The Roots of My Lifelong Political Dysfunction

But I'm not done dysfunctioning . . .

You get brought up with a more-or-less sunny view of the world. Anything else would have verged on child abuse. Then you find out things are not so sunny. In fact, they’re downright unspeakable. A popular implication is that the solution must be as radical as the problem, that their scales should be comparable. On the heels of this logical error comes Karl Marx.

We sought Marxian explanations for the two overwhelming issues facing us: racism and the war in Vietnam. They were assigned more-or-less simple analyses. Racism results from the efforts of the capitalist class to divide and conquer the working class. Vietnam was a crime of U.S. imperialism, sometimes tied to rubber production, of all things, available from Southeast Asia. There was something to the racism thing, much less to the imperial lust for Vietnamese rubber.

The Marx urged upon revolutionaries by the preeminent revolutionary regime, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was not just any Marx. Marxism-Leninism, with offshoots into Mao Tse-Tung, Leon Trotsky, and/or Fidel Castro, was at war with so-called “Revisionism.” Especially in youthful social circles, the militant sorts of Marxisms became promoted in cliques, mindsets enforced by intellectual bullying, if not physical bullying. I was part of it.

In a word, what can only be called extremism became de rigueur. This tended to be founded on two misconceptions that were drawn out of Marx and Engels and became tenets of what you might call vulgar Marxism. One could argue the extensions were spurious, but I’m not here to explicate the real Marx. It’s kind of like the joke about the real Shakespeare.*

One misconception was that economic misery would drive the working class to support for socialism. The other was that economic breakdown was inevitable and not amenable to remedy by the ruling class. It would create the conditions for rapid, abrupt revolutionary transformation of everything.

The dire consequence of these misconceptions was and is a neglect of constructive, incremental change, usually the only kind of positive change we get. Plus we look stupid as the working class, however defined, resolutely fails to rally for socialism and economic disruptions are adroitly dealt with by governments.

An appealing distraction for me was the figure of Rosa Luxemburg, which suggested one could be hard-assed about violent insurrection but also supportive of democracy. Her martyrdom elevated her appeal. Plus she was a she, as feminism became a thing to favor in the student movement.

Another bigger, shining distraction was the Bolshevik revolution, which contributed to a translation of Marx from theory to doctrine. One could reject reformism because the ultimate solution would be available, or even inevitable. I contend there was a masculinist thing at play too. Reformism was for wusses.

There is a small cohort of us in Democratic Socialists of America, people who drifted into DSA from its Left. An important matter for us remains sorting out the wheat from the chaff in Marx and Engels. I maintain that there is a lot of wheat. What is incontrovertible for us is the inescapability of reform. Not for nothing have we felt obliged to abandon sects with revolutionary fantasies.

That brings me back to the German SPD and its leaders, Karl Kautsky and Edouard Bernstein. My suspicion is that Kautsky, about whom I know little, was led astray by the political need to support the Bolshevik revolution and to maintain a more-or-less faithful adherence to less supportable themes in vulgar Marxism, as proposed above. Only Bernstein had the ballast to strike a clear distinction between wheat and chaff.

Bernstein took some heat for proclaiming, “The movement is everything, the final goal is nothing.” He walked this back a bit since it was susceptible to gross political attacks from those claiming greater fealty to socialist ideals, but the basic idea is still salient.

One does need an ambitious objective, the better to know one’s proper direction, and to gauge progress in that direction, toward that objective. But the ambitious objective cannot be the goal for the short term. Let me try to illustrate this more concretely.

I’ve suggested Medicare for All is a maximalist objective and as such, impractical in U.S. legislative settings. Of course I support a single-payer system. I would also support something more like the British Health Service, or in the U.S. context, a super-Veterans Administration that directly employs all the doctors and dentists. To that end, I also favor European levels of taxation. But what I want, or what you want, does not matter. Sorry!

The most far-reaching health care reforms are non-starters politically, though they make for good agitation. However, as soon as you get into any legislative context, the bloody head of taxes rears up, and M4A goes down in flames. That’s why I call it maximalist, albeit a worthwhile objective. It’s also why Bernie is on point, limiting himself on the Senate Budget Committee to advocating the addition of vision and dental coverage to existing Medicare, or to bolstering ObamaCare. Given recent events, we will be fortunate keep Medicare as it really is, let alone what we would like it to become.

Democratic socialism sounds a bit more radical and purposeful than social-democracy. I contend that for practical purposes, they are identical. If the objectives are the same, so too should be the tactics. Periodically you see efforts to distinguish DS from S-D. This to me is a futile exercise in window-dressing. Or vanity.

“Social-Democrat” acquired negative connotations by association with the anti-communist old-timers who fought the birth of Students for a Democratic Society and who apologized for the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. They had a dominant presence in the upper echelons of the AFL-CIO and collaborated with the CIA in attacks on left labor agitation, communist and otherwise, in foreign countries. Thing is, those guys are all dead or retired. Today the AFL-CIO is a different animal. “Social-democrat” is kosher again.

From an incremental standpoint, either democratic socialism or social-democracy are both, following Marx, dedicated to progressive decommodification. An example is taking vision and dental care insurance out of the market and into the public sector, under the rubric of Medicare. Following the old movement slogan, there is no way to democratic socialism. Democratic socialism is the way.

Bernstein would understand.

*”It has been discovered that the plays of William Shakespeare were not written by him, but by a different William Shakespeare.”