Socialism 101
Page 20
During the 1990s in the United States and elsewhere conservatism was on the rise. Although there was no McCarthyite witch hunt, as in the 1950s, voters generally preferred conservative candidates and rejected any suggestion of liberalism. This was helped by the fact that Reagan used his acting skills to present conservative thought with a cheerful facade. Even events such as the invasion and overthrow of the leftist government of Grenada in 1983 and the secret US support for anti-leftist guerrillas in Nicaragua in the mid to late 1980s did little to blunt the positive spin Reagan was able to put on the battle against socialist ideas. This was helped by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, an event that occurred in the administration of Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, but one for which he was largely given credit.
Socialist Movements in Europe
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Despite the lack of interest in socialism in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, it remained a popular political strain in European politics. Socialist parties were still significant forces in the parliaments of France and elsewhere. At the same time ultra-conservative movements also arose, often in response to non-European immigration. These included the skinheads in the UK and the National Front in France led by Jean-Marie Le Pen.
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The result of all this was that socialist ideas in the United States in the last decade of the twentieth century seemed to have died away. The New Left collapsed in the 1970s, and very little organized socialist activity remained.
SOCIALISTS AND THE GREEN MOVEMENT
A New Deal
The fundamental idea behind Green socialism is that our industrial system, and the ideas about our place in the natural world that accompany it, are rapidly destroying the planet. The endless spiral of new needs and wants has led to demands for greater quantities of material goods and comforts. The political systems of the West, socialist and nonsocialist alike, have worked to expand production capacity. Traditionally, the socialist debate focused on how to distribute the products of industrial society more equitably. Green socialists have moved the debate to the amount and quality of what is being consumed and the kind of workday needed to produce it.
Green socialist thought rests on the work of political philosopher Herbert Marcuse and other social theorists of the Frankfurt School. Marcuse questioned the Marxist idea of homo faber: the concept that humans are primarily working beings who create themselves through their labor. He argued that true freedom is realized through the instinctual forces of eros, or passion, and playful activity. Work requires the renunciation of instinctual pleasure. Alienated from eros by the discipline of work, the majority of the working classes have come to believe that freedom means having more and better consumer goods. While the elevation of work over eros was necessary in times of economic scarcity, Marcuse claimed this should no longer be a problem in highly developed societies. Society’s challenge is to use technology to provide basic goods and services in a way that would allow everyone to bridge the gap between work and meaningful play.
Green socialists analyze the economic and political roots of the environmental crisis in terms of Marcuse’s critique of homo faber, mass culture, and consumerism. Their proposed solutions take two basic forms: an “eco-state” that would play a major role in protecting the environment, and a loose federation of self-governing and largely self-sufficient communes.
Marx and Freud
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German-born political philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) used Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis to critique Marxism. His most important works, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964), were influential in the leftist student movements of the 1960s in both Europe and the United States.
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RUDOLF BAHRO
Green philosopher and activist Rudolf Bahro (1935–1997) wrote one of the most powerful ecological critiques of Marxism in The Alternative in Eastern Europe (1977). He pointed out that Marx assumed that socialism would be a classless industrial society but an industrial society nonetheless. Instead, Bahro argued that humanity needed “not only to transform its relations of production, but must also fundamentally transform the entire character of its mode of production.” Consumption is an inherent part of capitalism, which creates unnecessary and wasteful commodities at the expense of needs in its pursuit of profit. In order to reduce consumption, and industry’s damage to the environment, it is necessary to transform society.
Bahro suggested a “communist alternative” to state socialism that he described as Green anarcho-communism. In addition to changing the “relations of production,” socialists needed to change humanity’s relationship with the environment, creating a new economy geared toward producing no more than is needed for subsistence. In addition to reducing damage to the environment, scaling down needs would allow a massive reduction in the number of hours spent working.
Bahro and the Communist Party
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Rudolf Bahro joined the East Germany Communist Party at seventeen. He withdrew his membership following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. As a result of The Alternative in Eastern Europe, he was imprisoned for two years and then deported to West Germany. He was a founding member of the West German Green Party, from which he subsequently resigned.
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Because small-scale technology could not satisfy the needs of large urban populations, people should create federations of communes that could produce 90 percent of what they need, deal on a national level for another 9 percent, and for the last 1 percent deal with a world market.
ANDRÉ GORZ
André Gorz (1923–2007) argued that most people are stifled within the world of work. Most jobs are both boring and enslaving. Technological innovation and automation created a situation in which there is increasingly less work for people, but capitalism did not provide a framework for allowing people to work less. Consequently, the unemployed do not have the resources to enjoy a decent life, and the employed do not have the time. Gorz proposed a combination of lower consumption, a reduced workweek, and a guaranteed minimum income that would allow people to pursue independent activities, including socially useful pursuits that would benefit others.
Gorz drew a distinction between environmentalism and what he called ecologism. Environmentalism limits itself to a call for renewable sources of energy, recycling, and preservation. Ecologism demands an end to the fetishism of commodities and consumption.
SOCIALISM AND THE FUTURE
What Will It Bring?
For many Americans, their most dramatic exposure to socialism came during the 2016 presidential election. Senator Bernie Sanders, an avowed democratic socialist, ran a widely popular campaign for the Democratic Party nomination. Although unsuccessful, he made millions of people aware of, and in many cases accepting of, the concepts of democratic socialism.
FEEL THE BERN!
Bernie Sanders (1941–), although representing Vermont, was born in Brooklyn. As a young man he was involved in the civil rights movement, which had a significant political impact on him. He later moved to Vermont, where he ran several unsuccessful campaigns for political office before being elected mayor of the city of Burlington in 1981. He was later elected to the House of Representatives and then, in 2005, to the US Senate.
Sanders is an independent, although he caucuses with the Democratic Party. He argues for largely following the Scandinavian model of socialism, including universal healthcare and education, and for substantially increasing taxes on large corporations and wealthy individuals. He is also a strong advocate for campaign finance reform.
During the Great Recession of 2008–2010 Sanders was one of the voices calling for the breakup of the large banks and investment firms that traded in unstable securities. He supports raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and has also spoken on behalf of bills that would make joining unions easier.
In 2019 Sanders announced that he would again campaign for the Democratic nomination for pre
sident. Although his campaign in 2016 was unsuccessful, he made clear that an openly democratic socialist can garner a great deal of support.
SOCIALISTS ELECTED
Bernie Sanders is not the only American socialist to hold political office in the early twenty-first century. In 2013 Kshama Sawant won a seat on the Seattle City Council. Sawant is a member of Socialist Alternative, a socialist organization with Trotskyist origins.
Sawant ran on a program advocating a minimum wage of $15 an hour (something that was passed into law by the City Council and took effect in 2015), rent control, and higher taxes on local corporations, such as Boeing, Microsoft, and Amazon. Unlike Bernie Sanders, she rejected working through the Democratic Party and has maintained her independence from it.
Anna Louise Strong
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Another Seattle socialist, albeit from an earlier time, was Anna Louise Strong, a reporter and social activist who served on the Seattle School Board in 1916. Strong later reported on the newly formed Soviet Union and other events from around the globe.
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DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS OF AMERICA
By far the largest socialist organization in America today is the Democratic Socialists of America. It was formed through a series of splits and mergers. In the 1970s a group split off from the Socialist Party of America, which it felt had moved too far to the right, and formed the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. In 1982 it merged with the New American Movement, a group with roots in the Old Left, to form the Democratic Socialists of America.
As of the end of 2018 the DSA has more than fifty thousand members (the last socialist organization in the United States to claim such numbers was the Communist Party in the 1930s, which had more than 100,000 members). A number of its members have been elected to office, including a member of the Virginia House of Delegates and two women to the US House of Representatives: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib.
Michael Harrington
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Among the DSA’s earliest leaders was Michael Harrington (1928–1989). Harrington, a longtime member of the Socialist Party, was the author of The Other America, a study of poverty in the United States published in 1962. The book shocked many since the issue of poverty, not only in areas of the rural south but in the larger cities of the north, had been largely ignored up to that time.
ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (1989–)
Ocasio-Cortez has become one of the most prominent voices of socialism in the United States today—partly by virtue of the number of attacks launched against her by conservative commentators. Born in the Bronx in New York, she graduated from Boston University and worked a number of jobs to support herself and her mother. She was a volunteer for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign and traveled around the United States talking to people about the problems they face. When elected to Congress, she was the youngest person ever to hold the position of Representative.
Positions
Ocasio-Cortez is best known for her advocacy of Medicare for All, an attempt to massively expand healthcare in the United States, and the Green New Deal. This is a series of measures, spread out over ten years, that aims to make the US more energy efficient and to cut carbon emissions in an effort to fight global warming.
The face of socialism has changed many times over the years. In people such as Ocasio-Cortez, it seems to have found a new face for the twenty-first century.
Socialist Surge in Chicago
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In the 2019 elections for city council in Chicago, six democratic socialists were elected as aldermen. All were supported by the DSA.
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Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) published one of the earliest visions of a new society, one that inspired many future socialist thinkers. His book Utopia envisioned a society in which everyone worked on equal terms in a series of agrarian communities. All property was shared in common, and no type of work was held to be better than another.
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The Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries expanded the production of goods. However, it also concentrated the industrial working class in unhealthy urban slums, where they suffered from disease and malnutrition. It was not until late in the nineteenth century that the urban poor, often led by socialist agitators, began to win significant concessions from capitalist entrepreneurs.
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German philosopher Karl Marx (1818–1883), together with his colleague and friend Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), created modern scientific socialism (called “scientific” to distinguish it from the previous “utopian” socialism of other writers—Marx argued that his socialism was based on the inevitable movement of economic forces, not moral objections to capitalism). In 1848 Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto, a blast of their ideas intended to mobilize the industrial working class of Europe. Marx spent much of the rest of his life in London, where he wrote his masterpiece, Capital.
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Worker and peasant uprisings swept Europe in 1848. The idealism of the young revolutionaries can be seen in Eugène Delacroix’s masterpiece, Liberty Leading the People. Although they were defeated, they showed the growing power of the urban working class, which inspired socialist thinkers like Marx and Engels.
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In 1871, in the wake of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, soldiers and workers erected barricades in the streets of Paris and fought pitched battles against the National Guard for control of the city. For a brief time they formed a socialist commune in which the people ruled and the wealthy lost their privileges. Although they were eventually defeated with much bloodshed, the Paris Commune was regarded by socialists as a significant example of the power of a revolutionary uprising.
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Crafty and secretive, Joseph Stalin (1878–1953) took power in the Soviet Union after defeating his chief rival, Leon Trotsky (1879–1940). While in power, Stalin enforced collectivization of agriculture, causing a massive famine, and constructed a totalitarian state. However, he also led the Soviet people to victory in World War II.
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Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) led the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The revolution unseated the Russian Provisional Government, which had taken the reins of power after the collapse of the Tsarist regime in February 1917 but had been unable to fulfill the people’s demands for peace, land, and bread. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were prepared to address these issues.
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Mao Zedong (1893–1976), depicted here leading workers and peasants, became the leader and dictator of China after defeating Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975) in a civil war lasting from 1945 to 1949. He imposed various socialist measures, many of which improved the lives of China’s working class. However, some were disastrous, such as the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to force rural China to create its own industrial base. The program set back agricultural progress for many years and brought no discernable benefits to the peasantry.
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In the period leading up to World War II, socialist organizations suffered a series of defeats, the most tragic of which was in Germany. The rise of fascism, an extreme and oppressive form of nationalism, meant that socialist groups such as the German Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party came under attack, and most of their members were imprisoned in concentration camps.
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Today in many countries, particularly in Scandinavia, socialist forms of healthcare, from dentistry to eyecare to general care, are widespread. In such countries the costs of healthcare are covered by taxation; visits to the doctor do not require co-pays or fees.
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American Eugene V. Debs (1855
–1926) became a socialist in the 1890s while imprisoned for union activity. He was a passionate speaker, and as a socialist he sharply opposed US involvement in World War I. As a result of a June 1918 speech in Canton, Ohio (seen here), he was arrested and charged with advocating the overthrow of the government.
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Although support for socialist ideas waned sharply during the 1950s as a result of the US witch hunt for “subversives” led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, it saw a revival in the 1960s. This was partly due to the civil rights movement and growing opposition among young people to the American government’s role in the Vietnam War (seen here). As a result, in organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society, support for socialism in many different forms became widespread.
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In recent years there has been a resurgence of socialism in the United States. Bernie Sanders, an openly democratic socialist candidate, vied for the 2016 and 2018 Democratic presidential nominations. Socialists have been elected to city councils around the country and to Congress. And the Democratic Socialists of America, active within the Democratic Party, has an announced membership of more than 50,000.