Socialism: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, May 2023

I traveled to see friends in Bristol, England, in 1974. Harold Wilson’s Labor Party had been elected as a minority government for a second round of Keynesian social democracy intended to put the finishing touches on the British welfare state built from 1945 to 1951. Swaths of industry remained under state regulation and ownership. Social insurance, public housing, education, and unemployment relief had been established and expanded. An Equal Pay Act was passed in 1970. And Wilson’s government abolished the death penalty, decriminalized homosexuality, and outlawed racial discrimination. But it was no longer the “swinging sixties.” The Beatles had disbanded and the countercultural tribes were getting a dose of hard reality. The Angry Brigade’s bombing campaign in 1970-71 brought a crackdown on youth, which proved nothing compared to the society-wide clampdown instigated by the spillover of The Troubles from Northern Island to England with the IRA’s London bombing campaign. Even my liberal Bristol friends were anti-Irish. I stepped a couple of feet away from my backpack in the London Underground to examine the subway wall map, only to have my hippie ass immediately surrounded by suspicious Bobbies and plain-clothed officers.

I visited my relatives the same year in Poland deep in the Soviet Bloc; my grandmother in Gdynia with its massive Paris Commune Shipyards and my cousins in Warsaw with its famous Zeran car factory and working-class suburb Ursus. These locations were recurring flash-points in the off-again-on-again Polish rebellion against Soviet occupation.[1] The economy was state-owned and run, the society dreary. Polish Peoples’ Army and Soviet Red Army soldiers were everywhere, along with the police. In Warsaw, an additional reminder of the Soviet presence was the massive Palace of Culture and Science done up in Stalinist wedding cake style. Gomulka’s gray years as First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party had given way to a more optimistic time under Edward Gierek who tried to boost economic development and average income through foreign loans, which meant that instead of bread lines people queued up for a few basic consumer goods. All my relatives told Russian jokes. On Sundays they took me to church where, beneath cover of the Catholic mass, an overflowing crowd whispered, argued and organized against the Soviets.

I also hitchhiked through Josip Tito’s Yugoslavia and enjoyed the novelty of staying at hotels, going to restaurants and buying supplies from enterprises that were worker-owned councils operating in a market economy. The newsstands carried uncensored every Western newspaper and magazine and the country was prospering. But there was little doubt that I was in a one-party Marxist-Leninist country. When I failed to convince several Yugoslav Peoples’ Army soldiers to give me the striking red star pins on their hats I tried to take their picture. They warned me off with threatening gestures.

My most inspiring and troubling experience of socialism was Israel when I lived on a kibbutz for six months in 1974. A kibbutz is a rural commune with a mixed agricultural/industrial economy where people own all private property in common, raise their children socially and work cooperatively “from each according to ability, to each according to need.” Kibbutzim were but one of many forms of cooperative agriculture within the Histadrut, a centralized syndicalist trade union which was at the same time the owner of numerous businesses and factories. The Histadrut ran about 65% of the Jewish economy and 75% of the Jewish workforce in Palestine by 1948. Its state-building function, alongside the Hagana, spearheaded the Labor Zionist national liberation struggle that declared independence for the State of Israel in 1948. The parliamentary, multi-party Jewish state nationalized half of the Histadrut’s economy almost immediately. Israel’s Jewish socialism was one of the more self-organized, communitarian, liberatory forms of socialism I’ve known. But it was Jewish socialism nonetheless, an exclusionary “socialism for one people” that placed ethnic identity over class identity, resulting in Israel devolving into a settler-colonial apartheid state.

Now it’s a bad time for socialism.

During the 1980s, socialism advanced by one-party Marxist-Leninist regimes was based on centrally planned command economies, collectivized agriculture and industry, and nationalized property. “Real existing socialism” encompassed one-third of the world’s population (over a billion people) and close to a fourth of world’s land surface. After the collapse of the Communist bloc (1989-1991)—instigated by Reagan and the US striving to bankrupt the Soviet Union and its allied nations—there are now only five explicitly Marxist-Leninist countries remaining in the world—China, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea. North Korea further refined its state ideology into Kimilsungism–Kimjongilism which is also defined as the Juche Principle. This supposedly is a revolutionary socialism of material necessity grounded in concrete, immutable realities where “the people” have all the basic means of life. Yet in reality it is a socialism of chronic scarcity where people often don’t have even the basics to survive, where workers’ power is substituted for the power of the vanguard party and frequently the power of a dictatorial cult leader.

From 1945 until 2015, social democracy was seen as a viable socialist alternative in Western Europe and other parts of the Western world. Epitomized by the Nordic Model—Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland—it involved market-based mixed economies, private property, a strong labor movement, multi-level collective bargaining and a comprehensive welfare state administered by multi-party parliamentary democracies that mediate between capital and labor. Norway extended this with extensive state-owned enterprises and natural resources as well as state share ownership in publicly listed enterprises. This democratic socialism sometimes considers itself a moral crusade against capitalism and the profit motive and for workers’ rights and freedoms. Democracy, egalitarianism and social justice are emphasized over a specific form of socialist economy. Social democratic parties have peacefully traded governance with more conservative political parties even in the Nordic countries. Issues of national sovereignty and immigration after 2015 have caused a marked decline in their popularity.

The “hard” socialism of Marxist-Leninists regimes is attributed to their Third World context, to the oppressed and exploited peoples of color and proletarian-peasant nations of the Global South. The “soft” socialism of social democracies is not really considered socialist by “hard” socialists, but rather is of a piece of the Global North, of the First World whose nations are capitalist, imperialist and mostly white. I don’t regard either Marxist-Leninist regimes or social democracies as truly socialist, even though I’d much rather live in the latter than in the former.

I reserve the term socialism for a handful or two of historical periods and relatively short social experiments that broadly fall under the general category of “libertarian socialism.” Among them are examples that readily cross over the First/Third World-Global North/South and the “hard”/“soft” socialist categories. First is the Soviet-led government from the Russian 1917 Revolution until 1922 when opposition parties were outlawed, factions within the Bolshevik party were banned and Stalin started his rise to power. Second is the self-managed anarchist/socialist territories of the Spanish Republic during the 1936-39 civil war before Franco liquidated them. Third is the ongoing policies of indigenismo promoted by the EZLN in Chiapas, Mexico. And fourth is the ongoing system of democratic confederalism under the PYD/YPG in Rojava, Northern Syria.

Each of these examples of libertarian socialist economics—decentralized, socialized economies of collectives, cooperatives, communes, committees and councils—are coupled with democratic multi-party political systems based on parliaments, soviets or assemblies. Libertarian socialist economies have occasionally been combined with one-party vanguardist regimes—the first ten years of villagist ujamaa in Tanzania under the rule of Julius Nyerere’s TANU party, Tito’s Yugoslavia of workers’ councils—but they are no longer libertarian socialism proper.

To be clear, nations that call themselves socialist are a dime-a-dozen.[2] Some have references to socialism in their constitutions, most others are ruled by nationalist political parties that claim to operate on socialist or communist principles, but virtually none are Marxist. A fair number are one-party regimes, military juntas or personal dictatorships. And almost all have capitalist, oligarchic or corporatist economies.

There is also an implied socialism that is winning big by default.

In a world supposedly divided irreconcilably between imperialist nations and anti-imperialist nations, it is common to assume that those countries in the imperialist “camp” are reactionary whereas those countries in the anti-imperialist “camp” are progressive. This basic campism insists that the US is the center of global imperialism and therefore the primary enemy. The anti-imperialist forces arrayed against the US are on the right side of history and are, if not socialist, at least leaning Left. So campism implies that those who oppose imperialism are socialistic.

Lenin formulated the theory of imperialism, but there are no pure Leninist movements, parties or regimes any longer. All are some form of Leninist hybrid—Stalinist, Trotskyist, Maoist, Hoxhaist, Marcyist, ad nauseam. Additionally, the concept of anti-imperialism has spread far beyond its Marxist-Leninist origins. Maoist-inspired movements and parties multiplied under the rubric of anti-revisionism. With the rise of anti-colonial and national liberation struggles the Third World came into its own. But it also became the ideology of Third Worldism. And anti-imperialism has infected anarchism (Love and Rage), autonomism (German Wildcat), even democratic socialism (Democratic Socialists of America). In turn, tankies are Stalinists or campist apologists who defend the use of tanks in the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary in 1956, the Warsaw Pact’s suppression of Czechoslovakia in 1968, China’s massacre of the Tiananmen Square protestors in 1989, and the like.

So ideologies that embrace anti-imperialist campism often uphold an ersatz socialistic prognosis. They often claim that since the US is the only imperialist power in the world no other nation can be imperialist. And they often defend not just authoritarian Marxist-Leninist regimes past and present but authoritarian states in general.

Campism is truly the anti-imperialism of fools.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] 1944-47, 1956, 1968, 1970-71, 1976, 1980-81, 1982, 1988

[2] Algeria, Angola, Argentina, Bangladesh, Barbados, Bolivia, Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Mauritius, Mexico, Moldova, Mozambique, Namibia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Peru, Portugal, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tanzania, Venezuela, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Buy my books here.

The Left and Their Fetishes: “What’s Left?” April 2017, MRR #407

ONE

The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But for man the root is man himself.

Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1843

I claim to be a skeptic, an atheist, a supporter of science and rationality, yet I got my contradictions. One of these is that I collect “charms.” I pick up trinkets from places, events, actions, and people that start out as souvenirs but eventually become fetish objects. Invested memories transubstantiate into spirit power with time. I used to carry around a kind of personal medicine bundle of charms that grew larger and more uncomfortable until I realized my habit was absurd and a bit obsessive. I retired the bundle a while back, but I didn’t ever throw it away. And I usually have one or two tiny personal charms on me as I go about my day.

Segue into this month’s topic—the Left and their fetishes—as we transition from discussing the elections to leftist politics. I’m using the British possessive pronoun “their” instead of the American “its” to emphasize not only the multitude of fetishes but the plurality of American Lefts.

Broadly speaking, the Left in this country falls into democratic, Leninist, and libertarian categories. Each of these categories can then be further subdivided. The democratic Left falls into subcategories like the Democratic Party’s left wing, electoral third parties, independent liberals and progressives, non-Marxist socialists, democratic socialists, and social democrats. Similarly, the Leninist Left comes in Marxist-Leninist, Stalinist, Hoxhaist, Trotskyist, and Maoist subcategories. We can dig deeper into each of these subcategories until we drill down to the level of singular organizations.

As for the libertarian Left, what I often call the left of the Left, it too breaks down into various subcategories of left anarchism (mutualism, collectivism, syndicalism, communism) and the ultraleft (council communism and left communism). Setting aside this rudimentary deconstruction, I still think the libertarian Left possesses the potential to bring its components into dialogue with each other to theoretically transcend the overall Left’s historic limitations. Add Autonomism, neo- or post-Leninism, insurrectionism, and communization to expand the political discourse in this potent melange and I’m hoping that some grand, revolutionary synthesis on the left of the Left will emerge that cuts across all three categories of the Left—democratic, Leninist, and libertarian. By the way, these three happen to be the three overarching fetishes on the American Left.

Here, we’re not talking about fetish as an object with power, but as an idea with power, an idea embedded in social history that is also embodied in social relations and structures. It’s about a Left devoted to democracy, or a Left centered on scientific socialism, or a Left championing individual and social liberation. I passed through several political phases on my journey through the left of the Left and I entertained various narrower organizing ideas along the way—non-violence as an anarcho-pacifist, the power of the people or the power of revolt as a left anarchist, the working class as a left communist—before I distanced myself from the ultraleft due to my growing skepticism. Orthodox Leftists have their own parallel set of fetish ideas; the unions, the proletariat, the vanguard party, history, socialist struggles for national liberation, etc. The two idées fixes that dominated the Left historically have been the working class and identity nationalism, with various workers’ revolts, movements, and regimes vying with numerous ethnically/racially based national liberation struggles for preeminence.

What’s behind the fetishizing of these Leftist tropes is the notion of agency, that something will act as a unifying basis for initiating revolution, changing society, and making history. That a revolutionary proletariat or that socialist struggles for national liberation will be central to this process. In the US, this means either pursuing the illusion of working class unity or the fantasy of a rainbow coalition of identity movements to affect any such change. Never mind that class runs against ethnic/racial groupings, and that nationalism ignores class divisions, so that class struggles and national struggles invariably obstruct each other, making true cross-organizing difficult if not impossible. Both the working class and ethnic/racial identity nationalism are each fragmenting, the former under the pressure of capitalism and the latter under the influence of tribalism.

Me, I’ve always had a soft spot for the Marxist idea of the working class first becoming a “class in itself” and then a “class for itself” capable of self-activity, self-organization, and self-emancipation through world proletarian revolution. But while I think that organized labor will be an important element of any potential basis for social power, that’s a far cry from believing that a united working class will bring about social revolution. I’m not even sure that effective social power in the face of state and capital is feasible these days. I might also be naïve as hell to think that it’s possible to create a grand, revolutionary synthesis on the left of the Left. What I do know is that, even to create such a potential, we need to suspend all our cherished Leftist fetishes.
Easier said than done.

TWO

Frederick Engels wrote in the introduction to Marx’s 1895 essay “The Class Struggles in France” that, in the wake of the 1848 uprisings across Europe, “the street fight with barricades … was to a considerable extent obsolete.” In the struggle between popular insurrection and military counter-insurgency, the military almost invariably wins because “the superiority of better equipment and training, of unified leadership, of the planned employment of the military forces and of discipline makes itself felt.” “Even in the classic time of street fighting, therefore, the barricade produced more of a moral than a material effect,” according to Engels, who concluded: “Does that mean that in the future the street fight will play no further role? Certainly not. It only means that the conditions since 1848 have become far more unfavorable for civil fights, far more favorable for the military. A future street fight can therefore only be victorious when this unfavorable situation is compensated by other factors.”

One such relatively recent street fight that proved surprisingly successful were the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, the inspiring Battle of Seattle [N30]. The WTO Ministerial Conference of November 30-December 1, 1999, witnessed a fortuitous confluence of elements that temporarily prevented the conference from starting, shut down the city of Seattle, and initiated the beginning of the worldwide anti-globalization movement. The first was the sheer number of demonstrators, which was estimated at a minimum of 50,000. Second was the broad array of organizations: labor unions like the AFL-CIO, NGOs like Global Exchange, environmental groups like Greenpeace, religious groups like Jubilee 2000, and black bloc anarchists. Third was their alignment in various networks and coalitions, from the overarching green-blue teamsters-and-turtles alliance to the nonviolent Direct Action Network (DAN). The fourth significant element was the diversity of tactics employed, from old style mass marches and rallies through innocuous teach-ins, street celebrations, and more strident nonviolent direct action blockades and lockdowns of street intersections, to the minuscule black bloc rampage of 100 to 200 individuals memorialized by yours truly in my blog header picture. Finally, there was the element of surprise.

DAN activists took control of key intersections in the pre-dawn hours, before the Seattle Police Department (SPD) mobilized. By 9 am, when the marches, rallies, teach-ins, celebrations, and black bloc riot started in earnest, the nonviolent direct-action intersection lockdowns had effectively shut down the city streets. WTO delegates were unable to get from their hotels to the convention center, and the SPD were effectively cut in two, with a police cordon around the convention center isolated from the rest of the city and the SPD by the massed demonstrators. Unable even to respond to the black bloc riot, the SPD grew increasingly frustrated and eventually fired pepper spray, tear gas canisters, and stun grenades to unsuccessfully try to reopen various blocked intersections. The WTO’s opening ceremonies were cancelled, the mayor of Seattle declared a state of emergency, a curfew, and a 50-block “no-protest zone,” and the SPD took the rest of the day into the evening to clear the city streets. The next day, December 1, the governor of Washington mobilized two National Guard battalions as well as other police agencies to secure Seattle’s no-protest zone and permit the WTO to meet, despite ongoing protests and riots. In all, over 500 people were arrested on various charges.

Compare this to the protests on Inauguration Day, 2017. It can be argued that the number of protesters and the breadth of protesting organizations were even greater than in the Battle of Seattle. Organized into three distinct protesting coalitions by the Workers World Party, the ANSWER Coalition, and the anarchist/ultraleft Disrupt J20 network, the tactics employed by the protesters were perhaps not as diverse. Mass marches and rallies occurred around the capitol blocking traffic and shutting down streets. Nonviolent direct action attempted to blockade buildings and lockdown intersections, and numerous efforts were made to obstruct the checkpoints meant to screen Inauguration attendees with tickets. And the black bloc, now numbering over 500, did their usual roaming smashy-smashy. All of this was to no avail as the DC PD held the strategic high ground by controlling the city streets from the get go. The National Guard was never mobilized and the city was never shut down. Only about 200 people were arrested, with those arrested now facing harsh felony riot charges.

I did black bloc actions in San Francisco on Columbus Day, 1992, and during the 2003 Gulf War protests, where I escaped getting kettled and arrested by the SFPD. I also followed with great interest the running street battles between the black bloc and OPD during Occupy Oakland. But I’m 64 years old, and the black bloc street fighting tactic is a young person’s game. What’s more, and while frequently extremely disruptive, the cat-and-mouse of street fighting cannot be compared to any form of urban guerrilla warfare. At its best, black bloc successes are very restricted. They might give their participants a sense of elation and teach them maneuverability, teamwork, and flexibility on the fly—both physical and tactical—but they cannot overwhelm and defeat a better armed, better trained, more organized, and more disciplined police force without other favorable factors such as the element of surprise. Thus Engels was correct, and we’re not even talking about confronting the National Guard or the US Army. Nor are we considering police and military forces willing to open fire on peaceful protesters as is often the case in autocratic Third World countries. So while I have a soft spot for the black bloc, I think the tactic has limited usefulness.

Next month, I get down and dirty with my analysis of the Left’s numerous problems.