The Current Relevance of an Old Debate
JASON SCHULMAN
I’m posting this essay in response to some of the comments from Bhaskar’s “Beyond Good and Evil” post. First, I will fess up and say that my arguments are largely derived from the book Revolutionary Strategy by the British Marxist and academic lawyer Mike Macnair. I don’t claim to be offering anything particularly original here. Furthermore, what I write may not seem to have direct relevance for socialists in the U.S., where we lack even a labor party run by right-wing “Third Way” neoliberals. But since the hundred-plus year old debate in the original Social Democratic Party of Germany — between the “revisionist” Eduard Bernstein, the “centrist” Karl Kautsky, and the “left radical” Rosa Luxemburg — came up in discussion, I thought I’d weigh in.
The dominant tendency on the Left for the last century has its roots in the right wing of the socialist movement, of which Eduard Bernstein was the official theoretician. This tendency, as Bernstein suggested, has participated in cross-class coalition “left” governments as a means of achieving reform. However, the parties of official Social Democracy are largely now as committed to free market dogmas as the parties of the Right. They are not so much “social democratic” as “social liberal.” It makes no sense to think of the UK’s Tony Blair, Germany’s Gerhard Schröeder, Italy’s Romano Prodi or or France’s Laurent Fabius as social democrats.To the left of the social liberals are parties, often with roots in the old official Communist movement, which are either “real,” Cold War-era style social democrats (like Die Linke, in Germany) or which claim to be anti-capitalist and want more than reform (like Rifondazione Comunista in Italy).
Such parties are confronted with a rather old question whenever they become sizable: should they participate in coalition governments controlled by social-liberals – people with “Third Way” politics – in order to keep out the open parties of the Right?
By and large – perhaps out of the desire to bring marginal advantages to the exploited and oppressed — this is what they have done. They have been sucked into the role of junior partners to the social-liberals in administering the capitalist regime, and thereby undermined their claim to offer an alternative to the neoliberal consensus. The Brazilian Workers Party was originally a radical, “social movement” party; it is now a social-liberal party of coalition government, participating as a minority. Rifondazione joined Prodi’s Unione coalition government, with disastrous results. Die Linke is in a social-liberal regional government in Berlin. And we are seeing the same thing happen again in Iceland, with the Left Greens joining with the social-liberal Social Democratic Alliance in government as a minority partner.
So, this essentially Bernsteinian strategy is a dead end as a means of achieving significant reform, let alone anti-capitalist revolution. It is a “get rich quick scheme” that never pays off.
On the other side is the revolutionary Left, mostly Trotskyist. (Anarchist, too, but anarchist organizations usually have an ephemeral existence and I won’t be analyzing them.) Like the semi-syndicalist wing of the Second (Socialist) International – which Rosa Luxemburg partially represented – Trotskyists imagine that partial, trade union, etc. struggles can be led into a generalized “mass strike” challenge to the capitalist state, and in the course of that challenge they can guide the movement to the seizure of power in the form of “all power to the soviets” – in spite of their marginal numbers before the crisis breaks out.
Taken together with the autocratic centralism of most Trotskyist organizations and their secretive, hide-behind-a-front-group tactics, this policy amounts almost exactly to the policy of Mikhail Bakunin and the Bakuninist anarchists in 1870-73. It has had almost as little success as the Bakuninists’ projects. Before 1991, the Trotskyists could more or less plausibly account for this failure by the dominance in the global workers’ movement of the USSR bureaucracy and hence of official Communism. Since 1991, official Communism’s global political collapse has left the Trotskyists without this excuse. Without the Soviet Union and official Communism to its right, Trostkyism has proved to be politically rudderless.
To say this is not to reject in principle mass strikes or one-day general strikes or even insurrectionary general strikes. The point is that these tactics, which may be appropriate under various conditions, do not amount to a strategy for socialist revolution. And for those Trotskyists who have rejected the mass-strike strategy, “revolution” reduces to the need for the “Leninist party”: that is, to a version of the false conclusions about the need for quasi-military centralism that the early Communist International drew from the belief that Europe was about to enter into generalized civil war.
So, like the coalitionist social democrats, Trotskyists think they can get rich quick, without engaging in the long hard slog involved in building a mass party and associated organizations (cooperatives of various sorts, workers’ educational institutions, workers’ media, etc.). They effectively think they can con the working class into taking power (this is what “transitional demands” amount to), even if they don’t realize that this is what they are trying to do.
This is where the Kautskyan “strategy of patience” comes in, where the workers’ party/movement builds up its forces over the long term to the point at which it is finally able to take power with majority support. The party refuses get-rich-quick coalitionist schemes as well “mass strike” fantasies. It instead fights, as the early SPD did, for an opposition that will openly express the independent interests of the working class. Without beginning with the struggle for an opposition, there is no chance of confronting in the future the problem of an alternative governing authority to that of the capitalists.
In parliamentary regimes, which are now a common form across most of the globe, the capitalists rule immediately through the idea that the point of elections is to give legitimacy to a government that heads up the existing, bureaucratic, coercive state – and electing representatives to the parliament or other representative bodies is only a way of choosing a government. This fetishism of government forces the formation of parties and coalitions in which the capitalists’ immediate paid agents have a veto over policy, and creates the corrupt duopoly/monopoly of the professional politicians.
Within this political regime – with its corruption, its statism, its dependence on the financial markets, etc. – to govern is to serve capital, regardless of the government’s desires; and, therefore, to create a coalition that aims to pose as an alternative government within this political regime is also to serve capital. To fight for an opposition is to insist that socialists will not take responsibility for government without commitment to fundamental change in the political regime. This means establishing a regime in which — in addition to the political liberties partially provided by liberal constitutionalism (freedom of speech, assembly, association, movement, etc) and an extension of these liberties, there is:
- universal military training and service, democratic political and trade union rights within the military, and the right to keep and bear arms;
- election and recallability of all public officials; public officials to be on an average skilled workers’ wage;
- abolition of official secrecy laws and of private rights of copyright and confidentiality;
- self-government in the localities: i.e., the removal of powers of central government control and patronage and abolition of judicial review of the decisions of elected bodies;
- abolition of constitutional guarantees of the rights of private property and freedom of trade.
This, by the way, is where the SPD “center” fell down. The Kautskyans fostered the illusion that the Left could simply take hold of and using the existing state. They allowed the idea of the democratic republic – which Marx and Engels saw as the immediate alternative to the capitalist state – to be turned into a synonym for the liberal constitutional state. The national horizons of their strategy helped support the feeding of the working class into World War I.
I firmly believe that this is still a live political issue today. The large majority of the existing Left uses nationalist arguments and seeks to take hold of and use the existing capitalist state machinery. But since the first impulse of the post-WWII social-democratic settlement began to fade, the electoral cycle has repeatedly produced weaker reformist governments that end in disillusionment, the temporary rise of the far right and the victory of ever more right-wing center-right governments.
But the Kautskyans were right on a fundamental point. Socialists can only take power when we have won majority support for working class rule through extreme democracy. There are no short cuts, whether by coalitionism or by the mass strike. The present task of socialists in liberal democracies is therefore not to fight for an alternative government. It is to fight to build an alternative opposition: one which commits itself unambiguously to self-emancipation of the working class through extreme democracy, as opposed to all the state-loyalist parties — social-liberal, social-democratic, or outright capitalist.
This is how and why the Kautskyan strategic perspective is relevant today. The anti-capitalist Left needs a strategy of patience, like Kautsky’s: but one that is internationalist and radical-democratic, not one that accepts the existing order of capitalist nation-states.
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Great post. One question, do you agree that the collapse of social democracy and the rightward shift of the labor parties in Europe had more to do with objective conditions in the world— the stage of capitalist development that we were in, than a betrayal or loss of ideology by Social Democratic leaders?
Where there any really left-wing alternatives to try to confront capital flight, stagnation and inflation at the time that were shot down in favor of neoliberal dogma?
I’m not convinced that Kautsky offers any kind of useful guide to political strategy today. As far as I’ve been able to tell, it wasn’t even useful in his day. It wasn’t even the strategy actually employed by the party, which was thoroughly revisionist. In these times, do we really expect political conditions to ever reach the point where Die Linke or any of the other new left parties in Europe will be able to lead a government fundamentally oriented toward replacing capitalism? This condition never even obtained after the end of WWI and the fall of most of Europe’s monarchies. There are obviously dangers in participating in coalition governments, but I don’t think staying out of government forever is a viable option either – they’ll wind up in government eventually if they want to maintain and build support.
Also, I’d dispute the notion that the mainstream social democratic parties didn’t achieve significant reform of capitalism. To me, the historical record of the western and northern European social democratic parties shows that they indeed accomplished much make life much better for most people than under a regime of unfettered capitalism. And there have been social democratic-oriented regimes in certain countries in the global south that have done much to improve quality of life even under a basically neoliberal global regime.
I’ll address other points when I get back home, but here’s an interview:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,624880,00.html
Die Linke’s adopted programme aims to “overcome capitalism”
What would help novices like me would be if the author and others could explain who would translate to today’s Kautsky, Bernstein, or Luxemburg. Not as equivalent leaders, but political orientations.
Thanks.
Chris,
The SPD was NOT “thoroughly revisionist” until it started participating in coalition governments — regionally and then nationally — with bourgeois parties.
Also, the Scandinavian social democratic parties, for most of their histories, governed ALONE, not in coalition with bourgeois parties. This is one reason why they were able to accomplish more than other soc-dem parties which joined coalition governments (the post-WWII SPD, for example, or the thoroughly corrupt Italian PSI).
The greatest failure of Scandinavian social democracy was not simply that its parties weren’t committed to an internationalist strategy for overcoming capitalism — even the Meidner Plan was a plan for “socialism in one country,” which doomed it from inception — but that it did not attempt to bring greater democracy to the existing (capitalist) state. They never attempted to implement any of the “bullet points” I outline above. They accepted “liberal democracy” as it was. A radical-democratic program by the Swedish SAP would have involved, for example, getting rid of the SAPO (the secret police), which was always dominated by rightists.
Let me make it clear what I am advocating: the “classical Marxist” perspective of building up the working class’s independent organization until it can challenge for power. The early SPD’s “strategy of patience” was not a purely electoral strategy but one of building up the mass *organized* workers’ movement – the party, trade unions, cooperatives, sport and social clubs, etc.
It is important to understand that reformism proper – the Bernsteinian perspective of cross-class coalition in pursuit of reform – is OVER. Loyalty to the capitalist nation-state has so hollowed out the old mass unions and soc-dem parties in Europe and elsewhere that they no longer perform the basic tasks for the working class that they used to perform: promoting class solidarity and, at a low level, class-political consciousness. The problem the radical left now confronts in the continued mass votes for these parties is not reformism proper, but a lesser-evilism of the sort that led workers to vote Liberal in 19th century Britain (and, by and large, Democrat in the US).
Tasks which formerly were performed (in a deformed way) by the moderate left (and Stalinists) now fall on the radical left. It is our global job – no one else will do it – to rebuild the basic idea of solidarity: to rebuild the unions, cooperatives and so on at the level of the rank and file. It is our job – no one else will do it – to expose the corrupt, class character of the “media-advertising complex” and of the legal system and legal profession, so that widening layers of workers begin to understand that these are enemy organizations. It is our job to promote understanding of the common experiences and interests of the working class internationally and to promote basic international workers’ solidarity.
Broadly speaking, these are “Kautskyan” tasks. They are not unrealistic; they are not voluntarist. To be voluntarist is to do as most Trotskyists do; even when revolutionary crisis is not on the immediate agenda, build a “democratic centralist” Leninist/Trotskyist group prepared to take power, in spite of the clear basis of Trotsky’s Transitional Programme in the belief in the near-immediate “death agony of capitalism” and the manifest failure of Trotskyist groups in the revolutionary crises which have happened in several countries since 1938.
And to Bhaskar: any left strategy which has purely national horizons is a strategy which will fail. Keynesian social democracy died because it was always nationalist. As the soc-dem parties remain nationalist they continue to move rightwards, slowly or quickly.
To David: there are no exact political equivalents, but I’ll try.
For Bernstein: his class-coalitionist policy (that of the right wing of the 2nd International) has been, since 1945, the policy of most social democrats and official Communists alike. (Even the Scandinavians never officially ruled out coalition governments with liberal bourgeois parties.) The substantive difference between these policies (before “Eurocommunism” and then the fall of the USSR) was that Communists proposed for each country a socialist-bourgeois liberal coalition that would commit to geopolitical alignment with the Soviet bloc.
For Luxemburg: her “spontaneist” mistakes are magnified by today’s collectivist anarchists and advocates of “direct action” and “movementism.” The Hegelian-Marxists (News & Letters) come close to Rosa’s position. All these folks play down the need to build “permanent” mass workers’ organizations, as opposed to ad hoc organizations of mass struggle like strike committees.
Kautsky: there was no Kautskyism per se — certainly no “left Kautskyism” of the sort I’m endorsing — after WWI. The very early Communist International was “left Kautskyan” in a sense before it became “Bolshevized.” After WWII, though the Communist parties were coalitionist in their political aspirations, their attachment to the USSR meant that the soc-dem and left-bourgeois parties generally refused to enter “left coalitions” with them. The result was that the CPs were forced in practice to act as (less democratic) Kautskyan parties. In doing so, they could promote a sort of class-political consciousness and a sort of internationalism, and this could provide a considerable strengthening of the workers’ movement. This was the one good thing about them.
If we were to remain pure and uncompromising while waiting for “the movement” to slowly grow to the point where it is unstoppable, how would that affect our participation in the struggles for health care reform, immigration and labor reform, environmental justice, gay rights or any of the other immediate questions really-existing movements have to worry about?
Since classical (pre-1914) German Social Democracy did not result the revolutionary transformation its supporters envisioned, the Marxian mind automatically demands an autopsy of the failed movement in order to determine the cause of death, i.e. the wrong historical outcome.
But I think it would be a mistake to read the history of the pre-war SPD as a cautionary tale, or a syllabus of theoretical and political errors that overdetermined its downfall. Especially when there are so many lessons we could learn from its many accomplishments: its rapid growth, its success at the polls, its contributions to feminism, the extent to which it greatly if incompletely democratized a very authoritarian society, and the remarkable way it became a flagship for an authentic world-wide movement.
I think Kautsky had a lot to do with the success of the SPD, not because his 1891 program was practically applied (it often wasn’t) and not because it would “work” as a formula for revolution (it wouldn’t) but because he synthesized and popularized some basic radical ideas in a way that excited millions of workers in Germany and beyond.
Political theory can be useful in describing the trends and tendencies it observes, but it really only interests me because it tells the intellectual history of the movements I admire (i.e., what people “back then” were talking and singing and dreaming about) not because it provides practicable prescriptions for change — it usually doesn’t, it’s agitprop, like political poetry.
I totally reject and exclude the possibility that some alternative theoretical orientation would’ve actually prepared the German, European or world-wide left for making a “real” revolution in the 1910s. And I totally reject the possibility that such a transformation might happen in 2009 or anytime soon.
An interesting and well thought through post. We will link your site on Socialism or Barbarism. Kautsky’s earlier stuff remains necessary reading for those living in the imperialist core. However, his position on Russia was craven capitulation to the imperialists. He was a renegade as Lenin put it.
We are in total agreement on the need to avoid coalitions and to gradually build up mass support. Those who argue that a mass revolutionary party could sit for years as a minority on the sidelines of power do not understand the nature of the capitalist state. Of necessity, they would be forced to crackdown opening plenty of opportunities for revolution as they could not long-term live with the threat posed. Unfortunately, the current post-eurocommunist left has largely adopted the social reformist skin shed by the social liberals. As such, they represent no real threat either.
More important as you clearly state is the need to transcend borders. It is imperative that european marxists committed to achieving communism come together.
A few years ago some were raising the possibility of a pan-EU party of revolution – that needs to be revisited. We need to ditch the diatribes of the past against each other and build a common project. Unite all who can be united.
If Libertas can do it – why not the revolutionary left? We don’t have the money but we have the people. If we don’t move soon and the social liberals (as you accurately term them) and post-communist social reformists remain the only left of note, the ultra-right will make a comeback.
If anybody here is interested, I’ve completed a theoretical pamphlet (still yet to be published) on a similar strategy, independent of CPGB comrade Mike Macnair’s work. My current programmatic work-in-progress has, as its most recent section, commentary on the “media-advertising complex.”
I agree with basically everything Adrian says in response to Jason’s argument. And I’d also add that one of the reasons why the SAP in Sweden was so successful in gaining power is precisely because they were not Kautskyist in their strategy. The dominant currents within the party were always openly revisionist, and they gained ideological dominance at least partially because they successfully coopted many popular liberal and nationalist themes and were not afraid to enter into coalitions and compromise when necessary. If they had followed the SPD’s lead, they probably would never had the opportunity to exercise the kind of power that they did. And why are we looking to early 20th century SPD strategy as any kind of guide in 21st century America? I can understand the notion of building up oppositional institutions, and that’s obviously very necessary, but Kautsky’s broader perspective failed on its own terms in its own time. Why should we look toward it now, other than out of academic concerns?
Obviously, we’re not going to be able to just imitate what the Swedes did either, and social democratic power there is not what it used to be (though they have done a pretty remarkable job of defending and maintaining social democracy in a neoliberal world). I have no idea what the best left strategy in the 21st century is. But I have a feeling that looking toward Kautsky is not going to be very fruitful.
Perhaps there is a bit of what Freud called the “disorder of melancholia” — an obsession on the past that clouds our judgment of the present and future.
That being said the main point you’re missing Chris is that the SPD was following Bernstein’s line, not Kautsky’s. Furthermore time has shown many of Bernstein’s illusions about the nature of the capitalist state to be false.
Social Democracy for all its success left the levers of control in capitalist hands, it was an ideology that had its share of successes and failures, but it was made for the golden age of capitalism. Full employment isn’t even sought theoretically by the neo-Keynesians nowadays. If the goal of a socialist party is to actually overcome capitalism and not just pretend to overcome capitalism and instead indemnify its rule–the points in Jason’s article are interesting points to grapple with.
Of course we aren’t in France organizing the NPA, in Germany in Die Linke, we don’t even have a Labour Party like they do in Britain, we’re in the United States and we all know the reality of organizing here. Maybe objective factors will change in the future, but I’m not holding my breath.
The social democratic movement for all its successes did blow some big opportunities in the 20th century. Once the fruits of shared prosperity weren’t large enough the neoliberal revolution reasserted class rule and destroyed the welfare state, with support from large segments of the electorate. Labor became too costly, state expenditure too high, the system stagnated and the neoliberal revolution got things moving again.
If somehow we had seen something similar to the Meidner Plan implemented across Europe or any other genuinely socialist, internationalist efforts to assert worker ownership and development of the South, everything would have been different even if these plans kept heavy market mechanisms in place.
Social democracy across Europe devolved into a type of corporatism that had a mixed record of success and failures. It was firmly a part of the capitalist order and the establish and the people of Algeria and Vietnam can testify to the nationalistic tendencies of portions of the left during this “golden era”.
Social democracy was better than anything that came before it, but it certainly wasn’t socialism in my understanding.
Adrian asks “If we were to remain pure and uncompromising while waiting for ‘the movement’ to slowly grow to the point where it is unstoppable, how would that affect our participation in the struggles for health care reform, immigration and labor reform, environmental justice, gay rights or any of the other immediate questions really-existing movements have to worry about?”
I assume that ‘our” means DSA/YDS. Perhaps Cde. Prados has noticed that DSA/YDS is a small organization which does not even define itself as a party, and therefore cannot govern and does not plan to do so. In that sense we are already building an OPPOSITIONAL movement (which, yes, includes supporting leftists for office) which fights for reforms WITHOUT GOVERNING (i.e., without executive power). I simply wish we did more in pressing for our goals, both near and far, in terms of building working class power, not just achieving reforms because the reforms are good in and of themselves.
Adrian “totally reject[s] the possibility that such a transformation might happen in 2009 or anytime soon.” Did Adrian miss my saying that the strategy I lined out was one of PATIENCE? I am explicitly rejecting “get rich quick schemes” for the left based on immediate governmental plans or insurrectionary fantasias.
I thank SoB for their attention to this conversation.
To Chris: why all this Kautsky stuff? Well, I am trying to answer this question: what do socialists do when socialism is on the historical agenda, but revolutionary crisis is not on the immediate agenda? My answer is: build up the organized workers’ movement, as far as possible on the basis of open defense of a principled socialist program, i.e. one based on working class rule as opposed to “people’s fronts” and class-coalitionism, democratic republicanism as opposed to the capitalist state (and, dare one say it, the labor bureaucracy), and workers’ internationalism as opposed to all forms of nationalism.
I am not mechanically transplanting Kautskyism into the 21st century; I’m merely recognizing the partial strengths of Kautsky’s early politics as against the coalitionists of the 2nd International right (today’s Social Democrats and Stalinists) and as against the Hegelian-Marxist semi-syndicalists of the 2nd International left (much of today’s far left, albeit in very dilute untheorized “common sense” forms). They were the official politics of MASS parties in Germany and (to a lesser extent, in size) Austria. Given the political capitulation of global social democracy and the impotence of the Trotskyist and anarchist far left, might not looking at what made the old 2nd International “center” as successful as it was as a mass anti-capitalist workers’ movement be worthwhile?
I think that everyone is in agreement on the need to build up some sort of oppositional movement that stands outside the official political system (it would be spectacular if the labor movement wasn’t completely in the pocket of the Democrats, for example). But it seems to me like this argument is a recipe for maintaining some sort of sense of ideological and strategic purity that shuns many of the forms of important coalition work that DSA has engaged in over the years. I also don’t think the kind of workerist language and perspective used to frame this sort of argument is very useful either. Aren’t feminism and other movements based on oppression not based (or at least exclusively based) on class “class-coalitionist” in some inherent sense? Isn’t anti-war activity inherently “class-coalitionist?” Aren’t we going to have to organize across class lines around a number of issues in order to make any sort of reform under capitalism, much less move in the direction of socialism (unless one’s idea of “working class” is so broad to eviscerate the concept of a working class itself)? I don’t think I’m nit picking here. I think the perspective that Jason advances is too narrow, and too wedded to the orthodoxy of the past.
This argument is making us all talk like Trotskyists, and that’s kind of frightening.
1) Who is the working class?
The “working class” is the whole social class dependent on the wage fund, including employed and unemployed, unwaged female ‘homemakers,’ youth and pensioners. It does not just mean employed workers, still less “productive” workers or workers in heavy industry. This class has the potential to lead society forward beyond capitalism because it is separated from the means of production and hence forced to cooperate and organize to defend its interests. This cooperation foreshadows the free cooperative appropriation of the means of production: socialism. Within the U.S., the working class is over 60% of the population (see Michael Zweig’s writings).
2) Aren’t nonelectoral progressive movements “class-coalitionist”?
Not in the sense that I’ve been talking about. When I am talking about coalitionism I am talking about coalitionism *in government.* The Social Democrat/Christian Democrat coalitions in (West) Germany, for example.
But within the independent feminist, LGBT, African-American, etc. organizations, we should be fighting the dominance of the professional-managerial strata and dependence on corporate sponsors; i.e. we should be seeking working-class hegemony (hello, Gramsci) within the organizations.
Example: the most prominent LGBT rights group in the U.S. is the Human Rights Campaign. It is very white, very upper class, and very dependent on corporate cash: http://www.hrc.org/about_us/sponsors.asp
Unsurprisingly, HRC (uncritically) supports all sorts of capitalist politicians – even Rudy Guiliani – provided those politicians are “good” on narrowly-defined LGBT issues.
Those of us who demand that the needs of working class queers be prioritized within the movement are not going to easily “coalesce” with HRC. Most of the time we are going to be fighting their influence.
I actually don’t disagree with most of the points Jason is making, I just think that, as he himself makes clear in the first paragraph of his post, his general scope is a bit ambitious for our times.
As far as my question “If we were to remain pure and uncompromising …?” goes, that was a good-faith question that has real implications for how, say, a minor party in Europe would act if its deputies would make or break a government by joining or abstaining from a parliamentary coalition.
Barring unforeseen developments, I don’t think any of the new left parties in Europe would have any chance of governing any country alone, in the medium and even long term. Because of that, they are all going to be faced with the question of whether or not they will serve in coalition governments with the traditional social democratic parties, and a couple of them have already done so or are planning on doing so in upcoming elections. To maintain their socialist cred, they’d have to stay out of government, but to maintain and grow their support, they’d likely have to demonstrate the capability of actually participating in government. They’ll all likely wind up doing the latter, unless they are content with never appealing to more than a relatively small group of committed leftists.
To Chris and Adrian — all I can say is “look at the evidence.” Participating in coalitions with “neoliberalized” soc-dem parties (and even ruling class parties) has been BAD for the smaller left parties. The Swedish Left Party, the New Zealand Alliance, and the Italian Refounded Communists have lost deputies and members. The PT in Brazil, no longer small, is now so far from its founding principles that we see things like the Mensalão scandal occur. I expect a similar outcome in Iceland with the Soc-Dem Alliance/Left Green government — right-wing economic policies implemented by a “left” neoliberal government supported by a smaller socialist party, leading ultimately to defeat at the polls, putting the Right back in power and leaving the socialist party in a worse state than it started out with prior to entering the coalition government. Time will tell…
As far as this discussion, what separates us from most of the Trotskyist movement is that we aren’t printing something that resembles a high-school newspaper and aspiring for it to be the impetus for a world revolution
On the contrary, if we are serious about socialism, it’s natural to discuss what kind of tactics may work, as opposed to rehashing the ones that failed in the past.
All of us are active in organizing, so we have a firm grip on the reality around us. I have no idea how groups like the French NPA can move forward as an oppositional entity. I would imagine by getting an even larger student base and through gaining a foothold in the organized labor movement (replacing the faltering PCF and PS). Right now they are polling at around 10 percent. If any of these parties ever manage to come into power no matter how unlikely and launch a major transformative program, it would be a huge boon for the international left.
This discussion is premature of course, but since a lot of the international left is confused about what happened in, let’s say, Italy, and how the left can ameliorate itself, it’s a discussion that’s worth having.
One point where people might disagree with me is I believe it’s important, if not now, then down the line for the movement to have a coherent set of ideas for a post-capitalist future, not just a vague call for “transcending capitalism.” People are rightly skeptical after the historic failures of state-socialism.
(Also, I’m softer on Lula and the “neoliberal” left in the developing world than I have a feeling Jason is.)
I think Jason Schulman’s argument is interesting but neglects some issues pertinent to the “revisionist” debate. I am aware that Kautsky came to see himself as the “center” against the Bernstein Right and the Rosa Luxemburg Left. What this neglected, however, was how the gradual growth of the SPD — and the 2nd International social-democratic parties more generally — as part and parcel of the growth and social strength of the working class movement, as integral to the growth of capital, contributed to and was actually fundamental for the crisis of “imperialism” that exploded in WWI, something that Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky and others were keenly aware of. As Trotsky put it in his 1906 pamphlet Results on Prospects, on the social-historical situation for the Russian Revolution of 1905, the (international, global) prerequisites of socialism not only develop non-synchronously, but also come to work against each other as they develop:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/rp-index.htm
Please let me reference a very good short article on the history of the SPD by Luxemburg’s biographer and liberal (non-Marxist) political scientist J. P. Nettl, “The German SPD as Political Model:”
http://platypus1917.home.comcast.net/~platypus1917/nettljp_spd.pdf
Best,
Chris
In terms of reviews of the book:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/debating-kautskys-legacy-t103122/index.html (Thread combining two web articles by Permanent Revolution)
http://thecommune.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/revolutionary-strategy/