The Two Biggest Mistakes on the Left

Don't live like me!

I’m still riffing on the David Sassoon book I mentioned a short while ago, “One Hundred Years of Socialism,” that the author describes as a history of socialist parties in Western Europe. The opening chapter dwells on the greatest socialist party in history, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), in the decades before the first world war.

Most any big political argument on the Left you have heard was raging in the SPD before 1914. The two I want to talk about here were referred to as “pauperization” (or “immiseration”) and “collapse theory” (a.k.a. “catastrophism”). Taking them in turn . . .

Pauperization calls to mind the old U.S. populist trope about “tramps and millionaires.” In that case I imagine the pitch was more rhetorical than analytical; of course most people fell in between those categories, if taken literally. The bigger point is the more pervasive notion that the capitalist economy was grinding so many down so far into poverty that a social explosion was inevitable. In other words, economic desperation would move people to rebel.

I don’t have to tell you this has not invariably transpired, certainly not in the form of socialist agitation. In fact, rebellion can take different, sometimes bizarre forms. MAGA is a kind of rebellion. So is Luigi’s crime.

When I discount the pauperization argument, I do not at all want to suggest that everybody here in the U.S. enjoys an acceptable standard of living. In heated debates, to doubt pauperization can be depicted as acquiescing to mass misery. I plead not guilty.

Collapse theory goes beyond pauperization to envision a full-scale breakdown of the economy, also moving the masses to revolt. As far as economies go, collapses are rare. The closest one to present days was the Great Depression. It’s not a stretch to say this gave us the labor movement and the New Deal, but socialism was not in the cards. As leading U.S. socialist leader Norman Thomas wrote, “Emphatically, Mr. Roosevelt did not carry out the Socialist platform, unless he carried it out on a stretcher.”

There hasn’t been much collapsing since the 1930s. The stock market crash of 1987 quickly reversed itself without any special action by the government. The Great Financial Crisis of 2008 caused a lot of damage and misery, but it lead to two terms of the unliberal Barack Obama and then you-know-who. The recession of 2020 was not due to the internal contradictions of capitalism, but to the pandemic.

Again, to doubt the likelihood of catastrophe is taken to mean disloyalty to the cause. Or to doubt the scriptural authority of Marx’s Capital. It’s really an empirical matter, not a religious one. Moreover, in the wake of Keynesian economics, modern governments have ways to deal with economic slowdowns. Catastrophies can be averted.

These questions were reflected in a gulf in the SPD, led on one side by Edouard Bernstein and on the other by Karl Kautsky. Bernstein was quicker to suggest changes to orthodox Marxist theory, leading to his lasting status as a “revisionist,” an evil thing according to adherents of Stalin, Mao, and lesser lights.

Both Bernstein and Kautsky placed importance on the Marxist tenet that societies needed to reach an appropriate stage of economic development before the working class would be prepared to take power. Bernstein was more prone doubt that even Germany was “ready.” Both surely would not have thought that Russia was. This led to eternal damnation of both by avowed Leninists of all types.

A denial of any immediate prospects of state power meant concentration on more incremental demands in such areas as the electoral franchise and social insurance, with not a few concessions in these areas granted by the capitalist state. It also means a rejection of any use of violence. The old socialists could even be antsy about calls for general strikes, which in Germany were a real possibility, as excessively provocative.

These two delusions have dire political implications. They lead socialists to await a radical rupture than provides a golden opportunity for an insurrection to seize state power. As mentioned, that’s kind of how the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, but that was a freak occurrence.

Sassoon reports that to 1914, Lenin could be as squishy about violent insurrection as the German SPD. The real militant in that period was Rosa Luxemburg, though in her vision, revolution would result from a mass strike. For all the subsequent wannabee lenins, expectation of such an opportunity further distorts the program offered, that tends to what has been described as “maximalist” proposals. I would say a contemporary example is “Medicare For All.”

It is one thing to motivate a full-blown reconstruction of our health care system along the lines of M4A. I fully endorse advancing it as a goal. It is another to imagine that M4A will be available any time soon. After all, it has gone down to defeat in a few of our most liberal states. Hence the relevance of Bernie Sanders’s gambit to propose adding vision and dental benefits to really-existing Medicare.

Not so many years ago, a group to which I belonged known as Labor Party Advocates told its members to canvas neighborhood blocks on behalf of single-payer health care. I wouldn’t do it. I thought it was a total waste of time. These days the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are in the same rut.

The obsession with maximalist demands leads to a neglect of practical political objectives — victories that are accessible in the here and now. There is a legitimate fear that incrementalism, sometimes called “parliamentary cretinism,” leads to a complete abandonment of the bigger things we need. I would say this is indeed a danger, but it goes with the territory of real-world politics.

One is always faced with the choice of how to bridge the gap between what is possible and one’s ideal. In political bargaining, where to draw the line between what is acceptable and what is not is always a complicated decision. (I could be wrong about the chances of M4A, for instance.) However, choosing to avoid that enterprise amounts to rejecting politics altogether.

This is all a very personal matter for me. I basically did my 20s all wrong (from 1969 to 1979), in pursuit of the unattainable, at possibly great personal cost. I didn’t realize socialist politics is a marathon, not a sprint. I needed to settle on a way to look out for myself and pursue my ideals, at the same time, in a sustainable way. I wasted a decade. Dozens of my friends made the same mistake. Some of them have done fine anyway, some not so much.

In spite of it all, I’ve been very fortunate and have no grounds for complaint. But I might have become someone different and accomplished more if I hadn’t delayed any pursuit of a career until the latter 1970s.

Today a lot of younger folks in DSA are repeating my mistake. Even so, DSA is an interesting study in inconsistency in this regard. At the state and local level, elected DSA politicians are fully engaged in practical campaigns. I like to point to DSA’s support for the campaign in defense of reproductive rights in Kansas, in 2023. It is not a stretch to note that this victory resulted in a state of play for rights that was far short of our ideal state of affairs. So Kansas DSA compromised, big time, and bully for them.

When it comes to national politics, however, DSA keeps getting over its skis. It craps on likely political allies — even AOC — for the sake of positions that haven’t the ghost of a political chance.

Maybe the mistakes are a matter of youth. One is raised, perhaps with all sorts of illusions about how the world works, and when one finally reaches an age where we think we have some agency, everything that ought to be done can be done. Lesser alternatives are ruled out.

If just one person reads this advice in time to take it, the writing effort will have been worthwhile.