On Actually Existing Socialism

The Left's Will to Powerlessness

At Facebook, my friend Joe Amato asked me what I thought of Roge Karma’s recent article in The Atlantic, “America’s Class Politics Have Turned Upside Down.” The argument, in brief, is that the highly educated and highly paid strata of American society are now neglecting their “immediate material interests” because they favor the Democrats’ eagerness to fund social spending, even on the scale of Scandinavian social democracy, by taxing the rich in the name of equality and environmental integrity.

Meanwhile the proles have aligned themselves with the billionaires over on the Republican side who want to dismantle government altogether—or, if not the whole enchilada as per crackpot capitalists like Peter Thiel, then the regulatory apparatus that goes by the name of an administrative, a welfare, or a “deep” state. This apparently new alignment of electoral forces suggests an axis of class conflict that, to Karma, makes no sense in Marxist terms.

My comment in response to Joe’s query went like this (again, with corrections and additions where necessary):

Brilliant piece, but I love it mainly because it turns Thomas Frank's inane argument, in What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004), on its head, in much the same manner as Marx was said to have done to Hegel. The author might as well have come right out and accused highly educated, high-earning Democrats of succumbing to the dreaded disease of “false consciousness,” as Frank did, covertly at least, when he accused the benighted proles of Kansas of being similarly hoodwinked by Republicans. But then the question would become, where are the hidden persuaders who have convinced the wealthy, the well-educated, and the guilt-ridden to betray their own class interests?

That said, here's what this "class analysis" misses or obscures.

(1) "Immediate material interest" is what defines or animates interest groups. Class consciousness comprehends more than this, because, (a) in the case of the capitalist class, it requires neglect of the short-term bottom line (profits) in favor of the larger system's long-term needs, e.g., for social stability and political consensus provided by a safety net (a "welfare state"), without which profit-seeking becomes impossible; (b) in the case of the working class, it requires invocation of what Marx called the “historical and moral element” in the determination of wages on the job and time off from the job—that is, the demand to be treated as something other or more than an economic "factor of production," a cost to be reduced in the name of higher profit by whatever mechanical or managerial means necessary.

In any case, class as a sociological category is inert and thus meaningless until it is brought to life as an ideological claim—as Adam Przeworski insists, class is the product of struggle, not its presupposition. If one’s relation to the means of production defines one’s class standing, and if that relation can’t be known by anyone, whether participant or observer, except as articulated in words and deeds, then class is not even a sociological datum until it is expressed and/or enacted.

(2) The historic function of the two-party system in the US has been to blunt class conflict and party competition as it might be reduced to economic issues, mainly by appeal to religious, ethnocentric, and cultural issues. the most salient of which have been gathered under the heading of race. The political science literature on this function is vast, having started out as the "pluralist" analysis of American politics at Yale when Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom presided, then as it evolved into the "new institutionalism" typified by Walter Dean Burnham, Stephen Skowronek, Karen Orren, et al., or the “new political history” personified by Paul Kleppner, J. M. Kousser, Alan Bogue, et al.

“Critical realignments” are part of the big picture here, which produce radical discontinuities between the party systems. For example, the third two-party system, ca. 1854-1896, pitted Democrats vs. Republicans, having replaced, almost overnight, the system in which Jacksonian Democrats faced off against Whigs, ca. 1828-1853. During the life of that third system, both parties evolved into political organizations their “founders” would have found unrecognizable, partly because the sectional configurations shifted profoundly as the Republican Party was driven out of the South, partly because industrialization created new classes (a proletariat and a new, post-proprietary middle class).

In sum, I'd say the author mistakes a truly vulgar Marxist analysis for a reasonably (historically) informed Marxist kind. The latter would understand, for example, the lingering effects of the South's status as a backward colonial appendage of the industrial North, which recapitulates the ugly itinerary of the global North and South (see: dependency theory and/or world systems, in which the “core” exploits the “periphery” to the point of underdevelopment), or the relation of Western to Eastern Europe in the early modern period (see: the Second Serfdom east of the Elbe, ca. 1550-1861).

P.S. The fact is, a majority of working class people support Bernie's "economic" program, which means tax the rich to sustain Social Security AND to spend on health care, education, and jobs through infrastructure building and industrial (indicative) planning.. More than that: social democracy is the preference of the overwhelming majority of people, regardless of their class position (sociological classification) or allegiance (actual political behavior). Every poll on programmatic choices, exit and otherwise, demonstrates this point conclusively, no matter what organization sponsors the the polling.

P.P.S. "As presidential candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are neck and neck in polls. But if the race were solely about their policies, Harris would win handily. That’s because voters — whether they know it or not — overwhelmingly prefer the vice president’s agenda to the former president’s." Catherine Rampel & Youyou Zhou, Washington Post 10/22/2024.

P.P.P.S. Socialism, or social democracy, is not the exclusive property of "the" working class. Like capitalism, it's a cross-class construction. So of course certain strata of the bourgeoisie will be on the side of socialism, aligned against capitalism.

II

The Left’s will to powerlessness has never seemed so urgent as recently, when the Democratic nominee offers a genuinely social democratic alternative to the man who would be king by way of authoritarian rule or outright fascist dictatorship.

It is rational, I admit, for the comrades to treat Trump as a stupid, exhausted, quite possibly demented old man whose rhetoric gets more hysterical every day. But it is irrational, I believe, for them to assume that when he talks about a “radical left” in power, he’s speaking only for himself; or that when his respectable, Ivy-trained supporters like Tom Cotton or Josh Hawley write books about a left-wing conspiracy against American families, faith, and military strength, they’re just making shit up; or that when the accomplished lawyer who leads the “election integrity” army animated by the Big Lie says she joined the fight to save her country from the Left, she’s indulging in some kind of sado-masochistic fantasy.

It’s irrational because since the 1960s, the Left has, in fact, been winning the “war of position”—the contest for control of “common sense,” of the ideas that inform everyday beliefs and behaviors, which Antonio Gramsci posited as the essence of post-Leninist revolution. To be sure, the New Deal coalition disintegrated in the 1980s, under the hammers of a bipartisan neoliberal regime, and by 2000, the labor movement almost expired. Meanwhile, however, the Trilateral Commission’s dire predictions of unbound democracy, which it made in its infamous Report of 1976, came true—since the 1970s, the unthinkable became normal as, for example, the concept of human rights and the demand of equality before the law made “women’s liberation” and even gay marriage (hello?) seem commonsensical rather than revolutionary. (On the “war of position,” how the Left has won, etc., see my previous posts on these topics here at Substack, and at Jacobin in 2014. See also the book wherein I pursue the argument before the cataclysms of the 21st century overtook us: The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century [2009].)

To emphasize the point I’m trying to make here, let me quote myself from the last post, to the effect that the Left’s power and authority need not appear to the Right in the form of a vanguard worker’s party “on the verge of a revolutionary breakthrough.” The Left’s impending or actual triumph can be felt as a gradual, implacable, evolutionary development that has finally reached an intolerable limit—that, at least, is the way MAGA Nation sees it.

The failure of liberalism and the encroachment of socialism do not have to be embodied in street fights and a militant proletariat—they can be, and can be perceived as, gradual processes that are nonetheless symptoms of civilizational decline or demise, which must, then, be addressed by extreme measures. That is where we are today: MAGA means it when its spokesmen and women invoke a "radical left" and the specter of communism. Unlike the comrades, they recognize social democracy when they see it, and respond accordingly—also realistically—as if it's a mortal threat to their way of life.

Here is where the redoubtable Ezra Klein comes in. His New York Times column of November 3, on the coalitions and stakes of this election, speaks directly to what I’m trying to say about the Left’s will to powerlessness. My italics throughout.

“The Trumpist coalition isn’t conservative at all. It’s counterrevolutionary. It believes a leftist revolution has corrupted American institutions, and a counterrevolution — which may even require violence—is necessary. I think a lot about something that Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which oversaw Project 2025, told Steve Bannon’s ‘War Room’: ‘We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.’

“In 2024, Pew polled Democrats and Republicans on their views of various government agencies. The net favorability gap between Democrats and Republicans on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was a stunning 92 points; on the Environmental Protection Agency, it was 80 points; on the Department of Education, it was 73 points. Fine, all those are liberal-coded agencies. But it keeps going: a 62-point gap for the F.B.I., a 60-point difference on the Department of Transportation; a 37-point gap on the Department of Homeland Security. In all of these cases — yes, even the Department of Homeland Security — it was Democrats reporting far more favorable feelings.

“It wasn’t always this way. In 1970, Democrats and Republicans were nearly equally likely to trust the media (74 percent and 68 percent). Now 54 percent of Democrats trust the media but only 12 percent of Republicans do. Republicans are turning against institutions they had more trust in until recently. In 2019, 54 percent of Republicans, but only 23 percent of Democrats, said big corporations had a positive impact on American life. By 2022, that had fallen to 26 percent of Republicans, and risen ever so slightly to 25 percent of Democrats.”

Here Klein pauses to cite Karma’s Atlantic essay, and reminds us that the Democratic Party has moved left, and decisively, since 2010:

“You might assume that this realignment [which has made Democrats the defenders of existing institutions] would push Democrats, at least, toward a less progressive economic agenda. But that’s not the case: Democrats are well to the left of where they were in the Clinton or Obama years, even as their coalition is more affluent now. This reflects richer Americans adopting more liberal views as they assimilate into the Democratic coalition.”

And now the piece de resistance, the curious, telling moment where even the estimable Ezra misses the boat, and the point:

“But here, too, we see a feedback loop emerging. A survey by the Center for Working Class Politics and YouGov tested a number of messages among working- class Pennsylvanians and found that none performed worse, for Democrats, than focusing on the threat Trump poses to democracy. At least in that survey, those voters wanted to hear how Harris would curb the power of billionaires, not how she’d protect the integrity of a government they mistrust.”

How to curb the power of billionaires? That is the question the working class citizens of MAGA Nation want answered. The liberals and leftists who are the base of the Democratic Party have been asking the same question for a generation. As it turns out, after the Great Recession, the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Bernie Sanders’s campaigns, and then Donald Trump’s ill-gotten electoral gains, these three constituencies have come up with the same answer—social democracy.

If only the Left would admit it.