Reading Revolution Between the Lines

Is MAGA Nation Right to Fear Socialism?

There’s a famous bit in Richard Hofstadter’s second book, The American Political Tradition (1948), where he notes that, contrary to the posthumous lore, Lincoln’s rhetoric was often as exciting as a bill of lading, mainly because he had to frame his anti-slavery policies in the cautious idiom of “preserving the union.” That bit is actually a parody of a moment in Marx’s contemporary analysis of the American Civil War, where he compares Cromwell’s biblical bombast in celebrating minor victories against the royalists to Lincoln’s precise, legalistic language as he recorded the conquest of whole states. (Hofstadter, the dean of so-called “consensus history”—the academic Left’s whipping boy—had been a member of the Communist Party US, and he knew his way around Marx.)

This is how American revolutions typically unfold, without pomp and circumstance, even without any formal announcement at all. Something like that is happening right under our noses, as we slip the yoke of a Biden campaign and change the joke on MAGA Nation.

We’re expecting to make concessions to the “mainstream” and to compromise our socialist principles if that’s what it takes to elect Kamala Harris and keep the ridiculous yet dangerous pimp-in-chief from the White House. But maybe we don’t have to. Maybe the main current in the stream of consciousness that is our America has changed course—from a broad consensus stipulating that unregulated markets are the source of freedom and progress because they’re anonymous arbiters of equal opportunity, to an implicit agreement on the assumption that markets are merely economic means to social and political ends, manageable devices we use to achieve goals that we decide on democratically.

MAGA Nation is convinced that it’s fighting off a socialist movement that calls itself the Democrat Party (not the Democratic party, because that word would give the Left a rhetorical advantage). We leftists laugh at that, because we know better—we know that The Revolution arrives with a bang, not a whimper, as a result of open ideological combat, armed struggle, and the “overthrow of the state,” all orchestrated by a class-conscious cadre of dedicated socialists that leads a vanguard party.

But what if that “revolutionary” scenario is anachronistic at best, just a consolation to the remaining Bolsheviks, the true believers, among us? What if we take the long view? What if we ask how capitalism arrived on the scene, and realize in trying to answer that the bourgeois revolutions that punctuate the decline of feudalism, ca. 1350-1750, were the capstone in the curriculum of transition? What happens once we know that it took centuries for social relations of goods production to change, that is, for wage labor to supplant serfdom, slavery, apprenticeship, and indenture; for the rights of property to be asserted, then codified, as against an absolutist state; for modern individuals to extricate themselves from the bonds of feudal, familial, patriarchal obligation; for markets, contracts, and money to become everyday realities that organized and animated normal life?

And then, what if we also realize that since the transition from proprietary to corporate capitalism, ca. 1890-1920, we’ve inhabited a hybrid mode of production that has sentenced capitalists to social death by making them superfluous creatures—Oblomovs all—in the allocation of resources, something like the landed aristocracy once it had relinquished control of agricultural production to rent-paying, enterprising commoners? Don’t take my word for it. Here’s Marx from Volume 3, Chapter 27, of Capital, on the effects of the intersection between modern credit and modern-industrial corporations:

“III. Formation of stock companies. By means of these:

“1) An enormous expansion of the scale of production and enterprises, which were impossible for individual capitals. At the same time such enterprises as were formerly carried out by governments are socialised.

“2) Capital, which rests on a socialised mode of production and presupposes a social concentration of means of production and labor-powers is here directly endowed with form of social capital . . . It is the abolition of capital as private property within the boundaries of capitalist production itself.

“3) Transformation of the actually functioning capitalist into a mere manager, an administrator of other people’s capital . . . .

“This is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within capitalist production itself, a self-destructive contradiction, which represents on its face a mere phase of transition to a new form of production. . . . It reproduces a new aristocracy of finance, a new sort of parasites in the shape of promoters, speculators, and merely nominal directors; a whole system of swindling and cheating by means of corporation juggling, stock jobbing, and stock speculation. It is private production without the control of private property.” [Kerr ed., 3: 516-17, 519]

All right, with these “what ifs” in mind, turn to the op-ed in the New York Times of August 24, 2024, by Jen Harris (no relation), a former director of international economics at the National Security Council, on the basics of Kamala Harris’s “economic vision.” [link is below] The title and the quiet, matter-of-fact tone of the piece make it sound like, well, like a bill of lading, as exciting as an invoice. But notice the core of its farewell to neoliberal trust in free markets—notice that the question here is not whether but how we reconstruct markets, not if but where to bend them to the needs and the will of the people:

“Markets are a tool, not an end unto themselves. And our government’s job is to set national aims and then shape markets to serve them. While traditional markets are fine for many, even most, things, the weight of experience over recent decades suggests they can miss some essentials—decarbonization, a stable manufacturing base, sufficient quantities of quality housing and child care—and need to be organized and supplemented by active government policy. Historically, the federal government has done just this.”

Jen Harris suggests that Kamala’s new economic vision is composed of two imperatives, “build” and “balance.” The first is embodied in the revitalization of industrial policy—a.k.a. indicative planning, or market socialism—which translates as “rebuilding America’s physical, technology and energy infrastructure, using trillions of dollars in public investment to stimulate private dollars and create good unionized jobs to boot.” [my italics]

The second imperative is personified by Lina Khan at the FTC, whose anti-trust agenda is based on the assumption that, as Jen Harris puts it, “markets, left on their own, often tend to concentrate power. As a result there are fewer options, worse service, higher prices, lower pay, less innovation and generally less control of our economic lives. It is the job of government to correct these power imbalances.” To follow this lead is to revitalize the anti-monopoly program of the Populists who turned the world upside down in the 1890s, and to recall the rhetoric of the New Deal’s Temporary National Economic Committee, which scared the bejeezus out of the plutocrats whose hatred FDR welcomed.

Taken together, it’s a plainly, wholly social democratic alternative to the Republican program of slash and burn, what the pimp-in-chief reduces to tax cuts for the rich and tariffs for the rest of us. It doesn’t sound revolutionary, but maybe that’s because a century of life under corporate capitalism has taught us that it’s time to end the reign of that “new aristocracy of finance,” and to carry out the sentence of social death it imposed on itself by becoming expendable purveyors of other people’s money.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/25/opinion/kamala-harris-economy-trade-antitrust.html