Future Historians

[by Fred, 12/8/17, based on DiEM_Left-Is-Dead.pdf]

The historic defeat of the German Social-democratic Party (SPD) in the 2017 federal elections marked the end of the political framework that had shaped European societies since the end of World War II. Such a framework has rested on two pillars, i.e. a social-democratic and a bourgeois-liberal pole, which long competed for government, by articulating clearly distinct sets of policies, while agreeing on the basic tenets of liberal, capitalist democracy. As the social-democratic pillar crumbled, the way was opened for the rise of right-wing, national-populist, or even fascist-type parties. Those parties succeeded for a time in appealing to social and demographic groups that had historically supported not only the Social Democrats, but the Left in general, such as “blue collar” workers, students, public employees and young voters.

Thus the crisis of social-democratic parties was nothing but the tip of the iceberg, the base of which consisted in the crisis of the entire Left, ranging from classical Social Democracy, to green and post- or neo-communist parties. Second, such a crisis was not only political, since it impinged on the very social basis of progressive politics. What then needed to be done? To answer such a crucial question, it was necessary to grasp the nature of the relations between left-wing parties and their social base. Historically, social-democratic, communist and green parties had always risen as the political offshoots of vibrant social movements: trade unions, working class mutual aid associations, cooperative societies, religious communities, environmental protection organizations, anti-colonialist, feminist, civil rights and LGBTQ movements. Such movements not only provided progressive parties with electoral momentum, but they also built large networks that allowed the disenfranchised to socialize and to empower themselves.

The crisis of the political Left was thus nothing but the final act of a tragedy that started to unfold at the end of the 1970s, the deep sense of which was perfectly summarized by Margaret Thatcher’s notorious phrase, “There’s no such thing as society”. As the historian Tony Judt put it, what was unfolding was “the steady shift of public responsibility onto the private sector to no discernible collective advantage”, which caused, in turn, “an increased difficulty in comprehending what we have in common with others”. It followed that bringing back progressive politics meant bringing back society itself, understood as the common space where individuals could reclaim the capacity to flourish, through free collective association and with the support of public institutions. The question remained, which forces could possibly achieve such a goal? And how would they go about it?

Existing progressive forces seemed doomed to fall short of the mark. Western communist parties had already lost most of their social base even before they were buried by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and only became further marginalized. As for the Greens, they had embodied the hope for a renewal of progressive politics throughout the 1980s and the ‘90s, fueled by new forms of civic engagement. However, they steadily abandoned their “alternative” roots to fully integrate into existing institutions.

Social-democratic parties long presented themselves as a beacon for progressive politics in western Europe, by helping to craft the welfare state system in the 1950s and 60s. But by a strange irony of fate, those same parties were instrumental in dismantling that system in following decades. The demise of social-democratic parties could not, however, be reduced to the treachery of their élites. On the contrary, it was rooted in two structural weaknesses of the compromise between capital and labor that they helped to bring about. As Tony Judt remarked, social-democratic parties benefited from “a very particular combination of circumstances”, both from a political and an economic point of view, which were doomed to fade away. Moreover, they tied their political action to the framework of the nation-state, which was in crisis as globalization proceeded.

Those seeking a way out of this impasse pointed to three key notions: The first was “grassroots”, since any new movement would need to establish the largest possible social base, while supporting all the other forces that shared its goals. The second was “communication”, since a new movement would also need to spread its values and policies as broadly as possible, by combining old and new media activism with street activism, canvassing and new forms of political action. The third was “electoral action”, which, in the context of a democratic state, constituted an essential tool for establishing and reversing power relations between social groups. Left-wing “electoral vehicles” had historically emerged as the culminating point of a long process of self-organization, promoted by social movements that shared the same long-term goals. It was therefore be argued by many that the grassroots and the communication phase should be prioritized over the electoral one.

Proponents of electoral activity cited Machiavelli's teaching that political action is nothing but the result of the struggle between the will of political subjects and ever-changing conditions which are not of their own choosing. In such a struggle, timing is essential, even more in times where opportunity windows open and close very rapidly. Thus they called for building electoral vehicles that were tightly connected with broader social and political movements, going well beyond traditional parties.

In the period after Donald Trump's election as US president in 2016, … [start here, for Sunday 10/21]

Voter suppression had long been the major electoral strategy of the racist right in the U.S., going back to the Federalist era, the tragedy of the post-Civil War Reconstruction of the slave-holding South with the nation-wide triumph of Jim Crow, and again in the 21st century with the the reversal of the Civil Rights era’s victories of the 1960’s. The usual voter suppression tactics were revived with renewed Gerrymandering, closing of polling places, strict voter ID laws and massive arbitrary purging of voter rolls all aimed at minorities and the poor.

Obviously, the way for the anti-racist left to counter this strategy was to mount a vigorous voter registration campaign. This had been the strategy of the Rainbow Coaltion proposed by Jesse Jackson, but the national Democratic Party never endorsed it. The DNC, dominated by the millionnaire donors and established politicians, was afraid of being challenged by an expanded base and apparently preferred losing elections to the Republicans (who won the presidency twice with a minority of the popular vote). The real scandal of the Democratic defeat of 2016 was not the largely ineffective Russian stealth propaganda campaign, but the illegal suppression of the populist Sanders challenge which left Donald Trump as the only populist in the field.

The amazing success of the grass-roots 2016 primary campaign of Sanders, an avowed socialist as well as several public opinion polls revealed that millions of Americans prefered socialism to capitalism. Socialism was no longer identified with totalitarian Communism as during the Red scare, and people were eager to learn more about it. And when the racist, mysogonist, bully Trump was “elected,” many gave up on the existing political system altogether and began looking for alternatives.

Within less that two years, a more-or-less moribund organization with the attractive name of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) had 50,000 new members and counting. DSA was the latest incarnation of the historic U.S. Socialist Party/Social Democratic Federation. The SP’s perennial Presidential candidate was E.V. Debs, who was thrown into prison by Democrat Woodrow Wilson for his opposition to the U.S. entry into WWI (in 1920 Debs garnered a million votes from his cell in Leavenworth). The SP was decimated by the post-WWI Red scare and later was pushed aside by the more radical Communist Party. The post-WWII Red scare reduced both parties to mere shells.

In 1958 a Trotskyist splinter-group, the International Socialist League, whose leading theoretician was Max Schachtman, dissolved into the SP/SDF, whose leading lights were Michael Harrington and Civil Rights activist Bayard Rustin. This merger dynamized the old SP through activity in the Civil Rights struggle and the growth of its youth wing, the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), which foreshadowed the “new left” and educated a whole new radical generation, many of them still active a half-century later, in the fundamentals of socialism.

However, under Schachtman’s influence, the new SP strategy, “political realignment,” called for working within the Democratic Party to eliminate the Southern Dixiecrats and turn the Dems into a “labor-liberal party” – a strategy which eerily prefigured Nixon’s successful 1968 “southern strategy,” winning the racist Dixiecrats to the Republicans. In the 60s, the SP, loyal to the Dems, refused to condemn JFK’s Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and LBJ’s Vietnam War and also opposed community control of NY’s segregated public schools and the seating of the Mississippi Freedom Delegation at the 196? Democratic convention. The SP thus lost the support of the YPSL’s anti-racist, anti-imperialist youth, whom the SP leadership expelled. Disgraced and isolated, the SP shrank to a marginalized splinter group called DSA which, after the crisis of the 2016 election, was rapidly revitalized by a new generation seeking a socialist home. DSA was “the only horse in town.”

The revitalized DSA rapidly broke with its past, resigning from the neoliberal Socialist International (which included France’s François Holland and Greece’s Papandreou) and repudiating Harrington’s subservience to the Democratic Party, while struggling with the issue of what kind of electoral strategy to pursue without falling into the same trap. [RG]

Bernie Sanders won the presidency in 2020 along with 312 DSA members elected to the House of Representatives and 53 who joined the US Senate. On the popular level, utopian hopes and fantasies bloomed. IN the dailty operation of government, the new DSA regime and its officers were soon confronted by capital flight: [details] The FBI claimed to have found evidence that bots supporting Bernie had been organized and financed by billionaires in Abu Dhabi and party hacks in Venezuela. Bernie and the DSA members of Congress spent months defending themselves from these accusations and finding ways to give corporations subsidies to bring jobs back to America. The fascists among Trump's supporters did their best to organize racist reaction against Sanders and his ilk, all of whom they claimed had African-American blood in their genomes, one part in 12,000l.

Meanwhile, millions of working women, working and unemployed Blacks, immigrants, and large parts of the 90% were disappointed and pissed off. Their lives were not improving. The environment continued to go to hell. They got poorer and poorer, and the cops continued to run amok in their communities, even as 1/4 of the cops and their families were on food stamps due to cutbacks. As the Utopians had long expected, all hell broke loose. [cut/paste from Sam Friedman's docs on how we made the revolution]

As the label “the left” ceased to have substantive meaning - encompassing everyone from Hillary Clinton to ___ - a new terminology gradually emerged: Utopians vs. Conformists. [Sam Fassbinder] https://caucus99percent.com/content/utopians-vs-conformists-part-two

From Improvisation to ‘Planning Factories’

Once peace was re-established on the planet, the Internet revealed itself as a horizontal networking and sharing tool as useful now as during the period of revolutionary emergence. The first order of the day was to make a rapid assessment of the state of the planet and its population so as to address the most urgent needs, the first wounds to treat.The Net facilitated first the gathering of information and then the matching up of needs and resources around the planet.

During the period of capitalist collapse and revolutionary emergence, networks of anti-capitalist scientists and other specialists formed in every country to exchange data on agriculture, ecology, migration, refugees, famine, drought. Global data bases were established. Statistics brought together in the data bases permitted specialists working with the popular assemblies to simplify choices by permitting discussion of alternatives, their advantages and disadvantages. This whole system, if you want to call it that, was improvised in haste. There was a planet to heal, with its human, animal and vegetable inhabitants.

As reconstruction progressed, the network system was refined and elaborated. Research Centers were created on the regional, national and planetary levels to bring together all the economic data transmitted by collectives of producers and consumers and by the local assemblies. These centers also had the task of classifying and analyzing this data, then transmitting the results to the regional and local Assemblies in a form readily accessible to ordinary workers.

The researchers were also responsible for producing a range of alternative plans in every domain: different plans each with their own forecasts about the costs in human effort, the time it would take to complete, its environmental impact and the benefits it would bring to individuals and collectivities. These ‘Planning Factories’¹⁾ as the centers were commonly called, provided the kind of information about alternatives which made possible truly democratic and popular debates all on essential questions of social and economic life.

The Internet also permitted great planetary debates and referendums on certain fundamental questions: ecology, health, human rights. There were competing global plans for limiting the extraction and use of fuels emitting CO2 and other gases dangerous to the ozone and the atmosphere. There were proposals for the creation and coordination of sources of alternative energy. There were also plans for saving plants, animals, seas. The different choices proposed by the ‘planning factories’ and their likely consequences were clear and comprehensible to every voter.