The Road Beyond Social Democracy
What would it take to go from reforms within the capitalist system to a democratic socialist society?
We face the challenge today of building the kind of socialist movement and party that will not back down in a moment of rupture with the capitalist system. (Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)
Many of us on the Left today joined because we were inspired and got organized on the basis of Bernie Sanders’s program for a “political revolution.” The essence of that program is by now very familiar, and it is the de facto program of the democratic socialist left today. It includes Medicare for All, a Green New Deal to address the climate catastrophe, new labor laws to enable a surge in union density, and more. Not only is it the de facto program of our new socialist movement — it is a program that now enjoys broad popular support.
At the risk of sounding overly optimistic in an especially difficult time, I would say that the election of a government on the basis of this program in the United States some day in the future is entirely possible. It is, at the very least, a major goal of our new socialist movement to achieve that. A government of the Left dedicated to enacting this program for a political revolution would encounter all kinds of challenges, from stiff resistance from business to a relentless attack campaign from the corporate media and harsh attacks from the political center and the Right. Nevertheless the eventual victory of such a program is not impossible to conceive. It is no more radical than programs of reform that have been fought for and realized before in many countries all over the world.
For many if not most of us in the socialist movement, that is the horizon with which we are more or less working on a daily basis. Our main question is how to build a movement that is capable of winning such reforms.
Naturally however, the longer-term questions of socialist strategy are also on our mind. And here lies the theoretically more challenging and less obvious question of whether there is a “democratic road” to socialism: a road that moves from a program of reforms very much won within the logic of the capitalist system to a program of structural changes that begin to alter the system itself.
These structural changes to the capitalist system are those that strengthen labor and expand the public sector in a way that threatens capitalist ownership at a major scale — this means, for example, the nationalization of finance and the major corporations. This more radical program also includes the expropriation of the great family fortunes — the breaking once and for all, in today’s terms, of the oligarchy and the abolition of the billionaire class. Only this kind of program can smash the immense power of a small investor class over the lives of billions of people and effect a radical democratization of society.
The challenge here is that as a socialist government and movement heads in the direction of systemic changes — to make “despotic inroads on the rights of private property,” as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto — there will come a point when further progress provokes a real showdown with capital. Systemic changes like nationalizing the major financial institutions, for example, pose an existential challenge to capital as a whole in a way that, say, Medicare for All simply does not.
Probing the Limits of Reform
That showdown may take the form of capital strikes, semilegal moves to destabilize a socialist administration, and even attempts to depose a democratically elected government by force. This has been a challenge in one form or another posed to every even somewhat ambitious government of the left — from the French Popular Front in the 1930s to Salvador Allende’s government in Chile in the ’70s and many more besides.
We do not know where precisely those limits are — where challenges to capital provoke not just resistance but a willingness on the ruling class’s part to try to bring down a democratically elected government. Finding those limits is what Ralph Miliband and Marcel Liebman had in mind in their classic essay “Beyond Social Democracy” when they said that a task of a socialist government is to “probe the limits of reform.”
The key question is what — when these limits are reached — will be the response of a socialist government? Will it retreat and equivocate, trying as the social democrats of the 1970s did to reach a modus vivendi with capital? Or will such a government go further, mobilizing popular forces to support a more radical program? And will it accept the risks inherent in a real confrontation with capital, a rupture with the way things have always been done, with all the uncertainty and dangers that come with that?
For those of us who believe that a) the limits just described do exist, and that capital will not tolerate its own abolition by gradual steps, and b) that when those limits are reached, further conflict and not retreat will be the order of the day, the question is how to prepare strategically. Preparation is especially difficult since it’s impossible to predict where the precise limits to reform exist, when they will be reached, and under what conditions.
If that is right, we face the challenge today of building the kind of movement and party that will not back down in that moment of rupture. If there is a “democratic road” to socialism, it will take a party and cadre strategically prepared to find it and take it, knowing full well the risks that it entails. To use a rough metaphor: if we don’t know details about the road we’ll be driving down, finding and preparing a vehicle for the most likely and difficult circumstances is a wise move.
Learning From Social Democracy
Here the lessons that can be drawn from the failures of the social democratic parties of the twentieth century — setting aside their many achievements — are important to consider. Miliband and Liebman’s “Beyond Social Democracy” is especially useful on this point. Miliband and Liebman summarize what I would call the two of the major errors of social democratic parties and the lessons to be drawn from them.
First, social democratic parties were marked by a pervasive equivocation — especially in the postwar period — on whether public ownership, nationalization, and expropriation were a fundamental part of the socialist project. That reluctance to challenge the ownership rights of capital eventually led these parties to redefine the meaning of socialism, from a new social order to be realized in the future to a set of values and a spirit of solidarity that could coexist with capitalism in the present.
The lesson here is relatively straightforward: parties that are ambivalent about the goal of democratizing economic power will never see the need to move toward, let alone see through, a rupture with capitalism.
Second, social democratic parties were marred by a tendency to contain the rank-and-file activities of party members and movement activists, to channel all work into the electoral arena, and ultimately to disempower the activist layer in their own parties. In doing so, they undermined the grassroots strength that carried them into government in the first place, hollowing out their movements and reducing them more and more to a small community of hyperleaders and elected officials on the one side and a mass of demobilized supporters on the other. That kind of movement will not have the grassroots muscle to generate the popular power needed to push a government of the future through serious challenges — certainly not in any transition to socialism but also not even in fights for more basic reforms.
Evaluating Our Movement
Building a movement that guards against these errors is essential to building a robust movement for democratic socialism. This idea raises two further questions.
The first question: To what extent have we really accepted the immense long-term challenges of the project we are embarking on?
For too many, socialism still means public libraries and public schools. The task of a new socialist movement is to popularize a much more ambitious conception of what we’re aiming at. We need to develop a version of socialism that is about more than solidarity and community, as important as those values are, and treats socialism as a destination, a different kind of society where public and cooperative ownership over the economy predominates. And the work toward that goal begins now, not some day in the future.
The second question: To what extent are some of the leading elements in our new socialist project too uncomfortable with being at the head of a boisterous, often unruly mass movement?
The appeal of political movements that vest almost all power in an autonomous leader or set of leaders — the kind of project developed in Spain around Podemos and around Bernie Sanders in the United States — is that political spokespeople of the Left could contest elections while keeping an often undisciplined mass activist base at arms length. But without the deliberation and the development of cadres which can only occur in mass membership organizations, these movements place limits on their own growth.
It is to the credit of the US left that we have built the Democratic Socialists of America, which for all its problems is still the seedbed from which new left-wing leaders of unions, social movements, and, potentially, the next mayor of New York develop.
Only an organized movement with hundreds of thousands of grassroots activists will be able to build the kind of mobilizations and actions that can a) keep socialist leaders fixed on the real goal of building a new society and b) create the kind of disruptive energy that will be needed in a period of rupture to overpower capital’s resistance.
All who venture into these kinds of strategic questions acknowledge the abstract, open, and necessarily inconclusive nature of these debates. That goes with the territory of speculating about events that are so far removed from our concrete tasks and challenges today. The value of these reflections is the role they play in setting the terms of debate for and expectations of our growing shared political project. And while we can’t know or predict when and where we will come up against harder limits to reform — understanding and discussing why there are limits in the first place, and what our intentions are when they do descend, is key.