The Socialist Challenge Today

SYRIZA, Sanders, Corbyn

Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin, Stephen Maher

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781642592092
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin, and Stephen Maher provide a newly updated and expanded primer for twenty-first century democratic socialists. The Socialist Challenge Today presents an essential historical, theoretical, and critical perspective for understanding the potential as well as the limits of three important recent phenomena: the Sanders electoral insurgency in the United States; the Syriza experience in Greece; and Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom. The renowned coauthors compellingly convey the importance of developing strategic and practical capacities to democratically transform state structures so as to render them fit for realizing collective democracy, social equality, sustainable ecology, and human solidarity.

1

THE REVIVAL OF
DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM

One of the most unexpected aspects of the current political conjuncture has been the coming to the fore of socialists at the leadership levels of the British Labour Party and the US Democratic Party. Their class-focused political discourse, directed against the power of the capitalists, of the corporations, and of the banks—and the state policies and actions that reflect and sustain this power—no doubt speaks to many of the same popular discontents that have animated the rapid rise of explicitly populist xenophobic politicians on the right. But to dismiss those who advance today’s socialist discourse as an equivalent left populism is mistaken in theory and misleading in practice. These socialist leaders are drawing fresh political attention to the dynamics, structures, inequalities, and contradictions of capitalism as the systemic core of neoliberal globalization and ruling class privilege and power.

It is significant that this new politics has galvanized tens of thousands of young people into groups like Momentum and the Democratic Socialists of America. Their affiliation thereby with the parties of the center-left is not only directly concerned with mobilizing support for these socialist leaders and their political discourse, but also using this support as a springboard for advancing class struggles in the workplace, the community, and the local state. Nothing like this has happened in at least three generations. The explosion of activist energy has much to do with the frustrations of two decades of episodic mass protests and the marginality of those small revolutionary groups, which themselves provided little strategic guidance beyond direct action—in both cases leaving to the side the matter of how to enter the state to change what it does, let alone to change what it is.

That this socialist resurgence should have happened in the UK and US, of all places, is remarkable. It reflects how deeply political parties are linked to states through electoral systems, which is itself an outcome of certain dialectical historical relationships between states and parties. The resolve, since the early 1980s, of the Members of Parliament belonging to the Socialist Campaign Group to remain inside the Labour Party—so fundamental to the propulsion of Jeremy Corbyn into the leadership—would never have happened without the barriers imposed by the “first-past-the-post” electoral system, with its bias against new parties, blocking any viable socialist alternative. Nor would the Independent Senator Bernie Sanders have contested for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, or socialists at other levels run on the Democratic Party ticket, except for the absence of proportional representation in US elections. On the other hand, the coalescing of socialist forces in recent years outside the mainstream center-left parties into new parties such as Die Linke in Germany, Syriza in Greece, Bloco de Esquerda in Portugal, and Podemos in Spain cannot be understood apart from the fact that openings for their entering the state are provided by electoral systems based on proportional representation.

Yet however thin and frayed the electoral base of the old center-left parties has become, including even the “classic” social democratic parties of Germany and Sweden, these parties remain the dominant partners in electoral and governmental coalitions that extend from the center left to the far left. This suggests that the mobilization of socialist support behind Corbyn and Sanders inside the dominant center-left parties may afford possibilities as radical, at least for the time being, as the mobilization of socialist electoral support outside these parties.

The renewed appeal of a socialist political discourse, one hundred years after the Russian Revolution and thirty years after its ignominious endpoint, has astonished the punditocracy. It does indeed appear that socialism in the twenty-first century has finally broken free of the Bolshevik legacy, which so defined—pro and con—the political discourse of the left throughout the twentieth century, often weighing “like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” The emergence of a twenty-first century socialism that neither defines itself by the Bolshevik model, nor abjectly shrinks from advancing a socialist project for fear of being tainted by it, is itself a historic development. This is not to say that the Russian Revolution is forgotten, but only that, as young socialist activists mobilize against the timidity of career politicians and the machinations of the old center-left party and media establishment that keep them in place, such activists are today far more likely to be inspired by elements of its original revolutionary spirit than its specific revolutionary methods.

Yet the demise of the communist institutional tradition amid the survival of the social democratic one also carries with it a legacy that weighs on the brains of the living. This is seen in the tendency to clothe today’s socialist agenda in the image of the policy achievements of the New Deal in the US and of postwar social democracy in Western Europe. The former largely ignores the compromises with capital that prevented the New Deal from ever turning into a social democratic welfare state, while the latter plays down how limited even postwar European social democracy was by its own explicit politics of class compromise. Foremost in mind on the left in recent decades is how far the US Democratic Party and the British Labour Party have traveled down the path to neoliberalism, while largely disregarded has been the fact that this was a common trajectory of all social democratic parties.

Indeed, despite the very different economic and social conditions today as compared with the postwar era, there is a tendency to present reforms in terms of merely picking up from 1935 or 1945. That said, there is a sharper awareness among socialists of how far the social democratic welfare state had, by the 1970s, already been beset by the contradictions of being married to the regeneration of a dynamic financial capitalism. Today’s leadership of the Labour Party claims to inherit to the stifled Bennite agenda of the early 1970s, which was based on the recognition that it would be necessary to go beyond the postwar compromise with capital even to hold on to existing welfare state reforms. Yet the radical reforms advanced today, including the renationalization of the railways and other public utilities, fall far short of the pledge in Labour’s Programme for Britain 1973 to nationalize the twenty-five leading corporations across the key sectors of the economy alongside the planning agreements that other corporations would be tied to. Also notably absent is the 1976 Alternative Economic Strategy’s focus on the need for import and capital controls.¹

In contrast to the radical proposals for “taking capital away from capital” that emanated from within European social democratic parties in the 1970s—from the union-led socialization of the corporations in Sweden to the nationalization of the banks in France—the policies being advanced today by socialists inside the center-left parties look very modest. The emulation of the glory days of the New Deal or of postwar social democracy is inherently limited by the impossibility of restoring the particular social and economic conditions of those days. The past four decades of the internationalization of capitalist states—not least through the removal of capital controls and the free-trade agreements that codified their sponsorship of neoliberal globalization—have similarly rendered implausible any notion of merely rebooting the stifled socialist agendas that emerged within social democratic parties at the height of the crisis of the Keynesian welfare state in the 1970s.

This makes it all the more imperative that socialists face squarely, and discuss far more openly than has yet been done, whether the policy proposals that are being advanced in the current conjuncture through an explicitly socialist discourse only amount to the revival of social democratic reformism, or foretell the emergence of a new strategy for structural reform that would create the conditions for taking capital away from capital. Any socialist-led government in the UK or US in the foreseeable future would have to face a still deeply integrated global capitalism, with capitalist-class economic dominance securely in place domestically, with working-class forces not strong enough, nor coherent enough, to sustain a full-blown challenge to that dominance, and with public institutions very far from having the capacity, let alone the orientation, to implement democratic economic and social planning.

Being in no position to take over the “commanding heights of the economy”—or even to introduce capital controls without immediately inducing more severe economic hardship than the austerity they are pledged to end—such a government would of necessity tread cautiously through piecemeal interventions against capitalist power and advance reforms that risk being overwhelmed in these conditions. All this would sustain the very significant oppositional elements inside the center-left parties at every level, and especially among the elected career politicians for whom a serious commitment to socialism, however gradualist, is regarded as a dangerous chimera. This poses the questions of how the socialist leadership of such a government could sustain its long-term ambitions, and what would distinguish its policies from the types of reforms advanced by progressive liberals and moderate social democrats today.

A first condition for building on electoral success would be to deliver some material gains for working people. In the context of the massive growth of inequality and high profits in both the UK and the US, there is in fact both the ideological and economic space for delivering improvements in people’s lives through programs for social provision. A further step, which could open new paths to future structural reform, would be to expand economic democracy and public investment in infrastructure, transportation, and utilities. The crucial measure, however—one that distinguishes socialists from social democrats—is to develop these plans not in ways that would restore capitalist hegemony, but rather build the power, cohesion, and capacities of the working class to struggle for broader and deeper reforms than what are possible today. This would entail a systematic political education based on a sober acknowledgment of the barriers new socialist movements now face and what must be done to overcome them to realize that movement’s larger potentials. But reforms and political education will not be enough. Significant gestures toward a post-capitalist future must be introduced and struggled over in the present. This requires a politics that is at every step engaged in directly confronting a profound dilemma: giant steps are impossible, yet small steps risk being swallowed into the logic of the system.

FROM SOCIAL DEMOCRACY TO DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM

In 1917, not only those parties engaged in insurrectionary revolution but even those committed to gradual reform spoke of eventually transcending capitalism. Half a century later, social democrats explicitly came to define their political goals as compatible with a welfare-state variety of capitalism, and well before the end of the century, even many who had formerly embraced the legacy of 1917 would join them in this. Yet this shift occurred just as the universalization of neoliberalism rendered threadbare any notion of distinct varieties of capitalism. The realism without imagination of the Clinton-Blair “Third Way” was shown to ultimately lack realism as well as imagination.

However reactionary the era of neoliberal globalization has been, it has seemed to confirm the continuing revolutionary nature of the bourgeoisie, at least in terms of creating “a world after its own image.”² Nevertheless, the financialized form of capitalism that greased the wheels not only of global investment and trade, but also of globally integrated production and consumption, was clearly crisis-prone.³ The first global capitalist crisis of the twenty-first century, which began with the financial crash of 2007–08, was rooted in the contradictions attending the new credit-dependent forms through which, amid stagnant wages in the neoliberal era, mass consumption was sustained. Yet, in sharp contrast to the two great capitalist crises of the twentieth century in the 1930s and 1970s, as the crisis has unfolded over the past decade, it did not lead to a replacement of the regime of accumulation that gave rise to it. Unlike the move away from the Gold Standard regime in the 1930s and the abandonment of the Bretton Woods regime in the 1970s, the neoliberal regime persisted after 2008. Neoliberalism endured through the rescue and reproduction of financial capital, the reassertion of austerity in fiscal policy, the dependence on monetary policy for stimulus, and the further aggravation of income and wealth inequality—all of which were made possible by the continuing economic and political weaknesses of working classes everywhere through this period.

We are now at a new conjuncture. It is a very different conjuncture than the one that led to the perception that neoliberalism, at the height of its embrace by Third Way social democracy, was “the most successful ideology in world history.”⁴ While neoliberal economic practices have been reproduced—as has the US empire’s centrality in global capitalism—neoliberalism’s legitimacy has been undermined. The aftershocks of the US financial crash of 2008 reverberated across the eurozone and the so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), deepening the multiple economic, ecological, and migratory crises that characterized the following decade. At the same time, neoliberalism’s ideological delegitimization has enveloped many political institutions that have sustained its practices, from those of the European Union to political parties at the national level. What makes the current moment so dangerous is the space this ideological crisis has opened for the far right, with its ultranationalist, racist, sexist, and homophobic overtones, to capture popular frustrations with liberal democratic politics.

The recent delegitimization of neoliberalism has restored some credibility to the radical socialist case for transcending capitalism as necessary to realize the collective, democratic, egalitarian, and ecological aspirations of humanity. It has spawned a growing sense that capitalism can no longer continue to be bracketed when protesting the multiple oppressions and ecological threats of our time. And as austerity took top billing over free trade, the spirit of anti-neoliberal protest also shifted: whereas capitalist globalization had defined the primary focus of oppositional forces in the first decade of the new millennium, the second decade opened with the Occupy movement in the US and the Indignados anti-austerity movement in Spain dramatically highlighting capitalism’s gross class inequalities. Yet with this shift, the insurrectionary flavor of protest without revolutionary effect quickly revealed the limits of forever standing outside the state.

The marked turn on the left from protest to politics that has come to characterize the new conjuncture, as opposition to capitalist globalization shifted from the streets to the state theaters of neoliberal practice, was in good part what the election of Syriza in Greece and the sudden emergence of Podemos in Spain signified. Corbyn’s election as leader of the British Labour Party attracted hundreds of thousands of new members with the promise to sustain activism rather than undermine it. And even in the US, the heartland of the global capitalist empire, only a short bridge spanned Occupy and Sanders’s left populist promise for a political revolution “to create a government which represents all Americans, and not just the 1 percent.” This was reflected in polls indicating that half of all millennials did not support “capitalism” and held a positive view of “socialism”—whatever they thought those terms meant.

This transition from protest to politics has been remarkably class-oriented in terms of addressing inequality in income and wealth distribution, as well as in economic and political power relations. Yet as Andrew Murray has so incisively noted, “this new politics is generally more class-focused than class-rooted. While it places issues of social inequality and global economic power front and center, it neither emerges from the organic institutions of the class-in-itself nor advances the socialist perspective of the class-for-itself.”⁵ The disappointment that trade unions so often experience with the center-left parties whose base they form actually reflects the loss of these parties’ class focus once they are elected as they turn to govern in the “national interest.” But the larger strategic question pertains to how a class-rooted politics—in the original sense of the connection between working class formation and political organization—could become transformative today. What could the manifold changes in class composition and identity, as well as the limits and failures of traditional working-class parties and unions in light of these changes, mean in terms of new organizational forms and practices? And what would a class-focused and class-rooted transformation of the capitalist state entail?

While leaders like Tsipras, Iglesias, Corbyn, and Sanders all have pointed beyond Third Way social democracy, their capacity to move beyond it is another matter. This partly has to do with their personal limitations, but much more with the specific limitations of each of their political parties, including even the strongest left currents within them, and their failure to prepare adequately for the challenge of transforming state apparatuses. The experience of the government in Greece highlights this shortcoming, as well as how difficult it is for governments to extricate their state apparatuses from transnational ones.

All these factors compel a fundamental rethink of the relationship between class, party, and state transformation. If Bolshevik revolutionary discourse seems archaic a hundred years after 1917, it is not just because the legacy of its historic demonstration that revolution was possible has faded. It is also because the impossibility of an insurrectionary path to power in states deeply embedded in capitalist societies—as Gramsci clearly explained so soon after 1917—remains as real as ever. What this means for socialists, however, as we face up to a long war of position in the twenty-first century, is not only the recognition of the limitations of twentieth-century Leninism, let alone Soviet state practices. It also entails an appreciation of what inspired the communist break with social democracy in the first place—what Jodi Dean admires today as communism’s expression of the “collective desire for collectivity.”⁶ It also requires a commitment to working-class internationalism as opposed to national class harmony between capital and labor, an orientation to class formation and organization in the struggle against capital, and a recognition that socialist economic planning requires taking capital away from capital.

Democratic socialism in the twenty-first century must encompass all that was positive about the communist vision even while negating twentieth-century Communist Party and state practices by virtue of an indelible commitment to developing democratic capacities to the end of democratizing the economy and the state. This is crucial for retaining a clear distinction between de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the second edition
• Chapter 1: The Revival of Democratic Socialism
• Chapter 2: Class, Party, State: The Twentieth-Century Socialist Experience
• Chapter 3: From Protest to Party to State: Lessons from Syriza
• Chapter 4: Corbyn’s Challenge: From Party Insurgency to State Transformation?
• Chapter 5: Sanders’s Challenge: Economic Democracy beyond “Responsible Capitalism”?
• Chapter 6: Planning for Democratic Socialism
• Conclusion: The Socialist Challenge Today
• Notes
• Back Cover