistic and radical enough to realize that her recognition of this necessity, together with her readiness to act on it, puts her and the entire left climate movement that she represents in conflict with capital as a system—and not just with its most virulent form of neoliberalism. It is, as she says, a “two stage argument,” and we are now in the second stage. There is no avoiding the fact that the logic of capital accumulation must give way if we are to have a reasonable chance of saving civilization and humanity. (op. Cit.)

For “the entire left climate movement” to move beyond individual solutions, market-based answers, regulation, rejection of neo-liberalism, and even capitalism, the movement must define and embrace another goal. What would it be?

Only a system that will replace the logic of profit-before-all with the broad interests of humanity can answer the question. Only a system that can supplant the anarchy of production and distribution with rational planning could count as an answer. Only a system that can substitute forward-looking public ownership for individual short-term self-interest will cope with the crisis. And only a system that erases the existing extreme inequalities associated with capitalism and imperialism can meet our need to bring social justice to the disadvantaged.

As reluctant as much of the left is to utter the word, the answer is quite simply: socialism.

The Unseen Elephant in the Room
Lost on most of the environmental movement, including the “left climate movement,” is the role of imperialism in stoking the environmental crisis. According to Wikipedia:

The United States Department of Defense is one of the largest single consumers of energy in the world, responsible for 93% of all US government fuel consumption in 2007... In FY 2006, the DoD used almost 30,000 gigawatt hours (GWH) of electricity, at a cost of almost $2.2 billion. The DoD's electricity use would supply enough electricity to power more than 2.6 million average American homes. In electricity consumption, if it were a country, the DoD would rank 58th in the world, using slightly less than Denmark and slightly more than Syria (CIA World Factbook, 2006). The Department of Defense uses 4,600,000,000 US gallons... of fuel annually, an average of 12,600,000 US gallons... of fuel per day.

Add to this total the electricity and fuel usage of the rest of NATO, Japan, Russia, The Peoples Republic of China as well as those belligerents constantly at war with imperialism and you have uncountable and socially unnecessary waste of natural resources as well as ecological destruction.

Count the hundreds of military bases-- outposts for imperialism-- that devour resources better employed in a war to protect the environment.

Add to this total the unceasing pollution, the destruction of natural and man-made structures, the spoilage of land and water, etc. that accompany the endless use of devastating weapons.

The full effects of militarism and imperial aggression stagger the imagination.

Pentagon estimates of the production and maintenance of one weapons system alone-- the F-35-- have been reduced to over three-quarters of a trillion dollars-- an enormous unmentioned cost to the environment.

Unfortunately, far too many environmentalists are more cognizant of the environmental damage of littering than they are aware of the enormous threat to the environment of imperial design and endless war. Joining the anti-imperialist, anti-war movement, fighting for an end to militarism, is potentially a far more effective way to reverse the ecological wounds that threaten the planet than the entire bundle of liberal and social democratic panaceas that currently dominate the discussion in the environmental movement: Prius, yes, but Predator drones, no.

As the environmental movement matures, it must embrace the socialist option. It must stand resolutely against militarism and its threat to the environment. No other stance will deflect “civilization” from its determined march toward self destruction. Authentic, militant environmentalism comes with partisanship for socialism and anti-imperialism.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Is There Life After Social Democracy?

“Labour's problems aren't very different from those of other Western social democratic parties... In this sense we are experiencing not merely a crisis of the British state but also a general crisis of social democracy” (Labour Vanishes, Ross McKibbin, London Review of Books, November 20, 2014).

McKibbin's summary assessment of social democracy is both keen and cogent. Social democracy, the political expression of twentieth-century anti-Communist reformism, has arrived at a juncture that challenges its vision as well as its political vitality. In McKibbin's words: “Over the last twenty or thirty years the great social democratic parties of Germany, Austria, Scandinavia, Australia and New Zealand (and now France) have bled support...” One could add, though in a less dramatic way, the ersatz US social democratic party, the Democratic Party.

In a real sense, social democracy drew its energy from its posture as an alternative to Communism. For various reasons-- fear of change, anti-Communist demonology, ignorance, imagined self-interest-- many of those disadvantaged by capitalism took refuge in the tame, gradualist, and militantly anti-Communist parties claiming space on the left. By advocating an easy parliamentary approach, charting a cautious, non-confrontational road, and enveloping the effort with civility, social democratic thinkers believe they can win popularity and smooth the sharp edges of capitalism.

After the founding of the Soviet Union and the birth of international Communist parties-- many of them mass parties-- the old Socialist International hewed to a reformist line that separated it from Communism while posing as advocates on the side of the workers and for socialism. Parliamentary successes followed from the adoption of moderation and the condemnation of Communism, a lesson learned only too well by practical leaders.

The model for social democracy after the Bolshevik revolution was undoubtedly the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Assuming power after the abdication of the Kaiser, the SPD swiftly suppressed the revolutionary zeal of the masses and established a parliamentary regime. By suppressing Communism, the SPD sought to accommodate the hysterical fears of the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie, a tactic destined to permeate social democratic thinking to this day. Despite being the largest party bloc in the Reichstag until July of 1932, neither appeasement of the right nor “responsibly” overseeing a capitalist economy under great duress would rescue the SPD and Germany from the rise of Nazism. Social democrats are fond of blaming the SPD's failure on the militant left or right-wing extremism, but they willfully ignore the blatant fact-- equally true today-- that people turn away from centrist parties when they fail to keep their promises. Ruling Germany became more the goal of the SPD than ruling it well and in the interest of Germany's working people.

With Communists' resistance to fascism earning the respect and trust of the people, as it did throughout most of Europe, social democracy fared poorly after the War. It is well established today that where European social democratic parties were prepared to distance themselves loudly and forcefully from collaborating with Communists, “friends” in the US were only too happy to give them covert and overt aid. The CIA and the host of other acronymic entities created by the US government to subvert anti-capitalist and pro-labor activities worldwide found willing collaborators in social democratic parties, especially among those who clearly identified Communist success with social democratic failure. It was not long before the opportunism of anti-Communism infected the entire social democratic movement: In 1951, the Socialist International formally dissociated itself from Communism, characterizing it as terrorist, bureaucratic, imperialistic, and freedom-destroying. Articles 7, 8, 9, and 10 of the Frankfort Declaration excommunicate Communism, condemning it to the netherworld with all of the fervor of the Inquisition.

But opportunism begets opportunism. By 1959 any pretense of socialism was erased from the grandfather of social democratic parties, the SPD. With the Godesberg program, the SPD effectively renounced a commitment to socialism, replacing it with vague notions of social justice and allusions to democratic advances. German social democracy thus made its peace with capitalism, under the banner of anti-Communism, and would, henceforth, pledge to never stray from the path of reform.

Nearly all other socialist and social democratic parties followed suit. In place of socialism, the doctrine of social welfare emerged as a tepid surrogate for eliminating exploitation from social and economic relations. Social democracy created an artificial, divisive wall between marginally well-off working people-- the so-called “middle class”-- and their more destitute class brothers and sisters. Instead of expropriating the expropriators, social democracy insists that the burden of pacifying the poor should be borne socially, with much of that burden falling on working class families.

Class, like socialism, was relegated to the dustbin. In its place was the concept of civil society with markets determining social status, compensation, and the distribution of goods and services. Those who lacked the physical or mental assets to compete for the “opportunities” afforded by markets were supposed to be protected by a metaphorical societal “safety net,” a set of programs designed to guarantee a marginal life for those alleged to be lacking competitive skills or spirit. Thus, the cry of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité,” so inspirational in the French Revolution, was diluted centuries later to the liberty of markets, the equality of the jungle, and the selfishness of individualism. The only vestige of eighteenth-century humanism remaining in social democratic theory is a shabby, porous net that guarantees that “losers” in the game of life will remain losers.

For decades, the supposed shining star in the social democratic firmament was Sweden. The myth of Swedish “socialism” sustained the few claims to social justice remaining intact with the soft left's assumption of the role of capitalism's handmaiden. Whatever credibility this view might have enjoyed was devastatingly punctured by an article written by Peter Cohen in the July-August 1994 issue of Monthly Review (Sweden: The Model that Never Was). Taking two Pollyanna articles from the previous year to task, Cohen, a long-time resident of Sweden, states emphatically: “Like all European Social Democratic Parties, the SAP [Social Democratic Workers Party] not only accepts capitalism but defends it against any attempt at change. The party has always argued that what is good for Swedish corporations is good for the Swedish working class.”

Cohen presages the fate of the US and European working classes when he explains that the SAP has always accepted that class collaboration “requires the working class to accept cutbacks-- of all types-- when corporate profits decline, and even when they don't.” Cohen outlines the virulent anti-Communism in the SAP that led it to support internment of Communists in WWII and work hand-in-glove with US Cold Warriors, citing its support for Pinochet's government and hostility to Portugal's revolution.

The SAP instituted the so-called “solidarity wage policy,” a cynical leveling of workers' wages within the total wage package. Cohen explains: “The “solidarity wage” does not affect the imbalance of income between workers and capitalists. It only redistributes wages between different groups of workers. It also makes the SAP look like a dedicated defender of the workers' interests.”

Cohen documents the role of the SAP in introducing private schools into the Swedish education system, in pro-capitalist tax “reform,” and in weakening Swedish social insurance (the “safety net”).

He cites the SAP's call (now ubiquitous in all capitalist countries) to retard workers' compensation in the interests of “competitiveness.”

Cohen's remarkable article is uncannily prescient of the evolution of social democracy over the two decades to follow his article, an evolution of closer and closer class collaboration. In his words: “The table manners shown by the strong in the course of their meal may be more attractive in countries with Social Democratic governments, but the digestive process is the same.”

It is tempting to see this development as a mutation of the social democratic ideal, as a departure.

It is not.

Instead, it is the trajectory of social democracy in a world where the specter of Communism has ebbed. Without pressure from the left, social democratic parties shed all pretense of representing the working class against capital and political power. Today, social democratic parties-- like the US Democratic Party-- function under the illusion that Europe and North America are classless societies, while acknowledging the problem of poverty plaguing the so-called “underclass.” Absent an aggressive commitment to resource redistribution, the 2007-2008 economic crisis has caught the moderate left in the vise of either imposing additional burdens on the majority to help the poor or ignoring their increasing desperation. To a great extent, they have chosen to ignore growing poverty while aiding capital in its effort to extract itself from the mire of global crisis. In essence, social democrats believe that capitalism can be steered out of the crisis without seriously modifying the existing relationship between capital and workers.

For workers seduced by social democracy, the romance has proven truly tragic. A partnership with capital combined with a commitment to buffering capital's “excesses” proves to be an extravagant self-deception; capital accepts no such concession. Rather than delivering capitalism with a human face, the architects of anti-Communist reformism have delivered division, concession, austerity, hardship, and imperial aggression.

But even more tragically, the failure of the social democratic project drives far too many people, including disillusioned workers, toward the extreme right, fascism, and neo-Nazism. Throughout Europe and the US, working people thirsting for answers have been betrayed by reformism. Unfortunately, they far too often turn to the right, a turn that conjures eerie images of the rise of fascism between the Wars.

Workers deserve a better option.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com