For this installment of our series on Actually Existing Socialism we take a look at an attempt to solve the issues of central planning with a novel experiment unlike any other in history: Project Cybersyn in Salvador Allende’s Chile. In a discussion based on Eden Medina’s book Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Donald, Christian, and Rudy discuss the idea of Stafford Beer and their limitations, the difficulties of the democratic road to socialism, and if Cybersyn is totalitarian but in a good way. Outro music is “Litany for a computer and a child about to be born” by Angel Parra and Stafford Beer.
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We are very happy to release this crossover episode with Breht O’Shea from Revolutionary Left Radio and Red Menace! Remi (@cosmoproletan), Parker (@centristmarxist), and Donald (@donaldp1917) have a wide-ranging discussion with Breht touching on current events, ecological Marxism, organizing, labor, electoral strategy, and more.
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To continue our series on the relation of Marxism to science, we read and discussed Christopher Caudwell’s Crisis in Physics. Join Donald, Matthew, Rudy, and Remi for a conversation that covers the life of Caudwell, the relevance of his thought to topics such as ecology and the meaning of freedom, theoretical physics, and the possibility/impossibility of “proletarian science”.
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Karl Marx’s own ambiguous and sometimes contradictory views on colonialism meant that the Second International would debate over the correct view on the matter. Donald Parkinson gives an overview of these debates, arguing that Communists today must unite around a clear anti-colonial and anti-imperialist program.
Reactionary political cartoon. Reads: “Social-Democracy is against world politics; against colonies, against the army and navy!”
Today, when Marxism seems to be under constant intellectual assault, we hear the claim that Marxism is a Eurocentric ideology, that it is a master narrative of the European world. It could be tempting to simply dismiss this claim on its face. After all, most Marxists today live in the non-European and non-white world, inspired by the role Marxism played in anti-colonial struggles. Yet we should always pay attention to our critics, regardless of how bad-faith they may be. They can help us understand our own blind spots and weaknesses and better understand ourselves. As a result, we should take the question of Eurocentrism seriously and engage in a critical self-reflection of our own ideas. A closer look at both the works of Marx and the history of Marxist politics tells us that there were indeed Eurocentric strains in Marx’s thought. Yet through its capacity to critically assess itself Marxism has, to varying degrees of success, overcome its Eurocentrism to develop a true universalism, against a false universalism that only serves to cover for a deeper European provincialism.
Marxism developed in Europe as a worldview designed to secure the emancipation of the world from class society. This is the source of internal tension within Marxism: on one end there is the universalist scope of Marxism, an ideology designed to unite all of humanity in a common struggle. On the other end, there is the source of Marxism in the continent of Europe, an ideology that was shaped by the specific processes of capitalist development that propelled Europe into an economic power standing above the rest of the world. It would be foolish to simply dismiss charges that Marxism contains Eurocentric elements that exist in tension with its universalism. There is no better example of these tensions in Marxism than the different views on colonialism within the movement.
Colonialism in the history of Marxist thought served as a challenge for Marxism to overcome its own Eurocentrism. Within the works of Marx one can find different approaches to colonialism that could be read as apologetic to colonial expansion or firmly opposed to it, supporting the struggles of colonized people against their dispossession. As a result, the followers of Marx who formed the mass parties that came to be known as the Second International did not have a single position on colonialism that they could take from Marx. There was instead a series of often contradictory positions on colonialism within his work that provided justifications both for supporting colonialism and opposing it. There was also a theoretical heritage within Marxism, economistic developmentalism, that would be used to justify colonialism in the name of socialism.
To better understand these tensions in Marxism, we should examine Marx’s views on colonialism and the first major debates on colonialism in the Second International. These debates are an important part of a greater historical narrative, in which Marxism developed as an ideology in Europe and became the siren song of countless anti-colonial revolts against European domination. Marxism was able to overcome its initial Eurocentrism, but not without a struggle internal to itself and its intellectuals. In better understanding the history of this intellectual struggle, we can better identify the theoretical errors that held Marxism back from becoming a truly universalist worldview, which could serve as a political creed for the emancipation of the world, not only Europe.
Marx on Colonialism
To begin, it is necessary to look at Marx’s own views on colonialism and their development over his lifespan. Marx’s views on colonialism were never straightforward, and taken as a whole can be seen as inconsistent and contradictory, leaving room for interpretation. It is this openness for interpretation that allowed colonialism to be an open question for his initial followers. Within Marx one can find, on the one hand, a view of economic development and historical progress suggesting that European colonialism was a harbinger of progress, bringing the “uncivilized world” into “civilization” by laying the seeds for capitalist development and therefore proletarian revolution. And on the other hand, one can find in the later works of Marx the beginnings of an anti-imperialist and anti-colonial politics.
In his well-known Communist Manifesto,written in 1848, Marx comes across as almost a colonial apologist of sorts, pointing to the rise of the capitalist world market as an accomplishment of a historically progressive bourgeoisie, and colonialism as a means through which this world market is established:
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It 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.1
Referencing “Chinese walls”, Marx strongly suggests that England’s First Opium War against China was in the long run historically necessary and progressive, bringing a “barbarian nation” into “civilization”. For Marx in 1848, colonialism wasn’t so much something to be condemned and battled, as it was part of a historical process through which capitalism would conquer the world and create the necessary pre-conditions for a communist future, with all nations passing through a similar route of development. However, with time, Marx’s views on the matter would develop.
After moving to London in 1849, Marx would take up a career as a journalist and wrote a series of articles on non-western societies. One of the first of these was the 1853 piece The British Rule in India. In this article, Marx expresses sympathy with the victims of British colonialism in India, while at the same time seeing British imperialism as essentially progressive, claiming that
“English interference, having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindu spinner and weaver, dissolved these semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, to speak the truth the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.”2
Marx suggests that through its colonial process, the British are essentially bringing a stagnant and backward society into history, and only through its interference and disruption of this social formation can India become a real actor on the world stage of history. However, this one-sided view would not remain consistent in Marx himself. The conclusion to his 1853 series of articles on India, The Future Results of British Rule in India, would argue for a social revolution in Britain to challenge colonial policy and also point to the possibility of a movement for national independence from British rule. He would also condemn the “profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization” which “lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked.”3
Marx’s ambiguity here can be seen as a result of what the scholar Erica Benner calls a “two-pronged assault on the conflicting reactions of British MP’s to the government-sponsored annexation of ‘native’ Indian states.”4 On one side of this conflict were reformers who denounced the colonization as a crime pure and simple, while on the other end were those who saw colonialism as a historical necessity. For Marx, the former were ineffectual moralists while the latter simply apologists for bourgeois rule under the guise of patriotism. Marx sought to stake out a position between these two camps. To simply morally condemn colonialism seemed to suggest a return to a mythic pre-contact golden age, while to affirm the right of the Empire to annex India would be justifying naked bourgeois interests. By seeking out a position beyond this binary Marx sought to develop a position that would be able to reap the “benefits” of colonization while still looking beyond it.
Political cartoon referencing the British-Chinese opium wars.
In the latter years of the 1850’s Marx’s views on colonialism would develop remarkably in contrast to his earlier views. In his 1857-59 series of articles on China and the Second Opium War, any lauding of the progressive effects of colonialism in China is absent. Rather, Marx would focus on heavily condemning French and British colonialism, going so far as to gleefully report the British and French taking 500 casualties and mocking British editorialists who proclaimed their superiority to the Chinese. Marx would also espouse a more anti-colonialist position in his articles on the Indian Revolt of 1857-58, and in a letter to Engels in January, 1858 would tell his close intellectual and political partner that “India is now our best ally.”5
In the course of the 1850s, Marx would move from viewing colonialism as progressive to supporting anti-colonial uprisings. He would likewise support independence for Ireland from Great Britain and Poland from the Russian Empire, agitating for these positions within the First International and the British labor movement. Marx and Engels both would take the position that British workers must support the national liberation of Ireland in order to fight against anti-Irish chauvinism in the labor movement. This was a development from an earlier position that Ireland’s liberation would come through incorporation into a socialist multinational Britain.6 Rather than seeing the separation of Ireland as impossible, it was now inevitable if the unity of the labor movement was to be reached. Only after the separation of Ireland from the British Empire could a multinational socialist state be formed. The merging of nations into a socialist republic would have to occur on the terms of the Irish, not the British:
The first condition for emancipation here – the overthrow of the British landed oligarchy – remains an impossibility, because its bastion here cannot here be stormed so long as it holds its strongly entrenched outpost in Ireland. But once affairs are in the hands of the Irish people itself, once it is made its own legislator and ruler, once it becomes autonomous, the abolition there of the landed aristocracy (to a large extent the persons as the English landlords) will be infinitely easier than here, because in Ireland it is not merely a simple economic question but at the same time a national question, for the landlords there are not, like those in England, the traditional dignitaries and representatives of the nation but its morally hated oppressors.7
From this one can see the development of the Leninist position of the right of nations to self-determination. This position was able to condemn colonialism forthright, without resorting to a moralistic fetishization of traditional pre-colonial society. Marx linked the liberation of the working class in the metropole with the national liberation of the colony, creating a vision of revolution that put agency in the hands of colonized rather than resigning them to passive objects to be liberated by the working class of the more advanced nations. Engels would continue this thesis after the death of Marx in regards to India and other colonies, stating that the proletariat in the metropole could “force no blessings of any kind upon any foreign nation without undermining its own victory by so doing.” Socialism could not be brought to colonized people through imperialist bayonets; instead the colonies were to be “led as rapidly as possible to independence.”8
From this evidence it is clear that Marx (and Engels) began with a more ambiguous and even positive view of colonialism, and moved to a more critical view, developing the beginnings of an anti-colonial Marxism. Yet these anti-colonial positions were mostly found in fragments throughout letters rather than systematized in popular agitational material. As a result, when developing a politics based on the views of Marx, his followers could selectively pick out specific passages from his works to bolster positions that were apologetic of colonialism. While we should be critical of such a scholastic approach to politics, there can be no doubt that many of the Marxists of the Second International justified their positions on readings of Marx.
“Proletarians of all countries unite.” Stage of Second International Conference in Amsterdam, 1904.
Bernstein vs. Bax on Colonialism
In 1889 the foundation of the Second International saw the beginning of an era of Marxism without Marx, and in 1895 without Engels. The wisdom of the founders would soon no longer be a guiding light for the movement, and a new generation of intellectuals would have to carry the torch. The work of Marx and Engels, while providing a theoretical framework for questions like colonialism and imperialism, hardly provided a full, all-encompassing answer to properly deal with these questions. A single party line that could be applied wasn’t developed. It would be up to debate and deliberation within the union to determine the correct way forward.
In 1896, a year after the death of Engels, the debate would flare up, the two most prominent voices in the dispute being the German Eduard Bernstein and the British Belfort Bax. These debates were triggered by rising tensions between Armenians and the Sultan’s regime in Turkey, with Germany poised to intervene in the Armenians’ favor. In his 1896 article German Social Democracy and the Turkish Troubles,Bernstein would argue strongly in favor of supporting the Armenians, using the rhetoric of more “advanced” nations having a historic duty to “civilize savages”. His arguments would be hard to distinguish from the rhetoric of the colonialists themselves, claiming:
Africa harbors tribes who claim the right to trade in slaves and who can be prevented from doing so only by the civilized nations of Europe. Their revolts against the latter do not engage our sympathy and will in certain circumstances evoke our active opposition. The same applies to those barbaric and semi barbaric races who make a regular living invading neighboring agricultural peoples, by stealing cattle, ect. Races who are hostile or incapable of civilization cannot claim our sympathy when they revolt against civilization.9
Bernstein would of course aim to give his blatant colonial apologism a humanitarian aspect, adding, “We will condemn and oppose certain methods of subjugating savages.”10 Yet in the end Bernstein upheld that colonialism was progressive and should be supported, that it was part of a historical process in which backwards societies would be brought into civilization. He therefore argues for German support in the cause of the Armenians against Turkey using this line of thought.
Belfort Bax, an SDF11 theorist who, like Bernstein, was also controversial, would respond to Bernstein with the harshly titled Our German Fabian Convert: or Socialism According to Bernstein. Beginning his response by accusing Bernstein of ‘philistinism’, Bax would go on to attack Bernstein’s arguments on three fronts. The first was that socialism was not the equivalent to what the bourgeois colonialists called civilization but rather its negation, that the “civilization” imposed on colonized populations was nothing of the type socialists should support.
Portrait of Belfort Bax
In his second point, Bax would argue that while it was correct that capitalism was a precondition for socialism, it was not necessary for capitalism to be spread to every single corner of the earth:
“The existing European races and their offshoots without spreading themselves beyond their present seats, are quite adequate to effect Social Revolution, meanwhile leaving savage and barbaric communities to work out their own social salvation in their own way. The absorption of such communities into the socialistic world-order would then only be a question of time.”12
This would tie into the third part of Bax’s rebuttal of Bernstein, which was that rather than spreading capitalism to create the preconditions of socialism, colonialism actually gave capitalism a longer lease on life. Capitalist overproduction, an expression of its own internal contradictions, was the motor force behind the drive for capitalist nations to compete for colonial territories and engage in colonial conquests. By opening up new markets for commodities and cheap labor, capitalism would “soften” its internal crisis tendencies, hence delaying the “final crisis” that would allow for its revolutionary destruction. Hence Bax would make the direct opposite argument as Bernstein: rather than supporting colonial ventures, albeit in a “humane” manner, Social Democracy should support all resistance movements against colonialism regardless of how reactionary they may be, as their victory would increase the internal contradictions of capitalism and speed up its demise.
Bernstein’s next response to Bax, Amongst the Philistines: A Rejoinder to Belfort Bax, would primarily repeat his prior arguments: that “savage races” deserve no sympathy from socialists despite the need for condemning the most brutal forms of colonial subjugation. What exact methods of subjugation were acceptable and which weren’t isn’t clarified by Bernstein, the only clear part of this argument being that subjugation was necessary. This time Bernstein would also make references to the works of Marx and Engels, claiming that Bax was an idealist who was ignorant of what their own positions would have been on this matter. This reveals how the contradictory positions on colonialism in the writings of Marx would leave these issues up to open debate.13
The next round of debates between Bax and Bernstein would resume in late 1897, with Bax’s Colonial Policy and Chauvinism. The arguments in this piece show a development in thought in response to the positions of Bernstein, which Bernstein presented as authentically Marxist due to his upholding of capitalism as a progressive force based on free-labor spread through colonialism. Responding to this notion, Bax would argue that the labor regimes in the colonized nations were not in fact progressive regimes based on “free” waged labor, but a system which “combines all the evils of both systems, modern wage-labor and caste-slavery, without possessing the decisive advantage of the latter.”14 He would also claim that the chauvinism associated with the Anglo-Saxon domination which came with colonialism would be an obstacle to a future brotherhood of humanity, by bringing about a world culture dominated by a single ethnic group. This point would be buttressed with a claim that his stance was not merely a moral one based on abstract notions of human rights, but rather one which was based on a concrete strategy to overthrow capitalism.15 Also of importance is to note that Bax would also draw from the writings of Marx and Engels to make these arguments, countering the use of their arguments by Bernstein.
Bernstein would respond to these arguments with a two-part article, The Struggle of Social Democracy and the Social Revolution. Here he accuses Bax of seeing no deprivations and oppression where capitalism doesn’t exist, essentially holding onto a romantic view of non-capitalist societies. Countering Bax’s argument that the labor regimes introduced in the colonies aren’t progressive and actually based on free labor, Bernstein makes the argument that these initially harsh and un-democratic regimes will naturally evolve into democratic ones as if this tendency is inscribed into capitalism itself. Regardless of the cost, for Bernstein “the savages are better off under European rule.”16
With regards to Bax’s concerns about Anglo-Saxon cultural dominance, Bernstein simply argues that this is countered by France and Germany stepping up to join in as competitors in colonialism. Even if this wasn’t the case, Bernstein sees the cultures victim to colonialism as having no national life of their own, hence being better off assimilated. Not only is this argument obviously chauvinistic in acting as if only Europeans have an authentic culture, but it acts as if the same critique that Bax makes wouldn’t also apply to European dominance and not just Anglo-Saxon dominance.17
Also key to Bernstein’s reply to Bax is his rebuttal of the claim that opposing colonialism will hasten the “final crisis” of capitalism. Bernstein argues against the idea that capitalism will collapse due to its internal crisis tendencies, and argues instead for gradually reforming capitalism to transform it into socialism. It was through this argument that Bernstein would find himself in a political camp that completely diverged from the revolutionary Marxism of the SPD majority, his camp in the party being labelled as “revisionists”.18 Bernstein began from a position of defending colonialism on orthodox Marxist grounds, only to find himself exiting orthodox Marxism in the process.
Karl Kautsky on Colonialism
Karl Kautsky, possibly the most well-respected intellectual voice in the Second International, would initially side with Bernstein in the debate, calling Bax an idealist.19 Yet as the debate progressed Kautsky’s views on colonialism would develop so as to lean more in the direction of Bax’s position in its political conclusion, and point official SPD policy in a more anti-colonial direction. By the time of the 1898 Stuttgart Conference, Kautsky would openly condemn Bernstein’s views. Despite his condemnation of Bernstein, a closer look at Kautsky’s writings on the topic of colonialism reveal a degree of moral ambiguity.
In his 1898 article Past and Recent Colonial Policy,Kautsky lays out his basic framework for understanding colonialism. His argument rests on two basic claims. The first is that industrial capitalists do not have a material interest in colonialism, and instead favor a policy of free trade referred to as Manchesterism. For Kautsky, Manchesterism is not only based on laissez-faire economic policy but also “preaches peace”.20 To the extent that industrial capitalists are interested in colonialism, it is for export markets, which do not always align with colonial policies. Following this claim, Kautsky makes the argument that the class basis for colonialism is basically pre-capitalist aristocratic elites who form the military/colonial bureaucracy and finance/commercial capital. Colonialism is not a policy of the historically progressive industrial capitalist, but a reactionary and backwards policy based on the interests of classes antagonistic to industrial capital. In Kautsky’s analysis:
“the same industrial capitalist, who at home will resist any worker protection law without any qualms, and have no compunction about whipping women and children in his bagnio, becomes a philanthropist in the colonies – an energetic foe of the slave trade and slavery.”21
To explain Germany’s rising interest in imperialism, Kautsky claims that it is to maintain competition with the French and British, whose colonialism is fueled by the pre-capitalist elites and financial capitalists. This argument essentially turns Bernstein’s on its head, countering that colonialism is not a product of capitalism’s progressive tendencies but rather a holdover of reactionary classes. However we can find inconsistent aspects of this argument. For example, he ascribes to settler colonies “based on work” a progressive quality in contrast to colonies based on pure rent extraction. This not only confuses his own argument but reveals moral blindness to the genocidal nature of settler colonialism.22 In 1883 Kautsky would make a similar argument, counterposing the “progressive” and “democratic” colonialism of the USA and England to that of Germany.23 This is in sharp contrast to the arguments made by Bax, which while not purely based on appeals to morality, are strongly based in a moral condemnation of all colonialism. This attitude toward settler-colonialism is also apparent in his 1899 article The War in South Africa, which simultaneously argues for supporting the Boers against the British Empire and asserts, “We, by contrast, condemn modern colonial policy everywhere.”24
Official Resolutions
The SPD conference in Mainz on September 17-21, 1900 would see the party take up an official resolution on imperialism. Rosa Luxemburg would emerge as a powerful anti-colonial voice, condemning the war against China while urging for active anti-war agitation. The mood of the conference was overall anti-imperialist, with delegates condemning Germany’s intervention in the war against China. Contrary to the views of Bernstein, the resolution passed would state that military conquest was an all-out reactionary policy:
“Social Democracy, as the enemy of any oppression and exploitation of men by men, protests most emphatically against the policy of robbery and conquest. It demands that the desirable and necessary cultural and commercial relations between all peoples of the earth be carried out in such a way that the rights, freedoms and independence of these peoples be respected and protected, and that they be won over for the tasks of modern culture and civilization only by means of education and example. The methods employed at present by the bourgeoisie and the military rulers of all nations are a bloody mockery of culture and civilization.”25
Ultimately it would be the positions more aligned with those of Kautsky and Bax that would win out as the official policy of the SPD. Bernstein would represent a pro-colonialist minority in the party, with some members of the International like Henriette Roland Holst claiming that the mere existence of this minority in the party shouldn’t be tolerated. Days after the Mainz conference the entire International would have a conference in Paris and a similar resolution would be passed, this time with Luxemburg authoring a resolution that not only condemned imperialism but described it as a necessary consequence of capitalism’s newest contradictions.26
The SPD’s Dresden Congress in 1903 and the Sixth International Congress in 1904 would further affirm an anti-imperialist stance. Yet while international congresses were of symbolic importance to the Social Democratic movement (seen as “international workers’ parliaments”), one must take into account the federal structure of the party. Each national party was ultimately autonomous in its decision-making authority, being left to itself to make its own programs and tactical decisions. The congresses were taken seriously by parties but ultimately no central body had the authority to enforce their decisions until the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) was formed at the Paris conference in 1900. Even then, the actual authority of the ISB was ill-defined, and the tendency towards autonomy prevailed. This would mean that parties in the International primarily saw themselves as national parties who served workers on a national basis rather than sections of a single world party.27 The extent to which resolutions would actually be binding on parties was therefore very ambiguous.
Delegates to the 1910 Stuttgart Conference
Stuttgart Congress
In 1907 the SPD would face a disappointing loss in the electoral campaign known as the Hottentot elections. The Hottentot elections occurred in the context of a pro-colonial nationalist fervor caused by the German colonial war and genocide in South-West Africa, where approximately 65,000 Hereros were massacred in the period from 1904-1908. While the number of eligible voters to the Reichstag election had risen significantly (76.1% in 1903 to 84.7% in 1907), the SPD would lose almost half of its delegates in the Reichstag (81 seats to 43 seats).28 Expecting that more eligible voters would mean more electoral success, the results of this defeat would throw the SPD into a period of doubt and reignite debates over colonial policy.
According to Carl E. Schorske the districts the SPD had maintained in the elections were primarily the working class dominated ones. The section of the electorate lost was the salaried professionals and small shopkeepers, who had fallen prey to the nationalist fervor of the German campaign in South-West Africa. According to Kautsky, the bourgeoisie had promoted the future colonial state as a more attractive alternative to socialism for these strata, something Social Democracy had greatly underestimated. The right wing of the party would respond by asserting that excessive radicalism had cost them votes; the more left-wing elements would point to the Hottentot election as proving the unreliable nature of this “petty-bourgeois” stratum. The radicals in the party therefore saw this as a reason to increase attacks on nationalism and colonial policy while the rightists saw it as a reason to push for a softer stance on colonial policy.29
Alexander Parvus, belonging to the left-wing of the party, would write an in-depth study of the colonial question in response to the Hottentot failure, Colonies and Capitalism in Twentieth Century. Unlike Kautsky’s 1898 pamphlet, Parvus would place colonialism in the context of the contradictions of the modern capitalist system, with overproduction, the falling rate of profit and the merging of production and exchange in finance capital as the motor force behind colonial policies, rather than pre-capitalist elites.30 He cited the increasing imperialist policies of the British Empire as symptoms of its decline as a hegemonic world power, scrambling to hold onto supremacy as it collapses.31 From this theoretical study, Parvus came to the conclusion that colonial policies are symptoms of the decline of capitalism that will present the proletariat with an opportunity for revolutionary action. No political support for colonial policy of any kind was acceptable in Parvus’ view.32
Following the Hottentot failure was the Stuttgart Conference of 1907. This conference would see the colonialism debates resume, this time with a victory for the right. The conclusions made by Parvus, that colonialism was a symptom of capitalist crisis that must be combated with revolutionary action, would be rejected by the majority of conference delegates. In a shift to the right, Luxemburg’s anti-imperialist resolution from the 1900 congress would be dropped and replaced through a process of contentious debate.
One of these debates was between two delegates of the German party, Eduard David and George Ledebour. David quotes August Bebel, a highly respected leader of the party, as saying “it makes a big difference how colonial policy is conducted. If representatives of civilized countries come as liberators to the alien peoples in order to bring them the benefits of culture and civilization, then we as Social Democrats will be the first to support such colonizing as a civilizing mission.”33 The fact this quote is from August Bebel, one of the most important leaders of the Social Democratic movement, is revealing. It shows that for many Social Democrats, opposition to colonialism wasn’t opposition to European supremacy and was still premised on the legitimacy of a European civilizing mission. It was merely the methods of colonialism that were opposed, methods that were to be replaced by peaceful ones that would make Europeans welcome missionaries of progress.
Ledebour would respond by polemicizing against Bebel as well as David, arguing that Bebel’s position asserted the possibility that colonial policy could be anything other than the existing horror and inhumanity that it was. Rather than calling for a more “humane” colonialism, he says that only the resistance of the exploited can lessen the brutalities of colonialism. After Ledebour spoke, a delegate from Belgium, Modeste Terwagne, would argue that if the occupation of the Congo were ended that “industry would be seriously damaged” and that “men utilize all the riches of globe, wherever they may be situated.”34
Ledebour and a Dutch Socialist, Hendrick van Kol, would draft a resolution in compromise with the socialist colonizers who condemned existing colonial policy while neglecting to condemn colonial policy under capitalism in general. Terwagne would introduce an amendment that affirmed the potential for a socialist colonial policy that acted as a civilizing force, while David would add another amendment saying that “the congress regards the colonial idea as such as an integral part of the socialist movement’s universal goals for civilization.”35 David’s amendments was rejected and Terwagne’s was incorporated in the final draft which was accepted by a majority of the congress:
“Socialism strives to develop the productive forces of the entire globe and to lead all peoples to the highest form of civilization. The congress therefore does not reject in principle every colonial policy. Under a socialist regime, colonization could be a force for civilization.”36
While the resolution also contained commitments for parliamentary delegates to “fight against merciless exploitation and bondage” and “advocate reforms to improve the lot of the native peoples” it failed to reject colonialism as such and instead aimed to reform the existing colonial occupations. This turn to the right disgusted Luxemburg, Parvus and Kautsky. However, the turn towards what was essentially a pro-colonial stance was a product of democratic deliberation, a process that could be reversed through open debate. By the end of the conference, Kautsky was able to build up a bloc of support that would defeat the original resolution by a vote of 128 against 108, with 10 abstentions. Replacing the original resolution would be a resolution that would state that the congress “condemns the barbaric methods of capitalist colonization” and claim “the civilizing mission that capitalist society claims to serve is no more than a veil for its lust for conquest and exploitation.”37
While an anti-imperialist motion did pass, 128 against 108 was hardly a vast majority of delegates. Russian Social Democrat Vladimir Lenin believed this to be a sign of growing opportunism within Social Democracy, one that needed to be battled against with vigilance. The Stuttgart conference “strikingly showed up socialist opportunism, which succumbs to bourgeois blandishments” and “revealed a negative feature in the European labour movement, one that can do no little harm to the proletarian cause, and for that reason should receive serious attention.”38 Social Democracy was not guaranteed to stick to a strict anti-imperialist platform, and such a stance would have to be battled for in the halls of congresses and in theoretical debates.
Debates on colonialism and imperialism would continue in Social Democracy, reaching an apogee when a majority of SPD Reichstag delegates would vote for war credits at the beginning of World War One, followed by the majority of other Second International parties. Ultimately Lenin’s fear of growing opportunism was proven correct. However, while one could assume that the Social Democrats who voiced opposition to colonialism most consistently would be those who vigorously opposed the war, anti-colonialists like Parvus and Belfort Bax would find themselves amongst the ‘social-patriots’ who rallied behind the war. Arguments for supporting the war would vary. In the case of Parvus it was his conclusion that it was necessary to defend the progressive German state against reactionary Czarism that led him to rally behind the Kaiser.39 If support or rejection of WWI was the ‘final test’ for Social Democrats, positions in the debates over colonialism ultimately would not serve as predictors for who would pass.
1914 edition of German Social-Democratic newspaper Vorwärts. Reads: “Social Democracy and the War! The social-democratic faction allowed the war credits to pass”
Conclusion
It would take the October Revolution, with its radical approach to the national question and solidarity with the struggles of colonial peoples, to truly establish an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist orthodoxy in Marxism. Lenin’s anti-colonial Marxism would inspire national liberation leaders in the colonies like Ho Chi Minh to align with the International Communist movement and deal a blow to Marxist Eurocentrism. While a blow was dealt, it wasn’t quite fatal, as European chauvinism would still haunt Marxist parties throughout the 20th Century, the most famous example being the French Communist Party’s refusal to support Algerian independence at the most crucial moment. In these instances, Euro-chauvinists were continuing an unfortunate tradition within Marxism that contested for legitimacy in the Second International using the writings of Marx himself.
The pro-colonial positions found both in Marx and in the Second International have a common theoretical basis that can be identified as Eurocentrism. According to Samir Amin, a key theoretical backdrop to the ideology of Eurocentrism is economism, defined as the view that “economic laws are considered as objective laws imposing themselves on society as forces of nature, or, in other words, as forces outside of the social relationships peculiar to capitalism.”40 Eurocentric economism reifies economic development as an inevitable process that occurs as long as “cultural” factors don’t stand in the way. It sees the uneven development of the world and the backwardness of the periphery as a product of the specific cultures of these societies being inferior to that of Europeans, barriers to economic progress that must be broken down. In contrast, the scientific socialist view sees economic development as a process contested by class struggle and the role of imperialism in reproducing the core/periphery division
In the Eurocentric ideology, the European world is seen as a world of wealth due to its unique culture while the rest of the world is held back by its culture (Asiatic stagnation for example) and only progresses to the extent it copies Europe. History is a progressive march towards modernization, and “it becomes impossible to contemplate any other future for the world other than its progressive Europeanization.”41 The future is shaped and defined by the West, which has everything to teach the rest of the world and nothing to learn from it. As a result, Western capitalism stands as a model for the planet, its mode of development universal for all countries and only held back by internal backwardness when this development fails to take hold. This chauvinist ideology took hold over Bernstein and even Marx at times, seeing the spread of colonialism as a progressive process that would enforce the development of stagnant societies.
According to the ideology of developmental economism, if not for the backwardness of the non-European world the development of capitalism would ultimately homogenize the world. Four-hundred years of global capitalist development has shown the world still heavily divided, not only between bourgeois and proletariat but between core and periphery nations. Capitalism is dominant in almost every country today, and the uneven development of the world still haunts the periphery. Bernstein’s vision of colonialism bringing capitalist “civilization” to the world has come to pass. Yet imperialism still ravages the world, creating what John Smith calls the super-exploitation of the global south by the developed capitalist nations. Capitalism has spread worldwide, but it has formed a global division of labor where the post-colonial proletariat labors for starvation wages to produce super-profits realized in the imperialist countries. According to Smith,
“…the very processes that produced modern, developed, prosperous capitalism in Europe and North America also produced backwardness, underdevelopment, and poverty in the Global South…the accelerated spread of capitalist social relations among Southern nations has been far more effective in dissolving traditional economies and ties to the land than in absorbing into wage labor those made destitute by the process.”42
The historical verdict seems to have been made in favor of the arguments of Bax and the anti-imperialists rather than Bernstein. Yet we must not pretend that this debate is merely of historical importance. Today we face an imperialism more based in systematically enforced economic underdevelopment, which is maintained through imperialist police actions. Rather than direct colonialism, it is primarily economic imperialism of the more informal kind that devastates the world. As a result, the defenders of imperialism amongst the left come in different forms than the likes of Bernstein. They are not the colonial apologists of old but advocates of US intervention as progressive in certain situations or those who refuse to be critical of social democrats who vote for imperialist war budgets. There are also those who refuse to take up demands for the deconstruction of settler-colonial states, like the United States, and the national liberation of those still under settler-colonial occupation, in the name of focusing on bread-and-butter demands. As the socialist movement develops, we must learn from the failures of the Second International to clearly establish an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist position in its ranks, which exists not only on paper but in the class awareness of the rank and file.
Donald, Parker, and Christian are joined by one of the greatest political commentators of our time, Jake from Swampside Chats, to discuss the struggle between Social-Democracy and Woke Liberalism in the Democratic Party. What lies ahead? How can the left benefit from the Bernie movement/campaign? Are Boomers holding us back? Join us for a discussion on a historic election.
Christian and Donald sit down for a discussion on Moshe Lewin’s 1974 tome Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates. They discuss Bukharin, the Left Opposition, Stalin, Soviet reformers, cybernetic planning, and more. Our conclusion: this book has greatly humbled us, letting us know how hard actually creating a new society outside of capitalism is. Unfortunately, Lewin’s book is out of print but we recommend getting your hands on a used copy if possible. If you can’t, his book The Soviet Century is still in print from Verso Books. We hope to continue this as a reading series on the problems of building socialism. Edited by P.H. Higgins.
For this episode, Parker and Donald welcome Cosmonaut editor and writer Medway Baker on to Canadasplain the Westminster system. Join us as we put on our inner socdem wonk to discover what went wrong for the Labour Party in the recent UK election.
Donald Parkinson takes issue with the calls for a “socially conservative leftism” that have increased in popularity since Jeremy Corbyn’s defeat in the UK election.
Socially conservative, economically leftist
The recent UK election has been a test of faith for many. Seeing countless working-class people vote for a gang of pedophiles, who want to cut the NHS in the name of nationalism, is a dark sign for Marxists who are invested in class politics as the pathway to an emancipated world. Regardless of how one feels about social-democracy or bourgeois elections, this was a defeat for the left. Nationalism triumphed over classical working-class politics attempting a return to the national stage.
The defeat of Jeremy Corbyn by Brexit has been seen as validation for an ideology that can be described in short as “socially conservative, economically leftist.” The argument goes as follows: given the choice between economic redistribution and nationalism, the working class has chosen nationalism. Therefore the left needs to embrace nationalism along with all the other parochial “forces of habit” found in the working class if they want to win. A recent example is the advocacy group Blue Labour, which at least gives an honest argument for these politics without obfuscation.
Blue Labour argues that the politics of social conservatism aligned with economic leftism has a new majority, a silent majority if you will. It calls for a politics that is “Internationalist and European” but “not globalist, nor universalist nor cosmopolitan.” It calls for embracing the parochial against the universalist in the name of resisting the commodification of labor, not unlike the “Reactionary Socialism” maligned by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Yet instead of arguing for a return to feudalism, Blue Labour wants to return to a Fordist economy where the family and nation are stabilized by a protectionist social order.
This argument is given theoretical justification in a paper by Steve Hall and Simon Winlow. Hall and Winlow paint a historical picture of the British Left as a sort of battle waged by middle-class reformers trying to enforce a cosmopolitan morality on a socially conservative working class. According to Hall and Winlow, these reformers were first found in organizations like the Reform League and Fabians, entering the Labour Party to force their middle-class ideals on the workers’ movement. Fair enough, but Hall and Winlow accuse Engels of wanting to destroy working-class life to open the space for socialism, and claim the Soviet Union was inspirational to the Fabians because it was “yet another system imposed upon the working class by a middle-class vanguard.”
Then the article ventures into the territory of rightist conspiracy theories about “Cultural Marxism”, claiming that the Frankfurt School and the post-structuralist academics were merely a continuation of these middle-class reformers. Here we find a narrative best expounded by Christopher Lasch in his seminal Revolt of the Elites, in which middle-class technocrats try to impose social engineering on a wholesome “common people”, people with a healthy instinct of revulsion towards top-down social engineering. This is a worldview where anyone who strives to fight for socially progressive ideas amongst the working class is inherently a “middle-class outsider” trying to force their ways upon the righteous common folk.
This is also a worldview that has been bubbling under the surface since Marxist theorists like Michel Clouscard and Christopher Lasch critiqued what they saw as a narcissistic and libertine superstructure that reinforced and served modern capitalism, particularly after 1968. Today figures like Angela Nagle and Aimee Terese repeat similar critiques to an online audience. A common target is open borders and LGBTQ politics, and appeals are made for the left to make peace with the social-conservatism that (supposedly) dominates the working class. At the same time, Tucker Carlson calls attention to a potential electoral majority that is “culturally conservative and economically populist”, which can challenge a “state religion of woke politics” and the “elite left”. In the journal American Affairs, formerly pro-Trump, a more intellectual case is more for this kind of politics. A general political trend seems to be emerging in both the left and the right, basing itself on the premise that organizing the working class and challenging liberal capitalism means turning to social conservatism and even embracing traditional values. To quote a tweet from the leftist podcaster Sean P. McCarthy:
Seems to me like religion, family, and the nation state are all things that give people a sense of community and duty counter to the alienation and loneliness of late stage capitalism and the left should probably shut up about abolishing them and let people enjoy things.
In this, we see three of the main categories that the left is supposed to make peace with. Religion, family, and nation-state have long been critiqued by the left as an ideological fetishism and forms of oppression and alienation. This is not some deviation of a “postmodern cultural turn”, as some like to claim in an attempt to appeal to an earlier form of leftism where class issues were at the forefront. The Bolsheviks included figures like Alexandra Kollontai, who sought to overcome the bourgeois family while her comrades called for a radical internationalism that aimed to make no compromise with national chauvinism. These positions are a continuation of the radical enlightenment convictions baked into Marxism that critiques all oppressive superstitions that limit human potential. Yet with the left losing harder than ever, many think that it’s time to give up on these convictions. They think it is time to make peace with and even start appealing to what is essentially reactionary tradition in the name of building a movement that will effectively challenge neoliberal capitalism, both economically and culturally.
We can call this tendency “traditionalist leftism”, or “trad leftism” for short. It is a form of populism that sees the working classes as inherently morally correct no matter how organized or politically conscious. To even see social backwardness as a phenomenon among the working class to be challenged is to capitulate to a petty-bourgeois moralism more concerned with abstract universalism than the direct needs of workers. The working class is scared of migrants, alienated by trans people, and annoyed by the feminists who seek to guilt them for desiring a stable family life, the argument goes. To oppose these attitudes is to play the role of the middle-class reformer who seeks to impose progressive values on the workers against their will. As a result, the trad leftists implicitly call for a program of strong borders and strong families along with a paternalistic welfare state, sometimes flirting with an embrace of religion. After all, wasn’t Stalin himself opposed to homosexuality, making concessions to the Orthodox Church?
In a previous article, I argued against similar logic, albeit one that was less outright in favor of chauvinism, by arguing that a politics of economism that focuses purely on the bread-and-butter is anti-Marxist rather than authentically Marxist. Yet to simply appeal to “true Marxism” to show why the trad leftists are wrong helps us little when most people don’t consider themselves Marxists in the first place. Moralizing or calling people Strasserites won’t help us either. Instead, we need strong political arguments as to why an economist “leftism” that appeals to nation, family, and church is not the answer to the problems facing us today, especially for when we engage with working-class communities that themselves hold conservative sentiments.
Nation
Let us begin with the issue of the nation. Blue Labour argues that a politics that “opposes borders and the idea of the nation… cannot develop an alternative story of democratic nationhood, nor one about belonging, nor about international relations.” The underlying premise here is that it is only through nationalism and the nation-state that a democratic polity can be constructed, and since a democratic polity is necessary for leftist politics leftists must embrace the nation. This entails embracing border control to limit migration and putting “our own workers first.” It is a political logic that aims to affirm the nation-state as a protective shield against the power of the global market, with neoliberal capitalism a contradiction between national sovereignty and globalization. Outright Marxists like Wolfgang Streck have made these sorts of claims, arguing for a distinction between “people of the state” and “people of the market” to assert that without a strong national community there is no possibility of opposing capitalism.
Following this logic, various leftists like Angela Nagle and Paul Cockshott have argued that leftists should welcome rather than oppose immigration controls. Ultimately this argument follows an unspoken premise that right-wing nationalists have been repeating since the dawn of the nation-state, which is that social programs rely on an ethnically homogenous community. Therefore, if leftists want to rebuild a welfare state ravaged by neo-liberalism they have no choice but to become advocates of a strong nation-state to preserve the homogeneity of the nation in the face of immigration. And the longer they wait to do this, the longer they will lose like Jeremy Corbyn.
Blue Labour argue that rejecting the national can only mean embracing an “abstract universalism” as opposed to a concrete and actually existing national community. From this abstract universalism, one can only fail to actually form a working-class polity. Yet what the argument seems to forget is that nation-states themselves at one point were merely abstract universalism. The French Revolution developed the modern nation through a notion of universal citizenship that sought to ensure the rights of man, and to form the nation-state a disparate collection of agrarian communities had to be mobilized in the name of these rights. Through a process of political mobilization and organization, the abstract nation was made into a concrete political reality, centralizing different communities under a representative government with rights, duties, and a common language.
If it was possible to do this for the original nation-state then it is also possible to take an abstract internationalism and turn it into a concrete polity. The Second International began such a project, building a working-class culture that oriented itself around a “demonstration culture”, which sought to build a sense of international community among a federation of national parties.1 By organizing the working class around principles of solidarity with workers of all nations and forming transnational institutions, it is possible to build a democratic community that is not rooted in a particular nation. This isn’t going to be easy; the Second International ultimately succumbed to nationalism. Yet to say that only the nation provides a basis for building a democratic community is to surrender to the path of least resistance and ignore the possibilities contained in history.
If we aim to build this international community of proletarians, we must oppose immigration controls. As Donna Gabaccia shows in her work Militants and Migrants,the process of migration has been key in the formation of transnational working-class communities.2 To say that immigration controls are necessary because the nation is the only way workers can form a political community is to impose conditions that make transnational working-class communities more difficult to form.
Another issue with embracing the nation-state is that we are entering a global crisis of climate change that simply cannot be addressed on the national level. Developing the kind of response needed to the potential catastrophe on the horizon is going to require cooperation beyond the national level and working towards a global planned economy. The alternative is that nations compete to have the least disastrous downfall, protecting their respective populations from the worst while shutting out those suffering like a sinking lifeboat. It is imperative that humanity moves beyond the nation-state if it is going to survive.
Family
“Abolition of the family” has long been a controversial position amongst communists, prompting Marx and Engels to have to address it in the Communist Manifesto when defending themselves from right-wing attacks. The response of Marx and Engels was to point out that the family was already withering away in the face of capitalism for much of the proletariat, an observation that is made today by the trad leftists to argue that an embrace of family values is the logical conclusion of anti-capitalist politics.
I will concede to the trad leftists that “abolish the family” is not exactly a winning slogan. This is not because it scares workers but because it doesn’t effectively communicate what we are aiming for. We should be more precise in our language, and set our sights more specifically on patriarchy. It is the dependence of women on husbands and of children on their parents that we wish to do away with, not the cohabitation of kinship and the emotional support that comes with it. Of course, there are some leftists like Sophie Lewis who see a future beyond the family based on universal surrogacy, a vision that seems more designed to troll the trad leftists than as a genuine political program. Such visions are genuinely alienating, yet their existence does not require an equally contrarian response that affirms the traditional family.
According to Christopher Lasch, the family is a “haven in a heartless world”. If social life is reduced to pure economic competition between atomized individuals, then the family, for those lucky enough to still have one, is one of the few forms of community they have. There is no doubt that the destruction of the family by capitalism with nothing to replace it is quite grim and psychically horrifying. Yet it is mistaken to idealize the family as an escape from the impersonal alienation of the market, when for many people the family is itself a form of personal and direct alienation. Not everyone lives in a world where their family is their friend; in many cases, one’s family can be their worst enemy. We can do better than valorizing one form of alienation in response to another.
Rather than returning to the family in the face of its destruction under capitalism, we should seek to create a world where the haven of the family is not necessary. Rather than a society full of broken families, we need a society where someone without a family can thrive as well as someone with family intact. This is what “abolishing the family” truly means: to end the economic relations of dependence of wives and children on the patriarch so that kinship is based on voluntary relationships of genuine love and community. This would entail not ending the ability of parents to raise their children, but instead giving children the option to leave their families if they are abusive, while retaining support networks beyond the misery of foster care. It would mean ending the unpaid domestic labor of women that reproduces the nuclear family, by socializing this work and removing its gendered connotations.
This is not to mention that a reassertion of family values could only be done through a turn towards a vile culture of patriarchy. We must understand that patriarchy is not simply an attitude of men, but a historically derived mode of production with institutional forms according to which the wife and children are the property of the father and perform what is essentially slave labor to reproduce the household as an economic unit. To turn back to the traditional family would require empowering this economic unit by reinforcing the conditions under which women are essentially the property of their husbands. Until the trad left is willing to own up to this and describe the measures they will take to accomplish this, their gloating about family values is merely subcultural posturing.
Religion
The issue of religion is hardly cut and dry. Religious belief has been an ideological force for mobilizing the vilest of reactionary movements, such as the Iron Guard in Romania or the current rightist coup in Bolivia. Yet at the same time, religious sentiment has been used to mobilize those on the side of socialism and decolonization, such as Catholic Liberation Theology or Muslim National Communism. It could be argued that a policy of secularism rather than militant atheism is preferable, with militant atheism having done more harm than good for the Communist project by alienating potential sympathizers.
Yet for the trad left the question of religion goes beyond the question of whether someone can hold religious beliefs while also being a good communist militant. For much of the trad left an embrace of religion is coupled with a turn towards social-conservatism. It is obvious why; embracing a social-conservative viewpoint is impossible without distorting Marxism. Within religious doctrines, one can find an ethical appeal to justify taking up the reactionary viewpoints they see in the working class. There is also a communitarian and collectivist element to religion that, like the family, can serve as a “haven in a heartless world” which can be counterposed to atomizing liberal individualism. Another factor is the lack of an (at least explicit) ethical framework in Marxism, a belief system that exists as counterposed to utopian socialists who aimed to build socialism on the foundation of ethical ideals.
Examples of socialists turning to Catholicism or other religious tendencies are primarily niche phenomena on Twitter, but there are some more famous examples, like Catholic Elizabeth Bruenig, known for her anti-abortion stance. An attempt to articulate such a politics programmatically can be found in the “Tradinista Manifesto”, written by “a small party of young Christian socialists committed to traditional orthodoxy, to a politics of virtue and the common good, and to the destruction of capitalism, and its replacement by a truly social political economy.”
The Tradinista Manifesto is essentially an internet shitpost with no historical importance. I only turn to it as a good example of the contradictory nature of the social-conservative left and problems with turning to religious values as a counter to liberal capitalism. It begins by asserting that Christ is king and that the polity should, therefore, promote the teachings of the Church, “autonomous but not fully separate from the Church”. What we have here seems to be a sort of light theocracy, albeit a theocracy that is supposed to promote economic justice. The vision of economic justice here is a sort of Proudhonism, not dissimilar to Catholic distributism. Class society is to be eradicated while property rights are also asserted. The solution is the promotion of worker cooperatives, everyone becoming a property owner. How this vision is supposed to be feasible given the development of modern productive forces is left to the imagination.
Even more contradictory is the simultaneous rejection and promotion of sexual conservatism. Our Catholic authors claim to be against “Racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and similar forms of oppression” yet at the same time claim that “Marriage and family life should be specially supported by the polity to promote the common good” while also taking a “pro-life” stance against abortion. This is a stance that may make sense to the religious idealist, but to a Marxist it is nonsensical. According to Engels, the wife was the first form of private property and the institution of the family is the economic basis upon which the oppression of women rests. Such a position is like calling for the abolition of obesity while supporting the fast-food industry.
This contradiction captures the very bind that the trad socialists find themselves in. In calling for left-wing economics and social conservative cultural values, they fail to recognize that social conservative values only have purchase because of the division of society into classes and the various forms of oppression that accompany them. People turn to various traditional structures like the family and religion partly because they serve as shelters from the worst aspects of capitalist society. There is, of course, the force of habit that these attitudes have instilled in people which often dies hard. Yet it is unbelievable that a strengthening of the family would be a feature of a world where economic equality was the norm, unless women were systematically excluded from this norm in order to avoid granting them economic independence. Authentically ending class society therefore entails ending patriarchy.
We also find here a problem with trying to base politics on religion in general, as a religious ethics tends to be based on a priori claims that are not subject to further questioning and therefore must be held to. Alexander Bogdanov referred to this as “authoritarian causality,” a type of thinking that holds causality to be rooted in a greater power that exists before all other causes.3 Religious traditions see the work of god or gods as this final cause and therefore hold ethics to stem from these gods, making them unquestionable. This means that a collective and democratic understanding of what defines the “good life” is out of the question, since this answer is already taken as an item of faith.4 So when the Tradinsitas attempt to construct a left-wing politics for the modern world, they are forced to adhere to the Catholic Church’s dogma of being against abortion while simultaneously claming to be against misogyny, resulting in an incoherent politics.
Despite these contradictions, the desire for an ethical grounding beyond the scientific analysis of history provided by Marxism is real. It is my opinion that for us communists, ethical nihilism is not a tenable position. A basic ethical worldview is needed. Perhaps we can find this in the ethics of classical republicanism, a discourse that was implicit in the entire early socialist movement that Marx and Engels were embedded in. Or, maybe Lunacharksy’s “god-building” is the solution, wherein the wake of the old religions’ destruction humanity must build a new religious system devoid of superstition, which can provide a moral grounding for humanity. Such a moral grounding must be universalist and based in reason, not in a traditional creed that isn’t subject to further questioning. Regardless of how one feels about these ideas, turning to the old religious dogmas is not a solution to the problem, even on pragmatic grounds. One’s religious sentiments are very much rooted in their own upbringing and personal experiences, and cannot unify the masses of wage workers around a common human task of overcoming class society. A pluralistic approach that allows for the participation of religious socialists in a greater movement, unified around a truly universalist radicalism, is preferable.
Is liberal capitalism inherently socially progressive?
It is a common talking point of the trad left that capitalism destroys all the patriarchal and traditional bonds of the old communities, creating an atomized liberal individual who can be exploited by capital. Julius Evola, the ultimate philosopher of traditionalism, famously said that capitalism is just as subversive as communism. With this there can be no real disagreement. Yet this premise is taken a step further with the argument that to truly be opposed to capital means to affirm these traditional forms and protect them from erosion by capitalism. To be socially progressive, they say, is only to do the work of capitalism for the capitalists, and the left is nothing more than a vanguard of liberalism as long as it maintains an opposition to social conservatism.
The idea that capitalism is inherently socially progressive and antagonistic to social conservatism should be held up to closer scrutiny. This brings us to the theories of Karl Polanyi and his notion of the “Double movement.”5 According to Polanyi, capitalism is unique because of its tendency to subsume all elements of social life to the nexus of market exchange, alienating all that was once inalienable. Focusing on 19th Century England, Polanyi discussed the transformation of “natural” communities, in which land and labor had an inherent worth that was mediated through relations of personal duty and obligation, where now these are objects of abstract exchange. Where labor was once mediated by tradition and custom it now carries a price tag, subject to the whims of market anarchy. As Karl Marx would say, “all that is solid melts into air.”
In Polanyi’s vision this movement of capital to subsume all that exists outside of it inevitably triggers a countermovement to protect social order from this corrosion, as the market will eventually destroy the foundations upon which it functions. This countermovement can take many forms, from national protectionism to communitarianism to the welfare state. Against the atomization of humanity into sellable commodities there is an assertion of social solidarities that aim to restore what was destroyed. The countermovement is seen as external to the logic of the market, yet at the same time necessary for its functioning if society is not to fall into a war of all against all.
Polanyi would make an excellent theorist for the trad left, as using his framework one could call for a reassertion of the family, nation and church as social solidarities to provide the foundation of a countermovement against neoliberal capitalism. Yet by identifying capitalism solely with the logic of the market and social disintegration, Polanyi overestimates how much these countermovements are actually outside of capital. He sets up a situation where any reaction to capitalism will be inherently conservative, defending and reasserting the traditional ways of life that are disrupted by capitalism. Yet what if the movement of capital and the countermovement against it, the double movement, are internal to capitalism, rather than the latter being external to it?
Melinda Cooper, in her work Family Values, develops exactly this critique by looking at the role of the family in the history of neoliberalism. Drawing on the work of Wendy Brown, Cooper argues that neoliberalism and neoconservatism both need to be understood as a greater dialectic within capitalism. To do this, she focuses on the role of family in policy and discourse from both neoliberals and neoconservatives, showing how both political tendencies were invested in the maintenance of the family as the basis of a society based on market contracts. Neoliberals like Gary S. Becker and Milton Friedman used concern over the disruption of the family by welfare as a reason to promote the welfare reform, not simply as a matter of cost-cutting, but as a way to promote the equilibrium of the family as a sound basis for the equilibrium of the market.6 This throws into question the understanding of neoliberalism as having an inherently socially progressive superstructure of hedonistic sexual liberation from the family. Milton and Rose Friedman would write in their book Tyranny of the Status Quo that
If we are right that the tide is turning, that public opinion is shifting away from a belief in big government and away from the doctrine of social responsibility, then that change…will tend to restore a belief in individual responsibility by strengthening the family and reestablishing its traditional role.7
For the neoliberals, the family was a spontaneous order that would develop when set free from the distortions of welfare and provide a basis upon which the market could flourish. Neoliberal welfare reforms aimed to make the family rather than the state absorb the cost of externalities, which meant that welfare reforms aimed for more than just budget trimming, but also for enforcing family morality. For neoconservatives, the family was something to be actively protected that required intervention from the state. When the family didn’t develop as a spontaneous order due to neoliberal reforms, neoconservatism as a political force was necessary to reassert the family as a countermovement. Cooper summarizes the relationship of the two ideologies to the family as follows:
If neoliberals were adamant that the economic obligations of family should be enforced even when the legal and affective bonds of kinship had broken down, social conservatives were intent on actively rekindling the family as a moral institution based on the unpaid labor of love. Both agreed, however, that the private family (rather than the state) should serve as the primary source of economic security.8
Neoliberalism and neoconservatism can be seen as an example of how Polanyi’s double movement is a dialectic internal to capitalism itself, with countermovements that aim to reassert what is destroyed by market forces acting to facilitate the reproduction of capitalism as a whole. As a result, countermovements that assert the family or nation as protective shields against the worst aspects of capitalism do not offer a way out of capitalism; they instead act to stabilize it. Furthermore, market liberalism does not necessarily entail a social progressive superstructure. The capitalist zealots most intent on subsuming all life to the market have seen an important role for family life, even if they leave its promotion to other political forces. Seeing the rise of alternative lifestyles and sexualities as simply a superstructural expression of neoliberalism is ultimately too simplistic and ignores how social conservatism synchronizes with neoliberalism.
What is necessary is an emancipatory alternative to class society itself that can transcend the dialectic of market liberalism and social conservatism, rather than assert one side of it against the other. The destruction of village and family life in capitalism nonetheless creates a community of the proletariat which is engaged in collective labor in the workplace and community, fostering the potential for a new community that is not rooted in parochial ways of life. The formation of this community through transnational alliances as a political collectivity allows for a way forward, beyond the atomization of the market and patriarchal nationalism alike.
Is the working-class naturally conservative?
Many of those who would make arguments similar to Blue Labour may not themselves have much attachment to the traditional family or nationalism, but think that the left simply needs to abandon social progressivism out of a pragmatic need to appeal to the working class. This notion is based on the premise that the working class is “naturally socially conservative” and that mobilizing them for the purpose of economic redistribution should take precedence over struggles for the ‘recognition’ of marginalized peoples.
This notion can be found in a recent overview of the most recent work of Thomas Piketty by Jan Rovny. According to Rovny, the pattern of voting in which lower-income brackets voted for the left while upper brackets voted for the “Merchant right” has been disrupted by the process of neoliberal deindustrialization. While the wealthiest still vote for the right wing, the constituency of the left parties is no longer the working class but middle-class professionals, often referred to as the PMC (professional-managerial class). Now what remains of the working class is picked up by right-wing populist parties, in a reversal of the political realignment of the early 20th century when political parties with a working-class base had socially progressive agendas.
The explanation as to why the socially progressive left was able to win over the working class is that the old equivalent of the Brahmin left (examples given are Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum) were able to push against the inherent social conservatism of the working class. These middle class intellectuals “translated working class authoritarian tendencies into a fight for universalistic social progress” and “replaced nationalistic tendencies of the working classes with socialist internationalism”. Rovny takes issue with Piketty’s optimism that this can happen again for two reasons: for one, the left cannot square the economic interests of the working class with progressive middle-class intellectuals, and furthermore right-wing populists are able to meet the economic interests of the working class without the added baggage of social progressivism.
The problem with this argument is that it naturalizes both the social conservatism of the working class and the social progressivism of the middle-class professionals. Working-class social conservatism is not a “natural” result of their spontaneous life experiences but a product of the institutions that dominate their lives. Right-wing demagogues in the media and other institutions such as churches actively fight to win ideological domination over the working class and channel economic grievances into chauvinistic attitudes. Working-class conservatism is not a natural inherent quality of the working class, but something they are socialized into by political actors who actively struggle for domination over everyday life. It is something historically and institutionally determined, not “natural”.
Social progressivism among the professional stratum is a similar phenomenon, also something historically and institutionally determined. This social progressivism is related to the fact that this stratum serves the role of ideologically justifying the rule of the capitalist class. The “woke” ideology of this stratum is a product of the role they play as HR managers for a capitalist order that aims to nakedly exploit the global proletariat and manage the imperialist order, while still presenting itself as progressive by offering economic opportunity for marginalized people. Their social progressivism is designed to leave as much room as possible for capitalism to function while ensuring that it preserves opportunities for those who were previously left out. If capitalism loses the need for a socially progressive mask then we can expect to see this stratum embrace a nakedly reactionary chauvinism.
This understanding of the petty-bourgeois professional as inherently socially progressive with the working class as inherently socially conservative puts us in a position where any attempt to fight for genuine communist politics can only be understood as middle-class wankers trying to beat an alien ideology into the working class. It is also just as condescending to the working class as the middle-class liberals that the trad left rightfully condemn because it assumes the working class is too narrow-minded to embrace a universalist and progressive worldview. The truth is that the working class has no institutions of its own in much of the world right now, and therefore cannot be said to have an ideology of its own. As a result, it is a plaything of socially reactionary and socially progressive sections of the ruling class.
The lesson here is that we need to struggle against both social conservative demagogues who preach to the working class as well as the woke professional stratum and expose their hypocrisy. If the right can dominate the social life of the working class through its institutions and win them to its own platform, then the left can as well. It has been done before, and there is no need to square their economic interests with those of salaried professionals. This struggle has to take place in the realm of politics as well as the terrain of everyday life. It will certainly be an uphill battle, given the domination of our enemies and the unwillingness of the left to actually build a working-class base. We cannot put faith in the working class to spontaneously take up an emancipatory communist politics, nor can we surrender emancipatory communist politics to win easy support by playing to people’s prejudices. There will be many defeats on the way, like the one we saw in the UK. But to give in is not an option; we have to fight for the truth and not sacrifice our principles because of demoralization and a desire for easy victories.
Parker & Donald welcome Jake from Swampside Chats on to discuss the professional-managerial class. What is the PMC, its relation to other classes, and its role in contemporary capitalist society? We discuss this and more, including topics like the Democratic primary, Marxology, Brexit, intersectionality, and Ben & Jerry’s.
For this episode we read:
The Professional-Managerial Class by Barbara and John Ehrenreich (part 1 and part 2)
Donald Parkinson weighs in how communists should relate to our difficult history. We can neither be in denial of our failures or refuse to own up to them.
As communists living in the aftermath of the 20th century, we inherit a legacy that is tainted by violence and corruption. This legacy is haunted by misfortunes that we rightfully wish to distance ourselves from. Yet we are inevitably attached to it, regardless of how much we denounce it. It is not only the name of ‘communism’ that is associated with the crimes of Stalin, the images of Soviet ‘totalitarianism’, and the arbitrary violence of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Any grand attempt to change the world in the name of universal humanity and do away with the regime of private property carries these associations. The legacy of communism as a mass social project, not merely an idea, is tainted by a difficult past. To simply find a new name or symbolism as a way to distance ourselves from the legacy of brutality associated with communism will not work; we carry this legacy regardless of our appearance.
Lucio Magri calls this legacy “the burden of communist man” when discussing the Italian Communist Party.1 Magri used this term to discuss the contradiction of the party seeking legitimacy as a mass movement that stood for all that was progressive and democratic, while at the same time existing in continuity with the Stalinist purges and famines. When the Italian Communist Party reasserted itself after WWII, the Soviet Union was still standing, holding a well-earned reputation as a symbol of mass resistance to fascism. The Cold War had only recently begun, and anti-fascism was a more potent force than anti-communism. Today we live in a world of hegemonic anti-communism, where the notion of ‘totalitarianism’ tells us that communism and fascism were just two different expressions of what terror awaits us if we diverge from the liberal-democratic norm.
In spite of the hegemony of anti-communism, many of us are seemingly immune to it. We cannot help but be captivated by the idea that the world we live in must be changed at a fundamental level. The world must be remade, not reformed; history must be something that we consciously make, not passively observe as its victims. We are believers in a god that failed, defending what much of the Western world sees as a lost cause. Perhaps some of us may be attracted to such a vision for reasons of pure revenge fantasy, yet for the majority of us, it is a moral search for justice that makes communism compelling. Regardless of our intentions, there is an element of faith in our convictions. Rather than acting as an economically rational unit that seeks the most advantageous utility out of their current circumstances, the dedicated communist acts against what is convenient. Yet this faith is different from superstition; it is rationalized with an analysis that aims to be scientific, drawing from all human knowledge to create an all-sided worldview based in reason. This is well and good, but no matter how much we try to weigh our views with evidence it ultimately requires a leap of faith, a wager of sorts, to immerse oneself in the conviction of a communist future. Lucien Goldmann described this faith as follows:
Marxist faith is a faith in the future which men make for themselves in and through history. Or, more accurately, in the future that we must make for ourselves by what we do, so that this faith becomes a ‘wager’ which we make that our actions will, in fact, be successful. The transcendental element present in this faith is not supernatural and does not take us outside or beyond history; it merely takes us beyond the individual.2
We can tell ourselves all we want that we are merely inspired by an objective analysis of the impossibility of capitalist development after a certain historical breaking, only cold observers of the need for the forces of production to develop beyond the limitations set upon them by the irrationalities of the market. We would, of course, be right, yet to actually dedicate oneself to act upon this analysis requires a willingness to act beyond the confines of the self, beyond the immediate comfort of our lives. We must make a prediction, or wager on a future that we can never be one-hundred-percent sure of regardless of how refined our analysis is. Lars Lih argues that Lenin’s choice to seize power in 1917 was based on these kinds of wagers, the most important one being that the international working-class would follow his revolution in solidarity and spread it across the world.3There was no way to make such a prediction with absolute certainty, yet Lenin’s faith in the communist future allowed him to act on such a wager and carry through the task of revolution. Faith in the communist cause is essential to give us the conviction and militancy needed to make sacrifices for a greater goal, especially when faced with times like the ones we live in.
So how does one carry faith in Communism to this day, regardless of the burden of the past that we carry, the burden of communist man? How do we convince ourselves and others to make the wager that communism is possible, despite the tumultuous history behind us? Regardless of our moments of triumph and victory, there are still moments of genuine failure and atrocity. We are reminded of them constantly by the media and our social circles outside communist militancy, who see them as obvious reasons to write off communism and move on. My aim here is not to discuss these particular tragedies and crimes, but to discuss what kind of attitude we should have when looking upon the past and discussing it. First, we shall look at the common paths that people take in response to these issues and why they are inadequate.
One path commonly taken is denial. Denial means blinding oneself to any of the negatives in our past. If there are tragedies, it is the collapse of the USSR (caused entirely by external rather than internal forces) or the cases of outright violent capitalist counter-revolution. For more complex events, where communists faced repression from other communists, those who take the path of denial develop bizarre conspiracy theories or simply dismiss any kind of concern as capitulating to propaganda. The Moscow Show Trials, in which the Bolshevik elite were purged on absurd charges of aiming to unite with global fascism to overthrow a state they had helped to forge, are entirely justified in this view. The confessions extracted from the likes of Bukharin and Radek are seen as completely genuine. The best-known proponent of this view is Grover Furr, a Medievalist professor who claims that Stalin committed no crimes, in works such as Khrushchev Lied.
The path of denial is not an option, and those who take this path, regardless of their intentions to challenge the dominant hegemony of propaganda, only barricade their faith in the communist cause with the delusion that their own team was incapable of doing wrong. It rests on superstition rather than a reasoned faith in the final goal of communism. This is not to say that we shouldn’t defend even the most flawed figures of our history from bourgeois lies, even at the risk of sounding like apologists. There is no doubt that death tolls have been inflated and responsibilities placed in unreasonable ways when the bourgeoisie discusses the history of communism, and the authentic historical record must be defended. The danger is that in this defense, we lose sight of the actual crimes committed under our flag, and simply become contrarians to the mainstream history.
A more reasonable variant of the path of denial is to point out the hypocrisy of bourgeois hype over the crimes of communism, exposing their double standards of condemning the crimes of communism while apologizing for their own. This perspective, best articulated by the now-deceased Domenico Losurdo, is often described as “whataboutism” for its attempt to deflect the crimes of communism onto the crimes others. This perspective in its more nuanced forms does reveal profound hypocrisy at the heart of the bourgeois project.4 After all, if we apply the standards that liberals use to judge communism, we must also reject capitalism. Yet if we are consistent, shouldn’t we also condemn communism? At that point, we are left only with a vague desire for a “third way” with no basis in history, a rejection of any possibility for a better future. The only possible conclusion is to accept the flawed nature of humanity and engage in some kind of individualist rebellion against society itself.
The approach of ‘whataboutism’ also falls under denial because it refuses to recognize that Communists must have a greater moral standard than the bourgeoisie. Many Marxists would argue that morality is a meaningless concept that serves no purpose for a communist, a mere ideological fetishism used to justify bourgeois property relations. It is true that morality does not exist independent of the class divisions in society. Yet it was for a reason that Engels spoke of Communism as moving beyond “class morality” towards a “really human morality which stands above class antagonism …at a stage of society which has not only overcome class antagonisms but has even forgotten them in practical life.”5 We must not be moral nihilists, but rather prefigure this “really human morality” in the socialist movement itself, while also understanding that it cannot exist in a pure and untainted form. So while it is of value to point out the moral hypocrisy of anti-communists, it is not enough. We must also have our own moral standards. This does not mean moralizing, to simply apply abstract moral ideals absent any material analysis of the concrete situation in its historical circumstances. As Leon Trotsky said, “In politics and in private life there is nothing cheaper than moralizing.”6
On the other end, there is the path of distancing. This is summed up in a phrase that has become a joke amongst liberals and right-wingers: “that wasn’t real communism.” Those who take this approach would deny that the various crimes committed under the red flag can even be called our own, that they were deviations completely foreign to authentic communism. All that is undesirable in historic communism is placed under the label of “authoritarian socialism”, counterposed to an ideal “socialism from below” that has never been achieved. The impulse to distance oneself from the checkered history of communism, to insist that it has nothing to do with the true meaning of communism and what we want to achieve, comes from a genuine moral instinct towards universal human emancipation from all oppression regardless of its form. Yet condemnation of communist crimes by communists still doesn’t change the reality that we inherit this history. No matter how much we deny this, the majority of the public sees the crimes of Stalin as part and parcel of the communist experience, as part of projects that authentically aimed to build an alternative to capitalism.
Distancing typically takes a completely moral route, starting from an abstract opposition to authoritarianism and rejecting any kind of hierarchy in an a priori value judgment. This naturally entails condemning ‘actually existing socialism’ for the existence of any kind of impurity. An example of this kind of thinking can be found in an essay by Nathan J. Robinson, How to be Socialist Without Being an Apologist for the Atrocities of Communist Regimes. Robinson argues that countries like Cuba and the USSR tell us nothing about egalitarian societies and their problems, only authoritarian societies. Because communism is a society without classes or the state, and the USSR fails to meet this ideal type, no real conclusions about communism can be drawn from the USSR. In fact, Castro, Mao, Stalin, and Lenin didn’t even try to implement these ideas because their own ideology wasn’t pure enough, an “authoritarian” form of socialism rather than a “libertarian” one. Communism is an ideal that has no real-world reference point, except books where the ideas are held. All we have here is a moral opposition to hierarchy and authority that makes any serious historical investigation and reckoning superfluous.
Some communists attempt to frame their act of distancing in more theoretical, not merely moral, terms. Some argue that socialism has never been attempted in ideal circumstances, only in developing countries without a fully consolidated capitalist base. As a result, all that could develop is a form of “oriental despotism” or “bureaucratic collectivism”. While it is true that socialism will be easier to develop where capitalism has more fully taken hold, what we must keep in mind is that politics never occurs in “ideal circumstances”. Socialism will never exist in a vacuum, away from all the muck of the past and imperfections of human experimentation in the present.
Others would deny that socialism was even attempted. These are the theorists of ‘state-capitalism’ like Tony Cliff, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Onorato Damen, who held that the USSR and its offshoots were just a different form of capitalism, one where the state was a single firm and the entire population waged laborers. There are many problems with state-capitalism as a theory. It takes the surface appearance of the USSR as having commonalities with capitalism without looking deeper into the actual laws of motion in these societies and how they correlate. For Marx, capitalism is a system based on the accumulation of value, where firms compete to exploit wage labor as efficiently as possible and sell their goods on the market. Prices of goods manufactured in mass factory production are supposed to gravitate toward the socially average necessary labor time to produce the goods. This process is known as the law of value. In the USSR, prices were determined by state planning boards, used as a rationing mechanism of sorts. Other tendencies that defined capitalism, such as the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, were also missing. This is only scratching the surface of state-capitalist theories, but it should be clear enough that there are strong objections to these understandings of the USSR and ‘actually existing socialism’.
Attempts to distance oneself from the experience of ‘actually existing socialism’ by writing it off as just a form of capitalism to oppose like any other is also a form of denial, as well as distancing. It is a form of denial because it aims to avoid reckoning with the fact that these were attempts at building socialism, genuine attempts to create a society outside capitalism. Denying this lets us dodge having to genuinely come to terms with their failures. The USSR, Maoist China, East Germany, and others were all societies that attempted to replace the ‘anarchy of the market’ with state planning, replacing the production of exchange values with the production of use-values. It is arguable whether they are worthy of the title of socialism (I wouldn’t use it without qualifiers), yet to deny that they were related to a project of building socialism is untenable. The act of distancing is an attempt to wash one’s hands of the burden of communist man, which gives moral solace to the individual but fails to actually assess the difficult reality of the past. In this sense, it is a communist faith that is rooted in superstition as much as any other denialism.
Given the inadequacy of either denialism or distancing, the question of how we appropriately address our past remains. For one, we must own our past. Any kind of cowardly attempt to proclaim that we have no relation to the actual history of communism should be rejected. That there is a past of bloodshed (as well as triumph) that we inherit is something we must come to terms with. By taking responsibility for our past we disallow ourselves from making any simplistic assumptions that “true communism” was never tried, and that with our own purity of ideology we will do right. Instead, we must make an honest assessment of the actual history, understand the actual failures and recognize the kernels of the communist futures that manifested in the processes of the historical socialist project. This approach, neither denial nor distancing, is what I call the balancing act.
This approach was attempted by Leon Trotsky, a thinker, and leader who undoubtedly stands in the pantheon of great revolutionaries, despite many imperfections. The organizational legacy of Trotsky’s Fourth International is one marred by sectarianism and delusions of grandeur, as seen in countless Trotskyist organizations today, all fighting over who carries the true legacy of the man. Trotsky’s own thinking could be distorted by economism and his own career was not without opportunism and excess. But this is not the place for an in-depth critique of Trotsky, as much as it is warranted. What interests us in Trotsky is what his own approach to the problems of the USSR (a society he helped create yet found himself exiled from) can tell us about how to relate to our past in a critical way.
The most important aspect of Trotsky’s work, besides the concept of uneven and combined development, was his critique of the USSR. Trotsky’s own theory of the ‘degenerated workers’ state’ is of course not without flaws. The notion that the origin of bureaucratization in the USSR was the kulak when the Stalinist bureaucracy would go on to engage in a vicious assault on the kulak can hardly hold up under too much scrutiny. What makes Trotsky’s analysis valuable is its capacity to vigorously critique the USSR while maintaining that it was a conquest of the working class that needed to be defended at all costs. It is within Trotsky’s way of understanding the USSR that we can find a correct way to understand our past. Perry Anderson described this as a sort of “equilibrium” between defense of the ‘workers state’ and critique of its bureaucratic degeneration:
Trotsky’s interpretation of Stalinism was remarkable for its political balance – its refusal of either adulation or condemnation, for a sober estimate of the contradictory nature and dynamic of the bureaucratic regime in the USSR…There is little doubt it was Trotsky’s firm insistence – so unfashionable in later years, even among many of his own followers – that the USSR was in the final resort a workers state that was the key to this equilibrium.7
As Anderson points out, this equilibrium between “adulation or condemnation” was a treacherous one. To move too much in the direction of condemnation would be to take that risk of playing into the hands of the capitalist who condemned the USSR and used its shortcomings to bury the project of communism, and rally military intervention against it. This road was exemplified by the path of Max Shachtman, who would argue that the USSR under Stalin had become a form of ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ that was actually regressive relative to capitalism, due to its lack of civil liberties. This led him on the path of eventually lending a helping hand to Western imperialism in the Cold War, believing the US and NATO were genuinely more progressive for the working class. The logic of this approach led to saying that the USSR’s collapse would be a progressive win for the international proletariat because it would sweep away the totalitarian system repressing the liberty and freedom that represented genuine gains of bourgeois society. Today Shachtman’s followers in the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty celebrate the collapse of the Soviet Bloc as a victory of socialism despite the massive human cost. Hillel Ticktin, whose analysis of the USSR contains many useful observations, falls into a similar trap. While Ticktin never supported imperialism, he did state that “given the lack of understanding of what the Soviet Union was and the influence of the Soviet Union in preventing the coming into existence of a genuine socialist party, the end of the Soviet Union was a step forward.”8 One would think that this “step forward” would be accompanied by a renaissance of Marxism and worker organization, not neo-liberal shock therapy and reactionary nationalism.
It is not necessary to fully agree with Trotsky’s analysis of the USSR as a workers’ state, albeit degenerated, to accept that the USSR had certain advantages for the working class that were lost with its collapse. Coming to understand this is essential if we want to adequately comprehend the past communist experience. Michael Lebowitz argues that in the USSR there was a “tacit social contract” that “provided direct benefits for workers.”9 This was not a social contract based on the direct rule of the workers over the conditions of their own existence. It was a system where workers were still atomized, unable to exercise collective control over production. They were organized in official trade unions and civil society organizations without being able to form their own independent organizations. However, in exchange for yielding these freedoms, citizens of the USSR were able to receive protection from unemployment and guaranteed access to subsistence in an informal pact with the party-state.10 The nationalization of practically all private property allowed the USSR to “shield” itself from the forces of global capitalism and carve out space to form its own economic dynamics, protecting its citizens from the chaos of the market. This meant workers genuinely had something to lose in the form of a package of economic rights, given in exchange for curtailment of political liberties. Despite the Stalinist terror and bureaucratic malfunction, ‘actually existing socialism’ was able to provide something for the working-class that capitalism couldn’t. Nostalgia for the Eastern Bloc isn’t simply nationalism but also regret over a loss of tangible material benefits.
With the above taken into consideration, it should be clear that even if the USSR did not represent an authentic workers’ state, it was nonetheless something worth defending: its collapse was a massive setback for the global working class. Those who followed Shachtman were wrong, and Trotsky was right. It was necessary to defend the USSR and the Socialist States from capitalist restoration and imperialist attack while critiquing their bureaucracies and supporting fights for internal changes.
If this sounds like an example of contradictory “doublethink”, let us compare the USSR to a mobbed-up trade union. We always defend unions from busting by the capitalists, regardless of how corrupt their own regime is. Yet we do not support actions by unions that attack the rest of the working class, such as hate strikes, regardless of the fact they are performed by defensive organizations of the workers that they are better off for having. An equivalent in the case of the USSR would be the repression of Prague Spring, the deportation of ethnic minorities, or the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. We must condemn such acts, just as we would condemn hate strikes without joining the chorus of anti-union propaganda. Furthermore, we should support attempts by workers to reform their union, even to replace it with a wholly different union that fits their needs; not only kicking out the most corrupt bureaucrats but structurally changing it.
Of course, the USSR is now gone, so this is no longer a live issue. Leftist groups today do not have to determine the correct way to relate to the USSR as an existing entity. However, we do have to comprehend our past, not only for ourselves but for the public. My suggestion is that Trotsky’s analysis of the USSR gives us a model of how we should comprehend our past, in particular, the legacy of ‘actually existing socialism’. We must recognize that when we carry the burden of our past, we also carry a legacy of struggle for a better world, a struggle that in many cases actually has helped create a better world. If this wasn’t the case, then our faith in communism truly would be an irrational superstition, something we follow against all living evidence. Yes, in the end, the USSR failed, collapsing under its own contradictions. But this need not entail we give up. As Badiou said when challenged on the shortcomings of historical communism,
After millennia of administration centred on private property, we had an experience of collectivisation that lasted for seventy years! How can anyone be surprised that this very brief experience, which was conducted for the first time in history in Russia and China, did not immediately find its stable form, and temporarily failed? This was an assault against a millennia-long taboo; everything had to be invented from scratch without any pre-existing model to go on.11
The challenge faced by communists in forging a new society is unique in history: humanity must take history into its own hands, rather than leave it to the blind chance of necessity. To expect full success with every attempt would be foolish. Also foolish would be to join the chorus of the bourgeoisie in condemning every attempt at such a project. To even mimic the tone of these critics is not acceptable. Regardless of how much we are dedicated to the communist ideal in our hearts, joining this chorus only fuels our own doubt and prepares our eventual surrender. Following Trotsky’s example, we must be critical of and see the need for radical changes within our projects, but always while defending the validity of these projects against those who would stomp them out.
