Liberalism’s Crisis, Socialism’s Promise [annotated]

New York magazine contributor Jonathan Chait recently published a series of articles attacking the new generation of “Marxists” — as epitomized by Jacobin — for absolving “Lenin, Stalin and Mao” of their crimes.

Chait seems to assume that all socialists are Marxists and that all Marxists are of one cloth. He contends that “Marxist governments trample on individual rights because Marxist theory does not care about individual rights. Marxism is a theory of class justice.”

Chat was previously a senior editor at The New Republic (NR) and an assistant editor of The American Prospect. The NR has long been a fount of center right and Zionist propaganda. He writes a periodic column in the Los Angeles Times. Chait is in no hurry to see the country move to the (real) left. The status quo is fine by him and his ilk.

Chait blames the contemporary revival of socialism for refusing liberalism’s gifts and for supporting speech restrictions on college campuses, including efforts to shut down Trump rallies.

The title of Chait’s opening salvo, “Reminder: Liberalism is Working and Marxism Has Always Failed,” reflects his obliviousness to the forty-year crisis of New Deal liberalism and its replacement by a neoliberal regime of economic deregulation, privatization, attacks on union rights, and upwardly redistributive tax cuts.

Chait worries that the increasing attraction of young people to socialism and the Sanders campaign will push them down the slippery slope to [authoritarian communism].

But millennials’ newfound interest in socialism results not from dewy-eyed visions of five-year plans. Rather, they recognize that “the triumph of capitalism” has left them a world of contingent, low-wage labor, burdensome student debt, and insecure futures. [Not to mention constant brutal imperial wars “of choice” against weaker and literally helpless nations, and a perilous slide toward nuclear Armageddon.—editors]

This is an important and interesting article, hence our republishing here, but we are afraid the author is often much closer to mainstream liberals’ views (and J. Chait, whom he rightly criticizes) than authentic socialism. This is observed in his repeated attempts to distance his position from those who accept—contextually—the contribution that the USSR, Maoist China, Cuba, Marxist-Leninists, and Stalinism made to the struggle of humanity to advance beyond exploitative forms of social organization, in a context of nonstop attacks by the capitalist powers which left few choices to these nations’ leaders. A similar—also frequently denied context—can be observed these days among faux leftists in their snotty treatment of Iran, North Korea, and other “pariah states” regarded as “beyond the pale” in mainstream ideological circles, and consequently routinely demonized. While Schwartz is not part of that lynching mob, he is often oblivious to his own contradictions. He declares, for example,

“Chait fails to recognize that neither the Marxist nor the capitalist tradition developed a peaceful and humane path to equitable economic development in pre-industrial societies…”

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He is right, of course, but only half so, in a statement that hides and ignores almost as much as it reveals. For one thing, as he knows quite well, the establishment of social equality is an extremely difficult process that can apparently only occur in the context of social revolution. In this often turbulent context, as martyred Salvador Allende demonstrated, even when scrupulously playing by the bourgeois rulebook the social egalitarian forces will not accomplish their goal without a dirty and often violent struggle with the propertied classes and their foreign sponsors, for whom inequality is the source of social, political and economic privilege. In other words, democracy —such as it is—will be quickly and unceremoniously tossed by the wayside by the ruling elites when no longer able to justify and defend the bourgeois state and its attendant profound iniquities. Indeed, the Marxist position does not intrinsically presuppose nor advocate violence to accomplish its program; it will be happy to observe bourgeois formal democracy’s majority rule, make its gains in peace, often at a glacial pace, and within the context normally understood as “democratic” in much of the West. But precisely the opposite obtains among the bourgeois elites. Proper democracy—a distribution of power in which the ordinary citizen’s needs are prioritized— signifies the end of their scandalously small minority undemocratic rule and they will simply not abide it. They will fight, they will sabotage, they will bribe, they will change the playbook in mid-game, they will make war, and they will do anything and everything in their power—no matter how rotten— to resist legal change. Hasn’t history been abundantly clear about that? If so, why claim, then, that both sides enter the process of social change on a morally level playing field?

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A disrespect for and negation of  scrupulous historical context is what distinguishes “democratic socialists”, many varieties of Trotskyism and faux leftists in general, from more muscular and honest forms of socialism. Democratic socialists—who misguidedly feel the need to label themselves “democratic” —end up denying that true socialism is inherently democratic; and in practice they are not much better than your run of the mill left-liberal. This is regrettable but to be expected in the current polluted political culture of “the West” where intellectual myopia, laziness, and cowardice are as common as personal opportunism.

A more balanced analysis of society and a realization of the enormous difficulties of building socialism quickly shows that even a flawed but honest socialism is far more democratic in process and outcomes than anything bourgeois democracy can offer.  The multitude of left critics of socialism as it really happened so far, measure socialist behavior and accomplishments through the lens and yardsticks used by capitalist ideologues, which is as obtuse and self-injuring a way of going about it as you can possibly find. Unsurprisingly then, “Democratic socialists” (along with their longstanding collaborationist cousins the social democrats), in their desire to gain respect and perhaps a margin of safety in the wider culture controlled by the system, soon fall into the trap of borrowing from the insidious terminology of capitalist apologists in their own pronouncements.  Their writing is thereby often sprinkled with barely concealed anti-communist insults. Socialist leaders become merely “bosses”, “rulers”, “dictators”, or “strongmen”, with no claim to legitimacy or popular mandate.  Even the great Chomsky, for whom we have tremendous respect, is guilty of this liberaloid form of anti-left leftism, which is unfortunate indeed. On their lips, “hard-core” left governments, or anti-imperialist governments (the case of Assad and Gaddafi are two recent examples)—besieged and under vicious assault by the West and its countless tentacles—are described dismissively as “regimes.” Who would want to defend a “regime”? Displaying a fairly amazing degree of historical naiveté, they are neurotically impatient with the inevitable imperfections and requirements of revolutionary processes, which at times must employ anti-counter-revolutionary violence. Their descriptions are often indistinguishable in all key points from those we commonly find on the lips of the system’s main  propagandists, the sworn enemies of social revolution. Scott Pelley, Charlie Rose and Wolf Blitzer would be at home reading such tracts. With socialists like these what hope can we entertain that the fog of political idiocy will ever lift or that socialism will ever prevail? —PG  

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]hait conjures up images of young Marxists embracing the gulag. In reality, most Sanders enthusiasts support a return to the very New Deal liberalism that Chait claims to treasure. They don’t want “free stuff.” They want a progressive tax system that would expand public goods and decrease individual vulnerability to the market.

REMEMBER: ALL CAPTIONS, SIDEBARS AND PULL QUOTES BY TGP EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS

These “liberal” gains occur only when a strong socialist left forces moderate political elites to expand social rights. But in a globalized economy, this can only happen once the Left rebuilds the power of labor over capital on an international scale.

Achieving that requires new forms of political organization and strategy. This is why young organizers and intellectuals are drawn to socialist ideas and outlets.

Let’s Read Marx Marx’s Way, Not Chait’s

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]ut what of Chait’s charge that Marxists are hostile to political and civil liberties? To be sure, the state ideologies of Marxist-Leninist regimes dismissed political and civil liberties as mere “bourgeois rights.” But democratic socialist activists and dissident communists unwaveringly defended these rights, both as goods by their own virtues, and as necessary to working-class political organization.

Marx did hold in On the Jewish Question that the absence of social and economic democracy made civil and political rights less valuable and that civil rights under capitalism often prioritized property rights over individual rights. “Freedom of speech,” in Marx’s account, is much more valuable to the corporate owners of the mass media than to the poor. The value of one person, one voice, one vote is eroded when financial resources are convertible into political power.

But Marx also warned in The Eighteenth Brumaire and The Civil War in France that authoritarian regimes that eliminated basic political and civil liberties were a threat to freedom. His 1875 pamphlet Critique of the Gotha Program attacked Ferdinand Lassalle’s leadership of the United Workers Party of Germany (the Social Democratic Party’s forerunner) because he backed the authoritarian Bismarck regime.

Lassalle pointed to Bismarck’s social insurance schemes (including national health insurance) that benefited workers. Marx held that the workers’ movement should never embrace a government that took away its political rights to organize freely.

The Communist Manifesto itself ends with a clarion call for workers to overthrow aristocratic regimes and then win the “battle for democracy” by fighting for communism.

Fulfilling Liberal Values

[dropcap]D[/dropcap]emocratic socialists believe that capitalist democracy is too capitalist to be fully democratic. In fighting to extend democracy into the economic sphere, socialists aim to go beyond liberal democracy while fulfilling its aims: the flowering of human individuality and the ability of all to have an equal voice in governing the institutions that affect daily life.

These goals can only be achieved if society provides institutional guarantees to political and civil rights and to those goods necessary to develop human potential (things like health care, housing, education, child and elder care).

Socialists extend the liberal concept of democratic self-determination by fighting to extend democracy in the workplace and to achieve social control over what we produce and how we produce it and allocate the social surplus created.

Chait, who seems to have read little of Marx, let alone twentieth-century Marxist thought, conflates everything from left social democracy to libertarian anarcho-communism with Stalinism.

Orthodox Marxist-Leninists did build on Marx’s sometimes reductionist view of politics as solely class conflict to argue that, in a classless society, the question of how to organize a society would be purely administrative and technocratic. But almost all socialists today believe that political and social conflict would continue under socialism, albeit in more humane forms than under capitalism.

Democratic debate and deliberation, rather than a single omniscient party, would determine how society organizes things like caregiving, housing, cultural life, and transportation.

A principled pacifist, Jaurés has been variously described as a social democrat or a French Fabianist.

Nor is Chait aware of a long “liberal socialist” tradition that can be traced back to the pre–World War I French socialist leader Jean Jaurès and the Italian antifascist author of Liberal Socialism, Carlo Rosselli. Both held that only a democratic socialist society can produce the most noble goal of liberalism: the ability of each human being to freely develop their capability.

In a 1977 Dissent essay, “Socialism and Liberalism: Articles of Conciliation?,” Irving Howe argued that liberals who understand that corporations are undemocratic, hierarchically governed institutions (rather than organizations created by a series of “free contracts”) often embrace democratic socialism.

Socialists critique the dominant Lockeian romantic conception that each of us own our own land, tools, and labor and can determine our destiny through individual effort. They point out that liberal values can only be achieved if corporate property rights are excised from the liberal canon.

And contemporary antiracist, socialist feminists would argue that only a society with democratized gender roles and true equality before the law can achieve liberalism’s professed aims.

Does Marxism Lead to the Gulag?

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]hait demonstrates his ignorance of Marx’s work when he equates Marx’s vision of communism with the authoritarian communism of the former Soviet Union and Maoist China.

Marx in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts held that communism was only possible after the full development of capitalism. He predicted that if communists forced agrarian, feudal societies (like Russia and China) to industrialize, it would turn the state into “the universal capitalist” that exploits the population as the “universal working class.”

What Marx could not have foreseen was that it would be easier to overthrow landed oligarchies (particularly when the oligarchs could not protect the peasantry from foreign invasion) than to transition from capitalist democracy to socialism (though, at times, in the 1970s and 1980s such a shift seemed possible in Chile, France, and Sweden).

Chait fails to recognize that neither the Marxist nor the capitalist tradition developed a peaceful and humane path to equitable economic development in pre-industrial societies. The horrors of “primitive accumulation” (slavery, genocide against indigenous peoples) in the capitalist world do not seem to bother Chait.

Capitalism Versus Democracy

Chait is also silent about the failure of liberalism to achieve its aim of equal rights for all. He does not recognize how capitalism, racism, and patriarchy preclude the equal moral worth of persons that is the moral foundation for liberalism itself.

This is why socialists are active in struggles to end voter suppression, police brutality, and mass incarceration and to defend and expand reproductive services.

Chait celebrates Obama’s “egalitarian social reforms . . . higher taxes on the rich, lower taxes on the poor, and significant new income transfers to poor and working-class Americans through health-care reform and other measures.”

But these measures are tepid in nature, as compared to the more robust (though also flawed and exclusionary) social welfare reforms enacted in the 1930s and 1960s when a more powerful left and labor movement put some backbone into liberalism.

The Right Is the Main Threat to Freedom

[dropcap]C[/dropcap]hait also blames Marxism (and Jacobin readers!) for the alleged suppression of speech on campus, especially for the tactic of shutting down Trump rallies. But socialists hold diverse views as to whether and how to regulate speech on campus.

Chait evinces little concern that many students from historically underrepresented groups do not feel recognized as full and legitimate members of their campus communities. Nor does he recognize that sexual harassment and sexual violence remain major threats on college campuses.

Only militant student protests transformed the composition of the college student body and faculty in the 1960s. And conservatives  — and some liberals — criticized those protests for being “illiberal.”

Perhaps Chait recognizes the need to oppose speech that incites people to racist or homophobic acts. But he reserves his ire not for an anti-liberal nativist movement supporting an explicitly racist, anti-immigrant, and Islamophobic candidate, but for those who protest the politics of hate.

Many liberal democracies ban racist or hate speech. One can oppose such bans (as do I), but when speech veers into repressive action (such as racist violence against others), then force must be repelled by force. The failure of the German state during the Weimar Republic to stop fascist violence against peaceful gatherings of democratic citizens undoubtedly contributed to the Nazi rise to power.

Straw-man arguments all too often substitute for nuanced analysis. Apparently we’ve been reduced to stating the obvious: reading Marx does not inexorably lead one to worship Stalin. Most socialists are committed to a political project built around fulfilling the promise of liberalism — liberty, equality, and solidarity — that capitalism precludes. And that’s why we oppose liberalism of the Jonathan Chait variety.

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