Thanks to the current occupant of the White House, âsocialismâ is on the U.S. public agenda in a way it hasnât been for at least a half-century or even longer. In October 2018, the Trump administrationâs Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) issued a seventy-page report entitled âThe Opportunity Costs of Socialism.â âCoincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marxâs birth, socialism,â it began, âis making a comeback in American political discourse. Detailed policy proposals from self-declared socialists are gaining support in Congress and among much of the electorate.â1 The report purports to show how such proposals are misguided and counterproductive. In his State of the Union Address to Congress in February 2019, President Trump vowed that âwe renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.â âSocialism,â hence, will undoubtedly be a central target in his 2020 reelection campaign. The presidentâs pledge isnât unwarranted. Among Democratic Party presidential hopefuls is Senator Bernie Sanders, a declared âsocialist.â A leading Republican Party strategist makes a convincing case that Sanders, nineteen months before the 2020 election, âis a real contender.â2 The last time that was even remotely possible for a self-professed socialist was a century ago, in the case of Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs, from a prison cell.
The background to all of this is the continuing fallout from the Great Recession, âsecular stagnationâ as some defenders of capitalism term it or, in the language of some Marxists, the global crisis of late capitalism. In March 2019, Jamie Dimon, CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase, the countryâs largest bank, said that while his âcompany is doing fine, it is absolutely obvious that a big chunk of [people] have been left behind. ⌠Forty percent of Americans make less than $15 an hour. Forty percent of Americans canât afford a $400 bill, whether itâs medical or fixing their car. Fifteen percent of Americans make minimum wages, 70,000 die from opioids [annually]. ⌠So weâve kind of bifurcated the economy.â3 Not surprisingly, therefore, âonly 37% of Americans ⌠think the country is going in the right direction while 56.4% think itâs on the wrong track,â according to a poll in April 2019.4 This is the reality that made possible not only the Trump election victory in 2016 but also the Brexit vote in Britain in 2016 and later the âgillets jaunesâ protests in France in 2018â2019. Marx once said that a drowning person will grab hold of a twig in hope of salvation.
This book is a needed intervention into the discussion/debates about this unprecedented reality. One of the two most frequent charges levelled at socialism is that it has never worked, beginning with the Soviet Union. But that assumes, as the CEA report does, that socialism was once instituted and/or is in place somewhere. Although not a priority for this book, the charge is serious and needs to be addressed, which I do in the Conclusion. Suffice it to say here that nothing in any of the utterances of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels or Vladimir Lenin supports the claim that socialism ever existed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republicsâprobably, except for the Holy Roman Empire, the most misnamed state in history. It was Joseph Stalin in 1936 who first so declared. The burden of proof is on those who think Stalinâwho lied about almost everythingâknew better than Marx, Engels and Lenin to explain why.
The other major accusation about socialism is that it is an authoritarian and inherently antidemocratic project owing exactly to what unfolded in the Soviet Union, the sanguinary Stalinist counterrevolution, as some of us call it. Insinuated is that socialism was born with a fatal flaw that paved the way to Stalinist outcomes not only in the USSR but elsewhere as well. This recent example of the innuendo is typical. âGiven the violent tenor of Marxâs writings, his hatred of the bourgeoisie and of capitalism, his contempt for other socialist theoreticians who disagreed with him, and his delusions about the possibility of creating a utopia dominated by a morally superior proletariat, he would have sanctioned Leninâs brutality.â And this is in an account that claims to be sympathetic to Marx.5 Often accompanying the charge is the suggestion that the Marxist socialist project lacked the assumed democratic groundings of the alternative liberal project. But how accurate is the charge and its companion thesis? Is it true that the original Marxist project came with a democratic deficit unlike the liberal alternative? This question more than any other drives this inquiry. Implicit in the question is the need for some sort of comparison between the Marxist and liberal enterprises in their original incarnations to make a determinationâimmanently political projects that had political consequences. But what kind of comparison?
If politics is the art of knowing what to do next, then the test of political perspective is making decisions about unfolding eventsâin real time. After the fact, or in hindsight, we can all look or make ourselves look smart, to be the proverbial Monday morning quarterback. Figuring out âwhat is to be doneâ in the moment is the real challengeâbefore all the data has come in. Real-time political analysis, what this book seeks to make a case for as a method, is, then, about the political judgments and actions that flow from them as developments are under way.6 Engelsâs assessment of his partner to a fellow comrade a year and a half after his death in 1883 comes close to capturing what this inquiry is about. âNot one of us possesses the breadth of vision that enabled [Marx], at the very moment when rapid action was called for, invariably to hit upon the right solution and at once get to the heart of the matter ⌠at a revolutionary juncture his judgment was virtually infallible.â7 But were there any liberal rivals similarly talented that Engels might have ignored or not known of? Thatâs in part the task at hand.
More concretely, this book examines how a âmaterialist conception of history,â a Marxist perspective, compares to alternative varieties of liberal perspectives when subjected to real-time analysis. How well did either do in representing the events in motion? How good was either in informing actions to be taken? If predictive in anyway, how accurate were the forecasts? Have the claims stood the test of time? Most importantly, how did either perform for advancing the democratic quest?
To this end, I have selected four key moments in modern history about which leading Marxists and liberals made political judgments as they were in motion and for which there are ample archival data. So that the comparison is fair, Iâve selected liberals who engaged not just in analysis but in practiceâsome indication that they too like the Marxists tried to varying degrees to shape the outcome of the events under examinationâafter all, what politics is about. Unlike historiansâwho someone once accused of being vultures because âthey feed off the pastââpolitical people arenât just dispassionate observers of the world in which they live; they seek to be protagonists of history. This is, hence, a study in comparative real-time political analysisâunique as far as I can tell.
The four cases under the microscope: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels versus Alexis de Tocqueville on the Revolution of 1848 in France; Marx versus John Stuart Mill on the U.S. Civil War; Vladimir Lenin versus Max Weber on the Russian Revolution of 1905; and, lastly, Lenin versus Woodrow Wilson on the October Revolution of 1917 and the end of World War I. I supplement in appendices to the MarxâMill and LeninâWeber comparisons, respectively, the campaign for electoral reform in Britain in 1866â1868 and the impact of the October Revolution in Germany. Both additions confirm and enrich the findings in the main body of the relevant chapters.
This is the first time seminal figures in liberalism in many of its varieties have been subjected to real-time political analysis in comparison to their Marxist counterpartsâan incredible fact in and of itself.8 Clearly, others have thought about doing so, or, better, actually pretended to having done so. This is particularly true when it comes to Mill and Tocqueville. Graeme Duncanâs 1973 Marx and Mill: Two Views of Social Conflict and Social Harmony, for example, suggests such a comparison but actually doesnât deliver.9 The reader would hardly know from his account that real-time politics and acting on them was at the center of Marxâs life. For Duncan and many others trained like him in the academy, itâs all about texts.10 But to treat Marx simply as an author is unpardonable. And if Duncan could be so myopic about Marx, itâs no surprise, then, that he ignored Millâs most politically consequential moment, or, what could have been, in relation to the U.S. Civil War.
As for Tocqueville, the literature, sometimes, is suggestive but unfulfilling. Consider most recently, the Ewa Atanassow/Richard Boyd 2013 collection.11 Two of its essays imply or hint at a comparison. Nestor Capdevilaâs âDemocracy and Revolution in Tocqueville: The Frontiers of Democracyâ brings Marx into the conversation but only at the end and almost cursorilyâand without even mention of eitherâs involvement in the European Spring. The same is true with Atanassowâs âNationhoodâDemocracyâs Final Frontier?.â That Marx and Tocqueville were first and foremost political activists, as I hope to show, is evidently unimportant to those who prioritize texts and ideas as determinant in politics. But âideas,â the young Marx concluded, âcannot carry out anything at all.â Tocqueville, to be seen, would have been sympathetic to Marxâs dictum.
James Kloppenbergâs 2016 Toward Democracy, an otherwise magisterial survey of the ideasâbut not the strugglesâabout the millennial-old democratic quest, ends in the mid-nineteenth century with the European Spring and the U.S. Civil War, the foci of my Chaps. 2 and 3. The heroes in both events for him are Tocqueville, Mill and Abraham Lincoln; to his credit, Tocqueville gets a question markâat the least as I hope to show.12 Marx is brought in, as is common with these kinds of treatments, again, cursorily, stereotypically and only to score points for liberalism. It never occurred to Kloppenberg, who operates only in the realm of ideas, that the tendentious claims he makes about Marxâs democratic bona fides, in invidious comparison to the others, could be tested against the others in real time, the 1848 revolutions and/or the Civil War. Real-world politics, the effective test for political ideas, is not, however, what Kloppenberg does.
Even a left-leaning tome, Domenico Losurdoâs 2011 Liberalism: A Counter-History, missed the mark.13 Though apparently sympathetic to the spirit of Marxâs politics, he too succumbs to the text-only treatment of Marx, and, inexcusably, the pre-communist Marx texts to draw critical conclusions about him. Because Marx, Tocqueville and Mill all figure significantly in his critical look at liberalism he would have been on surer footing had he subjected all three to real-time political analysis, again, in relation to the European Spring and the Civil War. The terrain upon which to interrogate liberalism is real-time politics. The test for politics of any kind in the nineteenth century, the scope of Losurdoâs book, is its two most consequential contests for advancing the democratic quest.
Sheri Bermanâs recently published Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe betrays another failing in the literature, in particular regard to Tocqueville. While Berman cites approvingly Tocqueville as an authority on 1789, he is nowhere to be found in her account of the events of 1848. She correctly points out that the âcrushing of the June Days and the renewed appeal of the âforces of orderâ in France encouraged counter-revolution elsewhere in Europe.â14 But by not at least noting Tocquevilleâs counterrevolutionary role in that âcrushing,â as detailed in Chap. 2 of this book, is to give him a free pass. The silence of liberals like Berman regarding Tocquevilleâs sanguinary conduct in the drama of 1848 is deafeningânot for the first time. And when compared to Marx and Engels, as done here, itâs understandable. The contrasts with the two communists arenât flattering for the hero of many liberals. A worker in the streets of Paris during the âJune Daysââto be as attention-grabbing as possibleâcould be forgiven for wanting to either shoot or knife to death the author of Democracy in America.
The LeninâWeber comparison in Chap. 4 regarding the 1905 Russian Revolution isnât one, I admit, that would have automatically come to mind for even the most informed. Feedback I got on the drafts I shared with others was often one of surprise and sometimes incredulity. Only a close reading of Lenin could have revealed it as a potentially fruitful comparison. And, alas, too few of those who pretend to know Leninâfriend and foe alikeâactually take the time to read him. But to not take advantage of the fact that two of the most influential figures in modernity both examinedâin real timeâwhat proved to be the âdress rehearsalâ for arguably the most consequential event in the twentieth century, the 1917 Russian Revolution, would have been inexcusable for a project such as this. And that Lenin and Weber both read one another, unlike in the Marx/EngelsâTocqueville and MarxâMill comparisons, makes for an even more instructive case study. Berman, too, is noticeably silent about Weberâs counterrevolutionary role in revolu...
