Renewing Socialism

Democracy, Strategy, And Imagination

Leo Panitch

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367285647
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000309652
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Renewing Socialism opens with an exploration of the contemporary meaning of revolution and reform, beginning by stressing the appropriation of both terms into the rhetoric of the political right. Panitch examines the failure to realize socialisms revolutionary promise through an analysis of social democratic parties and the politics of compromise t

1
Rethinking Revolution and Reform in Capitalist Democracies

There must be something in every socialist, from the very values involved in wanting socialism at all, wanting a revolution to bring about socialism rather than just wanting a revolution, that continually pulls towards precisely the compromises, the settlements, the getting through without too much trouble and suffering.... It is only when people get to the point of seeing that the price of the contradictions is yet more intolerable than the price of ending them that they acquire the nerve to go all the way through to a consistent socialist politics.

—Raymond Williams¹

I

The theme of revolution has hardly been absent from political discourse in recent years in the countries of advanced capitalism. But it has been a theme far more confidently sounded on the right, where it has taken on the coloration of a revolution from above, than it has been on the left. "We were all revolutionaries," Ronald Reagan told his White House staff on his last day in office, "and the revolution has been a success."² It was tempting, of course, simply to characterize such verbiage as the ad-man's cover for counterrevolution, equivalent to Reagan's designation of the Nicaraguan contras as "freedom fighters." And a healthy degree of disdain is also more than justified regarding this kind of "revolutionary" rhetoric, coming as it does from those who even defined "reform" in terms of undoing the limited achievements of Social Democratic and liberal welfare states.

Yet there is a sense in which the self-characterization of contemporary capitalists and politicians as "revolutionaries" and "reformers" might well have deserved to be taken more seriously. Merely to dismiss such rhetoric as mendacious nonsense misses an important dimension of what they have been about. For they have sought to reinfuse their societies with the very kind of bourgeois norms and values that were identified in The Communist Manifesto, where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels affirmed that the "bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part."³ Could we not in fact say that they have sought to immerse their societies "in the icy water of egotistical calculation" and to leave remaining "no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'"? Have they not endeavored to resolve "personal worth into exchange value and, in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms ... set up that single, unconscionable freedom—free trade"? And, "for exploitation, veiled by... political illusions" did they not try to substitute "naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation"? Whether or not their drive to prosecute the bourgeoisie's long revolution into the world of the twenty-first century will ultimately prove nearly as successful as they would like to think, surely we must nevertheless admit that the bourgeoisie at the end of the twentieth century seemed to have "conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway."

The bourgeois revolution from above at the end of the twentieth century was not the same kind of thing as the heroic historic moment that 1789 represented two hundred years earlier. But setting aside what capitalist political leaders themselves say or do, there is a deeper sense in which it is still appropriate to see the contemporary bourgeoisie as continuing to play "a most revolutionary part." In the world of the microchip, of computer technology, of numerical control of production, of instant global communication and capital transfers; in an era of global restructuring of industry, occupation, finance, and control, of workplace relations as well as the relations between gender and work, culture and household, we are perforce reminded of the essential meaning of the Manifesto's designation of the bourgeoisie as revolutionary. "The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society." Consider, moreover, the very contemporary ring that our present-day experience of the globalization of capitalism lends to a description penned a century and half ago:

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.... [It] has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations [We] have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production [The bourgeoisie] compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.⁴

To be sure, such developments in our own time also accompany and, to some significant extent, emerge out of the renewal of capitalist crises. We live under the mark of a kind of global financial speculation that makes what Marx described in 1850 in France seem like small change. This rampant speculation stands astride the revolutionary era of the microchip in production and communication. The return to the heartlands of the bourgeois order of mass unemployment in the course of the crisis of the mid-1970s and the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s has remained all too visible in the rearview mirror even as the American economy has sped ahead in the last few years. The economic future appears precarious indeed not only to Marxist economists but to the Wall Street Journal. They watch, whether with bated breath or wringing hands, for another "great crash," even as they marvel at the stock exchanges and bond markets' resilience. And all this invites us to ask of the bourgeoisie's "revolutionary part" in our own time whether it is not still, again in the words of the Manifesto, "paving the way for more extensive and more exhaustive crises," all the while "diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented" (p. 73). Is it not now more than ever possible that the bourgeoisie "is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells"?

Perhaps. To say the bourgeoisie continues to play a revolutionary part, in the sense we have drawn from the Manifesto, is at the same time to say that the renewed dynamism of the bourgeoisie in every epoch emerges out of the contradictions that spawn capitalist crises. "Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbances of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones" (p. 71). All these are present together, and to say the bourgeoisie remains revolutionary is really just to say that we continue to live in the bourgeois epoch. The reemergence of capitalist crises, the demise of Keynesianism, the class war from above prosecuted in the name of market freedom—all this has undermined the postwar Social Democratic notions of an eternally stable, harmonious, "mixed-economy" or "organized" capitalism. But must we not also cast aside such notions as "capitalism in its death throes" or even "late capitalism"? For even as the bourgeoisie increasingly merges and conglomerates, concentrates capital and socializes production and communication on a global scale, and even as this very concentration and socialization seems to lay the bases for new capitalist crises, so it remains the case that capitalism is still driven by competition even among global giants. It is this competition that is the source of the contemporary evidence that to exist the bourgeoisie must be revolutionary in production and in the changes it brings to relations in society more generally. It is one thing to say that capitalist development is inherently rent by its own contradictions: That remains the great insight of Marxism. But what is wrong about fatalistic expectations of breakdown is not just that capitalism has consistently outlived them, but that they ignore the fact that the bourgeoisie is distinctive among ruling classes historically precisely because it cannot exist without "constantly revolutionizing."

The bourgeoisie's continuing "revolutionary part" should certainly not be associated with unadulterated notions of "progress." The ecological damage being visited on the globe demonstrates how market competition pushes us against the limits of nature in a manner that is more horrific than it is "progressive." Barbaric social conditions, moreover, exist not only in the Third World's all-too-common combination of degrading poverty and brutal dictatorship. They also exist in the heartlands of capitalism in the form of massive inequality, racism, police repression, and bulging prisons. The point to be drawn from this, however, is not that capitalism is closer to "barbarism" than it was in the 1840s when Marx and Engels celebrated the wonders accomplished by the bourgeoisie even as the conditions of inhumane life in Manchester were fresh in their minds. Both the wonders and the degradation existed simultaneously as evidence of the bourgeoisie being the first class "to show what man's activity can bring about." The point is that both characteristics still simultaneously exist. In the capitalist epoch, the bourgeoisie is always both revolutionary and barbaric. The market freedom that has unleashed the wonders of the microchip and the "new economy" on Wall Street, and much more generally on production and communication, is the same market freedom that devastated the Bronx. And the rich and the poor remain equally free to sleep under the exit ramps of the expressway

II

In relation to this, what can we say about the socialist "spirit of revolution" as we enter the twenty-first century? As the Raymond Williams quotation at the beginning of this essay suggests, the longing to achieve a humane society in a way that would avoid the upheavals of revolution predominantly defined the practice of the Left in capitalist democracies for most of this century. But the politics of reformist compromise, however understandable, agreed to leave in place a society in which the bourgeoisie continued to play the main part in production and communication, a society therefore subject to the competitive and contradiction laden dynamic of capitalism. Even the Social Democratic state, or the state of the New Deal, was condemned to riding that tiger, and as that state expanded, in its bureaucratic fashion, to meet the minimal requirements of what was taken to define a humane capitalism, it became, for capital, a source of contradiction itself.

The discourse that defined the politics of compromise went as follows: why insist on the old revolutionary means, when the ends of socialism can be secured without them? Yet the politics of compromise could have no other effect than leaving the commanding heights of the economy in capitalist hands, and leaving the state itself far too insulated from popular pressures and controls beyond the electoral and lobbying devices of liberal democracy to be able to resist the bourgeoisie's assertion of its primacy. After decades of searching for the kinds of cross-class consensus that would meet the requirements of a humane capitalism, that discourse now is threadbare: The bourgeoisie's continuing revolutionary part demonstrates that the ends cannot be achieved without the means. The case for trying to define and practice a consistent socialist politics, and for marshaling the nerve to go all the way through with it—that is, of taking capital away from the bourgeoisie and democratizing control over the instruments and processes of production and communication to the end of transforming their content and function—is reinforced by the bourgeois revolution from above in our time. As Raymond Williams suggested, this is not because it can now be shown to be quicker or more exciting, and certainly not because capitalism is about to succumb to its own contradictions so that all socialists need to do is proclaim the fact, but because no other way is possible.

But to say that no other way is possible is not to say that socialism itself is possible. We are often given to think today of socialism's failures in terms of the record of postrevolutionary regimes, their disappointment of original aspirations and promises, if not much worse; or in terms of the less heroic, indeed often abject, entrapment of Social Democracy within the capitalist framework. But from another perspective, socialism's failure stands out in the sense of the absence, especially in the advanced capitalist countries, of that conscious, organized, and creative movement for a democratic, cooperative, and classless society which, in so far as it is an expression of massive popular support, is the sine qua non of realizing socialist aspirations. To recognize this is to come face to face with one of the most sobering facts that must confront socialists today.

To put this problem in perspective, two things must immediately be said. First, that a distinction between two meanings of revolutionary socialism, of which many socialists in the West have long been cognizant, must still be borne in mind. On the one hand, it may be taken to mean a fundamental transformation in the social order, however that transformation is brought about. On the other hand, it may also mean the overthrow of a system of government, the word overthrow being intended to convey the notion of a sudden and violent political convulsion outside the existing constitutional channels. The two notions may be related, insofar as fundamental transformation may be impossible without such a political convulsion. But however this may be, the two meanings need to be differentiated; and it is undoubtedly true that the overwhelming majority of the population of advanced capitalist countries, including the overwhelming majority of the working classes, has shunned revolutionary change in the second meaning of the term. There have very occasionally been circumstances when something approximating a revolutionary situation has occurred in one or another such country. But, even then, an essential ingredient to the overthrow of the system of government has usually been missing, namely the presence of a revolutionary party capable of developing extensive popular sympathy and support and determined to use the situation to take power. That Social Democratic parties in this century have not had such an intention has been unambiguously clear since World War I at least. And the Western Communist parties, certainly from the 1930s onward, also rejected out of hand what they denounced as ultra-left adventurism or petty bourgeois romanticism. Moreover, the attempts that were made to build such revolutionary parties by groups of a Trotskyist or Maoist persuasion in more recent decades have proved largely barren.

In other words, revolutionary agencies with popular support have not existed in any significant sense for revolution-by-overthrow in these countries; and there is little reason to think that this will change in any relevant time frame. The fact may be deplored, viewed as the most blatant example of false consciousness in the people and of parliamentary cretinism and rank opportunism in the leadership of Socialist and Communist parties. Or it may be applauded as a demonstration of maturity and wisdom, a recognition of the fact that, given the relation between state and civil society in the West, given the very nature of hegemony, the notion of revolution by "seizing" and "overthrowing" the "state" is meaningless, absurd. But deplored or applauded, so it nevertheless is.

The second point that needs to be made, however, is that the absence of significant popular support for revolution-by-overthrow cannot be taken to mean absence of popular support for socialist aspirations altogether. And this was true even in the last decades of the twentieth century. It is worthwhile recalling that the 1980s opened with new programs for socialist change figuring centrally on the political agenda in a good number of Western countries: François Mitterand's and the Common Progamme's 1981 victory in France; the Wage Earners' Fund proposals in Sweden; the short "march to power" of PASOK in Greece; the strength of the socialist Left in the Labour Party in Britain, with that Left occupying governmental office in Europe's largest city. These developments did not appear out of thin air. They were the indirect products of the spirit of 1968, of the post-Cold War generation that spawned the New Left and the student and worker militancy of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Such developments, connected as they were in the bourgeois mind with the apparent "ungovernability" of this generation and with a rekindling of their old fears that they might lose any control over the state, were another factor in inducing the bourgeoisie's renewed determination to create the world in their own image.

Yet what is now all too evident is that there was a severe underestimation, on the one hand, of the hegemonic capacity of capitalist forces; and, on the other hand, an overestimation of the enthusiasm of the masses and the solidarity and/or commitment of the leadership. The disappointments regarding an electoral road to socialism in the West in the 1980s and the growing disaffection from classical revolutionary approaches combined, in the face of the bourgeois neo-liberal revolution from above, to produce great confusion and hesitancy among socialists for the remainder of the century.

Less weight may be given to the claims that there has taken place a great and irreversible ideological shift among the bulk of the population of a kind that betokens massive and deep popular support for the bourgeois revolution from above. It is probably the case that the socialist electoral options put forward in a number of European countries in the early 1980s were unable to garner positive support from more than a quarter of the electorate at the very most (with the rest of their support coming in the form of a negative vote against the bourgeois options). But it is worthwhile setting against this the fact that even the most ardent and successful of the bourgeois "revolutionaries" could hardly claim anything like absolute majorities. The victories of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, of George Bush in 1988, of Margaret Thatcher in 1979,1983, and 1987, were all won with the support of something on the order of one-third of the population entitled to vote. And they took place against the backdrop of the failures and retreats of earlier Liberal or Social Democratic parties in government in the 1970s.

Still, there is small comfort to be drawn from this as matters now stand. In many countries of Europe, there occurred a distinct loss of support for, and commitment to, traditional parties of the Left in the eighties: and even where such parties were able to stage an electoral recovery in the 1990s, this has certainly not occurred on the basis of their seeking popular endorsement for socialist aspirations and programs. At best, they have presented themselves as offering a moderate defense of the welfare state against the radical excesses of the renewed bourgeois spirit of revolution. For the most part, as epitomized by the leadership of Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder, such parties really did seem determined in government to prove above all how committed they were to the capitalist market economy.

Where does this then leave the socialist aspiration for fundamental change in the West? It is hardly surprising that one of the most notable characteristics of much of the Left in recent years has been the deep pessimism which the question evokes. Again and again, the same theme in different variations is heard, namely that even the advocacy of socialism is politically damaging and doomed to relegate its advocates to a marginal and ineffectual ghetto. The tactical and strategic accent, in this view, has to fall on a moderate pragmatism and on the defense and possible extension of old reforms in a manner that does not offend the sensibilities of those seduced by the appeal of the bourgeois revolution from ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Rethinking Revolution and Reform in Capitalist Democracies
• 2 Observations on Communism's Demise
• 3 Liberal Democracy and Socialist Democracy
• 4 The Legacy of The Communist Manifesto in a Global Capitalism
• 5 Globalization and Left Strategies
• 6 Bringing Class Back In: Reflections on Strategy for Labor
• 7 Transcending Pessimism: Rekindling Socialist Imagination
• Index