Jacobin founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara recently published his first book, The Socialist Manifesto.
He’s trying to do a lot with the book. But here’s the main goal as I see it. Sunkara wants to distinguish between social democracy and socialism. He draws this distinction primarily in terms of the political methods people use in their pursuit. And he argues that the best political vision for our times is one that helps us move from the former to the latter. He does this via a historical project, covering everything from the feudalist roots of capitalism to German and Swedish social democracy to the Soviet Union and China to the history of leftism in the United States. Again, quite a project.
I’ll lay out some of Sunkara’s key arguments in The Socialist Manifesto. And I’ll offer some agreement and criticism along the way.
What is Socialism?
Sunkara’s not trying to offer the definition of socialism in The Socialist Manifesto. Rather, he approaches from a few angles. One angle is moral. He writes that “at its core, to be a socialist is to assert the moral worth of every person, no matter who they are, where they’re from, or what they did.”
Who would’ve known the Backstreet Boys summed up the moral story of socialism?
For my part, I’ll mostly set aside the morality of socialism. It’s pedagogically helpful, but I don’t find it of much philosophical use. It’s probably most helpful when introducing people to issues like immigration where the current system brazenly denies the moral worth of members of certain groups. Of note here is that many leftists are immigrants or the children of immigrants, which I’ve pointed out before. Sunkara himself is a child of immigrants.
Social Democracy and Socialism
A big part of The Socialist Manifesto is drawing the distinction between social democracy and socialism. And the big idea is that we (i.e., the socialist left) need to push liberals and liberalism from the one to the other. But in our political system we use ‘socialist’ and, say, ‘progressive’ more or less the same way. Bernie Sanders, for example, uses both terms. What’s the difference?
Here’s a thought experiment Sunkara presents. Suppose we begin from our current society in the US. We move gradually to a social democratic system that provides for the basic needs and welfare of our residents. There are still bosses, and they still own key economic resources. But the pay’s much better than it is now, and no one has to worry about having care when sick, lacking a place to live, et al. You quit or get fired? No worries. The state pays for any education you need, and it offers generous benefits while you’re out of work.
Life isn’t so bad under that system, right? It’s basically the Sandersista Trinity in action, with some extras.
But there’s still a socialist turn ahead. People are excited by this society, and they’re building class power. Many jobs still suck. And working-class people press for more. We move to a quasi-socialist state where workers collectively manage their workplaces but maintain markets for the distribution of goods, services, et al. Could we push for even more than that? Maybe. There’s a raging debate on the left as to whether we should. For an overview of this, I’d recommend reading the discussion between Robin Hahnel and Erik Olin Wright in Alternatives to Capitalism.
System Distinction
There are a couple of ways we might distinguish between social democracy and socialism. The first is in terms of how they work as systems. In social democracy, key resources like workplaces and the tools of work remain under private ownership. But a strong state runs a deep system of social welfare that provides for people’s basic needs. This includes health care, housing, food and water, and so on.
In a social democratic world, we’d see things like single-payer health insurance or state-provided healthcare, a high minimum wage, public housing and food programs, and generous benefits for people out of work. We’d have a tax system that hits high wealth and high income pretty hard.
In a socialist world, the public owns and manages key economic resources from the workplace to natural resources to (perhaps) the distribution of goods and services. A socialist system might be democratic or non-democratic, though almost all socialists agree it should be democratic in some form. It might be very centralized with a strong central government. Or it might be very decentralized with many workers’ collectives operating on their own. Or something in between. And it’d likely be something between those extremes that balances the interests of workers, consumers, and community residents.
A Difficulty
One tricky aspect of all this is that social democratic states tend to own large parts of the economy. Take Sweden. Even now, the state owns about 24% of national wealth. The figure is even higher in nations like Norway that combine social democracy with state-owned natural resources. So, why wasn’t Sweden socialist, since the state owned so much?
I think issues like this drive a lot of people to the methodological distinction below. Perhaps this includes Sunkara in The Socialist Manifesto. But I don’t find it too troubling. While the Swedish state owned a lot, the state tends to focus on things like the distribution of certain essential goods and services, and perhaps issues of finance and credit. When it comes to value generation, as in the value that capital captures as surplus-value, private ownership was still much the norm even in Sweden.
But, admittedly, the system distinction isn’t rigid. Social democracies can, and do, move into public ownership.
Methodological Distinction
There’s a second way to draw the distinction, and this is the one Sunkara prefers. We might distinguish between social democracy and socialism methodologically.
Social democracy is based in harmony between different classes and class interests. Basically, it’s an attempt to set an ongoing foundation for capitalism where people’s needs are met. And debate is funneled through electoral politics. In The Socialist Manifesto, this is the difference between Sweden and, say, Rosa Luxemburg. The Swedish social democrats still wanted a socialist system, at least for awhile. They even tried to implement it via the Meidner Plan. But, in the end, they gave up socialism and even retreated from some of their social democratic ideas.
In the big picture, the story is much the same with the German Social Democrats or the British Labour Party. Social democracy transforms the key leftist institutions (e.g., unions, labor parties) into bread-and-butter groups that trade ownership for security.
Socialism, by contrast, is grounded in mass, class politics and the interests of working-class people. There’s no desire to maintain harmony within the capitalist system. Nor is there such a reliance on process and institutions. But Sunkara is careful to integrate the moral and democratic elements here. He’s very opposed to the kinds of teleological and deterministic readings of Marx that characterized some of the poor decisions of the Soviet Union and China. In this regard, though perhaps not elsewhere, his reading of Marx is in line with that of David Harvey in his Companion to Marx’s Capital.
From Social Democracy to Socialism
A key problem is how we transition from social democracy to socialism. And this is a key problem for any socialist group that wants to use social democracy as a first step. The Democratic Socialists of America, for example, advocates this route.
Other socialists argue that social democratic programs are a tool used by the state to prevent socialism. Norman Thomas, Socialist Party candidate for president in 1932 (and five other times…), exemplified this. Thomas famously joked that FDR “did not carry out the Socialist platform, unless he carried it out on a stretcher.” While Sunkara acknowledges Thomas, he ultimately thinks social democracy emboldens workers to demand more.
I’m much more pessimistic, and I think Thomas is correct. Sunkara’s right to condemn the overall strategy of the Socialist Party in the 1930s. They clung to a narrow vision of class politics that didn’t acknowledge broader groups and immediate needs. But Thomas’s reading of electoral politics was perceptive. It’s also a lesson Frances Fox Piven teaches in the book Poor People’s Movements. Major legislation typically comes near the end of social movements, not near the beginning. And the process is hostile to both methodological socialism and a socialist system. Social democratic legislation is typically a middle ground between capital and labor, where labor gains security and capital maintains ownership.
Turning social democracy into socialism requires movement building and political education. Answering the question “how do we turn social democracy into socialism?” by saying “by building social democracy” is begging the question. In reading The Socialist Manifesto, I get the sense that Sunkara is torn between the question-begging route and the movement building and political education route. But the key challenge is figuring out how to do the projects, build the movements, and promote political education to prevent social democracy from smothering class politics.
The Socialist Manifesto, Elections, and Bernie Sanders
And so, moving from social democracy to socialism requires careful strategic planning. What does that look like?
Sunkara endorses the ‘Pink Tide‘ movement in Latin America. He even more clearly endorses Jeremy Corbyn‘s Labour Party in the UK. I think the deeper point here is that he thinks electoral wins are good first steps toward deeper working-class movement building.
In the US, he’s all-in for Bernie Sanders. He’s made this clear for some time in interviews and writings. But reading The Socialist Manifesto provides some insight as to what he sees in Sanders. Sanders clearly isn’t a socialist in the sense of advocating for a socialist system. He was in the 1970s, but not today. Sanders now pushes for the kind of social democracy that provides for a generous welfare state but falls well short of public ownership of key resources. That makes him a clear example of a social democrat who isn’t a socialist, right?
But Sunkara reads Sanders as a methodological socialist. He claims that mass, class politics and opposition to the wealthy have been core to Sanders’s vision for 40+ years. Here’s how he puts it: “…there were questions over just what he meant when he called himself a democratic socialist. The senator would invoke Eugene V. Debs and the Danish welfare state in the same breath. But far from being ‘just’ a modern social democrat, Sanders believed the path to reform was through confrontation with elites…In this way, he is more closely aligned with socialists throughout history than with the liberal reformers he’s had to ally with to pass laws. Sanders gave American socialism a lifeline by returning it to its roots: class struggle and a class base.”
Evaluation
I don’t think Sunkara’s completely wrong about this. The Sanders style and message have a consistency that’s unusual for a politician with 3+ decades in office. But I think he’s engaging in a lot of wishful thinking here. There are a few reasons for this.
One, while it’s true that Sanders often uses the language of class politics, other Democrats also do this and Sanders sometimes doesn’t. Even Democrats as far to the right as Al Gore or John Kerry use populist or class language in the context of presidential campaigns. And Sanders himself sometimes makes remarks showing an inability to articulate the reach of class politics into issues such as race.
Two, while the Sanders rhetoric is broadly consistent since the 1970s, his policies are less so. He advocated for socialist policies like public ownership of key resources, and he now doesn’t. He made the change around the time he started running for federal office. Maybe in his heart of hearts, he still believes in socialism. But I wouldn’t bet on it. We wouldn’t want to use John Kerry’s testimony on Vietnam to argue that he was anti-war in 2004. Likewise with Sanders.
Three, building a class politics movement requires a broad coalition of working-class people, tenants, and people hit by racial and gender oppression, among other forms of oppression. The 2016 Sanders base had some of these groups, particularly young people and independents. But his base wasn’t particularly working-class. Outside of young people, his base was mostly wealthier white progressives. That’s not the kind of base needed for transformative change in the US. His 2020 campaign is more promising in this regard, though. That’s worth noting.
On Sandersism
I think this is where we get to the heart of where Sunkara and I likely disagree. He sees social democracy as the natural starting point for socialism. And he sees the Sanders campaign as the natural starting point for building movements and achieving social democracy. Both of these claims seem unlikely, and they seem unlikely for the reason that movements typically precede electoral organizing rather than follow it. Most of the examples from the Latin American Pink Tide, as well as the New Deal and Great Society in the US, confirm this.
None of this means leftists in the US shouldn’t vote for Sanders. I think we should. But it does mean that we shouldn’t mistake the Sanders campaign for a primary site for activism. A Sanders victory definitely won’t deliver socialism, and it probably won’t deliver social democracy outside of one or two victories.
Getting closer to socialism requires things like forming tenants unions, organizing our workplaces, organizing unemployed and underemployed workers, fighting for immigrants, and fighting against racial and gender oppression as well as other tools of capital.
I’m not so sure Sunkara would disagree with this latter point, exactly. But I think what’s missing from The Socialist Manifesto is a prioritization of these things over and above electoral politics. And a harder, more skeptical look at politicians who want to hold power in an era where it’s unlikely they’ll achieve large wins.
The Agents of Socialist Change
One thing I found notable about Sunkara’s thought experiment on the transition from social democracy to socialism is that he thinks racial disparities and a gendered division of labor would still exist even in a quasi-socialist state. That is to say, even once we have public ownership of the workplace.
It’s certainly possible. I pointed to the possibility of this in an earlier post on the relationship between capitalism and racism. But it raises some issues, particularly about who’s making socialist change.
Sunkara doesn’t say we should set aside concerns over racism or sexism when embracing class politics. And I don’t think he wants anyone to stop worrying about those things. That said, I don’t think he sees these things as central to capitalist accumulation in the ways that, in my view, they are. Particularly in an era of financialized capitalism, capital has to look for extra ways to squeeze value from the system. And it does so in ways that aren’t directly tied to the production of value in the workplace. This creates an opening for oppression of tenants, racialized oppression, et al.
When I imagine the sort of quasi-socialist state Sunkara imagines, and when I imagine us getting there from a neoliberal society, I imagine racism and sexism as largely stamped out along the way. That is to say, I imagine we’d have to fight racism and sexism, and mostly achieve victory, during the process of getting to quasi-socialism. Robbing capital of its tools is a big step. And pursuing these routes at the same time looks to me most promising. It has the added benefit of putting together an actual majority coalition, in the way that a purely working-class coalition probably wouldn’t form a majority.
