The Present Moment and the New Discourse About Socialism
Historian Eric Hobsbawm titled his book on the twentieth century The Age of Extremes. For the twenty-first century, this would be an understatement. No rubric can convey the level of emergency in which our species now finds itself. We live, both now and into the future, under a threat of geological proportions.1 The magnitude of the danger is clearly seenâand acutely feltâby young people the world over. The discourse of the powers that be hovers far from the storm-center, mostly waging (especially in the United States) a relentless campaign to keep everyoneâs eyes shutâif not to the reality of the eco-crisis, then at least to the idea that we might be able collectively to do something about it.
My own sense of the danger is longstanding but becomes more pressing with each passing year, even as capitalist politicians and corporate media squander precious time with their contrived emergencies, their self-indulgent jousting, and their endless flow of distractions.2 The longer this hegemonic denial continuesâand, along with it, the aggressions of powerfully armed governments and their vigilante shock-troops against largely defenseless populationsâthe more urgent becomes the imperative to sweep from power all those who keep it up. The scope of the required changes has all along been of revolutionary proportions, but beyond this, the amount of time we now have for securing a future that is to any extent livableâfor the majority of our speciesâhas become desperately short.
The revolutionary implications of this crisis were the theme of my 2018 book Red-Green Revolution: The Politics and Technology of Ecosocialism. In it, I developed a wealth of considerations showing that the long-run changes necessary to our collective survival are inconceivable unless the capitalist economic calculus gives way to one grounded in the common good of both humanity and nature, as determined by a thoroughly informed democratic process. The transformation cannot come all at once (although there may be abrupt upheavals at particular moments along the way), but the incremental changes that are made in the near term must all be in tune with the ultimate goal; that is, they must be steadily creating structuresâwhether parties, educational networks, or governing apparatusâthat embody the common interest of humanity as a whole and of a healthy environment. Empowering such structures is crucial to guaranteeing both the initial shift in class-power and the equally necessary permanent governing machinery grounded in universal participation.
The concept embodying this agenda, that of socialism, has an almost 200-year trajectory. But its most recent turns of historic fortune came, first, with the collapse or devolution, through the 1980s, of the majority of regimes claiming to embrace it, and subsequently, with the unexpected revival of popular interest in socialism in the United States in the years following the financial meltdown of 2008. In the wake of the âOccupy Wall Streetâ movement (2011), surveys have consistently shown, despite decades of anti-socialist indoctrination, an openness to socialism on the part of majorities or near-majorities both among African Americans and among people under 30. Of course, this does not yet reflect a precise notion of what socialism means, nor of what has shaped the historical attempts to implement it. But at least the S-word has ceased to be taboo for a great many people.3 As a consequence, it has become a target of ferocious attack not only from the governing Trump cabal but also from the âloyal oppositionâ of corporate Democrats, whose consistent pattern over the years has been to prefer defeat at the hands of the Republicans to any scenario that, while promising near-term electoral success for their own party, would entail the activation and mobilization of its popular base.
The dynamic of Democrat/Republican collaboration is now long established. On the one hand, Democratic electoral strategists rejoice in the most outlandish (racist, misogynist, etc.) conduct of Republicans, as this allows the Democrats to present themselves as guardians of rationality and decency. On the other hand, Republicans, having no policies to address the economic needs of the majority, revel in being able to tar the Democrats as âsocialists,â thereby setting firm limits on the degree to which Democrats, recoiling from the dreaded âredâ label, can legislate an authentically popular agenda. The result is that whichever of these two parties working-class people vote for, they are votingâexcept in rare cases of individual candidatesâagainst their own best interests.4
This dynamic affects the way activists sympathetic to socialism define themselves in the political arena. Given the systematic bias of the electoral system and the mass media against third-party challengers, there are powerful inducements for socialists to seek office as Democrats. This leads them to water down their conception of socialism to the point of rejecting any explicit challenge to the power of capital. What remains, typically, is an invocation of Franklin D. Rooseveltâs New Deal policies and his 1944 âEconomic Bill of Rights.â Although these expanded the scope of social welfare, thereby strengthening the economic power of the working class (for which they were widely denounced as âsocialistâ),5 they stopped short of questioning the legitimacy of the profit-system as such. The resulting political order has been variously dubbed âmixed economy,â âwelfare capitalism,â and âsocial democracy,â but some of its advocates in the USânotably, Senator Bernie Sandersârefer to it as âdemocratic socialism.â
Given that the New Deal agenda did not entail dissolution of the capitalist class, the practice of implying that it was somehow socialist is highly misleading. Its socialist aspects, although real enough (as far as they went) in terms of their benefits, were in the nature of partial and transitory concessions. What the New Deal meant was that capital gave up a portion of its power in orderâas Joseph P. Kennedy said at the time6ânot to face the prospect of losing all of it. But when the historical moment was right, capital struck back. The first phase of its counterattack was the post-World War II anticommunist drive. This not only broke up the Leftâs organizational infrastructure, it also had a long-lasting cultural impact, stigmatizing class consciousness on the part of workers and enshrining at the mass levelâespecially via racist suburban development planning7âan ethic of unalloyed individualism. The resulting conformity would be disrupted by the radical movements of the 1960s, but once again without diminishing the basic power of capital. The second phase of the capitalist counterattack is what has been increasingly in place since the mid-1970s, a period now generally known as the neoliberal eraâreferring to the systematic assault on every variety of welfare protection, along with widespread privatization, deregulation, and mass incarceration.
The evolution of this whole complex of hyper-capitalist policiesâbeginning in the late 1940s and with a fresh thrust since the mid-1970sâshould decisively discredit any impression that the achievements of the 1930s brought some kind of systemic break (as the term âdemocratic socialismâ might lead us to think) with capitalist power. In this sense, as Senator Sanders himself often insists, his core proposals, which typically revive New Deal-type priorities, are in no sense radical. They would bring the working-class majority certain obvious benefits, but (as he also says) would not threaten the decisive economic role of private capital, which he does not propose to replace.
In fact, in the US political context, programs even far more limited than that of Sanders do not escape the accusation of being socialist (recall the attacks made beginning in 2008 against Barack Obama). It therefore makes political sense for Sandersâespecially considering the more fully socialist (including anti-imperialist) position he staked out earlier in his career, as well as his lifelong public admiration for Eugene Debsânot to disown his association with the word socialism. What his acceptance of the word ultimately reflects is the fact that socialism, despite any negative historical baggage and (above all) despite its sustained stigmatization, embodies the positive social goals that most people seek.
Given its broad albeit partly latent popularity, one might envisage socialism having ultimately a rather straightforward and successful faceoff with capitalism. Even granting the obvious military power of the capitalist ruling class, we could at least anticipate an embrace of socialism at the level of mass working-class opinion, which could possibly in turn sway some of capitalâs intermediate-level operatives. The reality, however, is not so clear-cut. Important divisions exist within the potentially socialist constituency. Some of these reflect longstanding strategic divergences, foreshadowed in the Marxist/anarchist clash during the First International (1864â72) and in continuing antagonisms between reformist and revolutionary currents within the working-class movement. Added onto these we now find, especially since the 1960s, an intricate web of partly overlapping demographic groups (ethnic, cultural, religious, or defined by gender, sexuality, age, or ability) that occupy definite political spaces, corresponding to multiple structures of oppression.
These crosscutting interests magnify all the habitual difficulties of forging a popular majority that would be sufficiently unified to overwhelm the tiny yet all-powerful capitalist class. So, how do we come to terms with all the complexity? What insights and what proactive steps will be required in order to surmount the initially unavoidable, yet now steadily heightening, fragmentation of the popular forces?
The response to these questions must be a collective one. If it is effective, it will ultimately take the form of a hegemonic Left projectâone to which all who are not viscerally wedded to capitalism will be naturally drawn. The components of the response will come from at least as many directions as there are social and demographic differences among people. Some of the inputs will be individual, while others will be from groups. The forums within which they interact will be equally diverse, ranging from household, neighborhood, or workplace to national or international convergences. Some will be face-to-face while others will use all manner of electronic channels. Whatever the mix, there will be exchanges among the various levels. The point is that such processes are continuously unfolding already, but that the directions they have so far taken within the US are, in their totality, so chaotic that one is hard pressed to envisage any uniform message, let alone a clear outcome.
On the other hand, however, there are conditionsâboth historical and geologicalâthat are so universally relevant and yet so far beyond the control of any single human agent, that we will be compelled, sooner or later, to become aware of the common danger and, insofar as we recognize its scope, to see a narrowing of the range of available options that would assure our collective survival.
No single intellectual intervention into this process can expect to offer definitive guidance. At the same time, however, any set of reflections that spans a sufficiently broad range of issues, while drawing o...