democratic socialism – Mike Passarini

“Why Socialism?” added to the Reformist Bibliography

Albert Einstein’s seminal 1949 essay, originally published in Monthly Review, is now accessible in PDF form via the bibliography. The piece, far from being an empty call to revolution or a milquetoast defense of welfare capitalism in the guise of a nominal “socialism,” is one of the most sober and concise defenses of democratic socialism ever written. In relatively few words, the German physicist puts forth an unsparing indictment of capitalism and argues in favor of the need for social and economic transformation.

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of [man’s suffering.] We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.

His conclusion, in favor of a planned economy, additionally confronts the dilemma of preventing tyranny.

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate [society’s] grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals….Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?

Einstein’s essay offers both a solid explanation of socialism’s basic utility while avoiding any overly didactic prescriptions for its realization. Einstein ends his piece with a call for discourse. Seven decades on, the left is bogged down in unproductive and frequently bad faith discourse. A revisiting of pieces like Why Socialism? more often could break the logjam.

SocDem bibliography update: “The Minority Party in America” featuring Norman Thomas

In 1960, a producer from Folkways Records (now Smithsonian Folkways) interviewed then leader of the Socialist Party of America and six time presidential candidate Norman Thomas, releasing the interview the following year under the title The Minority Party in America. Beyond the subject of the title, Thomas discusses a range of topics and issues (many of which are still relevant) including campaign finance and the odious role of the public relations industry in politics. Thomas’s forthrightness, pragmatism and commitment to egalitarian democracy shine through. He makes clear that his pragmatism, however, is not just a cover for unprincipled opportunism. “Politics is, in a sense, the art of compromise, but it’s the art of compromise of people who have a sense of direction, who know where they’re going and who don’t compromise too easily without a fight,” he says. The interview is both rich with Thomas’s insights and a snapshot of American cold war politics from a leftist perspective.

The record can be streamed in its entirety on YouTube and downloaded from the Folkways website along with the original liner notes.

SocDem bibliography update: “From Socialism to Neoliberalism”

Bayard Rustin c. 1970. (Photo: Associated Press)

In 2013, American Marxist Edmund Berger published excerpts from an abandoned writing project on his blog. The two posts, titled “From Socialism to Neoliberalism: A Story of Capture,” chronicle the downfall of the Socialist Party of America and the ideological drift of seminal figures like Bayard Rustin from democratic socialism to anti-Communist hawkishness. It’s essential reading regarding the downfall of the American left.

Parts 1 and 2 are now included in the bibliography.

SocDem bibliography update: Four Jacobin articles

Today, the bibliography gets the addition of four Jacobin articles, published in 2018/2019, all addressing the strengths (and weaknesses) of social democracy.

Three Scandinavians (Andreas Møller Mulvad, Rune Møller Stahl and Kjell Östberg) chronicle the halcyon era of Swedish social democracy (and its failure to transition into democratic socialism) and highlight Denmark’s welfare state as a refutation of superficial American anti-left talking points. Jacobin staff writer Meagan Day continues the Scandinavian theme, arguing that the fetishization of the Danish concept of Hygge ignores the political realities of its country of origin. In a later article, Day challenges the notion that the U.S. possesses a welfare state of any real substance, instead relying on “an elaborate system of tax expenditures intended to facilitate private welfare provision.”

Collectively, the articles offer important insight into the much vaunted social democracies of Scandinavia and, with Day’s second piece, how that form of welfare statism has utterly failed to materialize in the United States.

Against the Champagne Socialist

National Women’s Support groups rallying in support of striking UK coal miners, Barnsley town hall, May 1984. (Photo: Martin Jenkinson)

Note: This was written in the Spring of 2019 for a now defunct Facebook group I used to moderate. I resisted posting it anywhere else for a year but finally decided to post it here since I still agree with the central thesis and believe it has a renewed relevance given the class dimension of the COVID-19 crisis.

The stereotype of leftism as some ego-stroking pastime of the wealthy and college-educated wouldn’t be so cringe-inducing if there wasn’t some truth to it. Something that drove me insane when I first became involved in activism in my late 20’s was how many of my peers were exactly like me: privileged people from upper-income backgrounds with college degrees. Few of these people had parents who were the first in their families to attend higher-ed or grew up poor.

Anyone who knows anything about leftism knows how antithetical this is to the cause. Of course, it’s not new either. In his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell excoriates the “book-trained” socialist and his elitist attitudes. “To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on Saturday night, Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about,” writes Orwell. “Sometimes I look at a Socialist–the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation–and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed.”

He goes on to observe that this brand of socialist seems motivated by an aversion to the disorder of the proletarian condition, not by their suffering. “The present state of affairs offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but because it is untidy; what they desire, basically, is to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard….The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which ’we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ’them’, the Lower Orders.”

Orwell’s portrait of the didactic “book-trained” socialist is as relevant today as it ever was. The working class and underclass must be able to view the left as their allies. Those of us who come from privileged backgrounds need to quash our petty aesthetic aversions to and stereotypical assumptions about the blue collar worker and the poverty-stricken individual and view them not as infantile creatures we’re saving via our benevolence. We need to view them as our comrades who we’re engaged in a common struggle with for the betterment of humanity.

Of course, I recognize the irony here, being a fuzzy-haired book-trained leftist myself, currently pounding out a tract to be posted on a website run by unprincipled capitalists. Joking aside, my grievance comes from my family history. My working class mother and her siblings, with their father dead and their mother dying, relied on social security to get by. Without that state largess, born of New Deal quasi-social democratic reforms, who knows what would have happened to her and her family. Unfortunately, the cold war red-baiting of the time presented the left to my mother as the enemy. Years later, the failures of the Democratic Party provided the right with an opportunity to seduce the working class.

Attacking the exploitation of labor and the indignity of poverty is at the heart of both social democracy and democratic socialism. Both the worker and indigent must be able to recognize this and not be alienated by elitism and dogmatism. If the “servile masses” are ever to arise from their slumbers and “change henceforth the old tradition,” the left needs to change its tradition of holding the people they claim to represent in contempt.