The
full title of Michael D. Yates’s article is even much longer, as it contains
the subtitle, “Will the Triple Crisis Bring a Working-Class Revolt in the
United States?” It is a prime current
example of unrealistic, ultraleft thinking in the U.S. left today, and as such,
will have a favorable impact on many of those “far left” within DSA today. That is why this “feasible socialist”
critique, which Monthly Review refused to publish, preferring
instead to ignore its socialist critics—GF)
Methinks
Michael D. Yates’s “COVID-19, Economic Depression, and the Black Lives Matter
Protests” (September 2020 Monthly Review, pp. 14-33) is, as the old
saying goes, just “whistling in the dark.”
While it starts out overall with plenty of examples from our recent
tumultuous times of what Trotsky properly called “uneven and combined
development” both psychologically and in terms of direct action, that certain
sectors (but by no means all) of the working class are becoming more militant
and imbued with radical consciousness (pp. 14-24) and the disappointing, but by
no means unsurprising, response by the trade union leaderships (pp. 17-24),
Yates then descends into hyperbole and ultraleftism in what he proposes what
can be done to deepen worker militancy and political consciousness. The result is a most disappointing
prescription that, for me and others involved in the left, is bound to lead to
futility and dead ends.
Despite
recent upsurges in the United States, from the Chicago teachers’ strike through
the Bernie Sanders Presidential campaigns of both 2016 and 2020, and the
overnight emergence of a powerful Black Lives Matter movement protesting the
blatant police killings and wounding of black people, from, just to note a few,
Breonna Taylor to George Floyd to Jacob Blake, the overall class consciousness
of US workers is still quite low, and varies much from geographical locale to
geographical locale; it is also hindered in development by an overall weakened
position of organized labor, both in terms of what Yates terms “good unions”
and those he sees as not-so-good; and of course, exacerbated by COVID-19 and
the resultant economic depression, which has not only made 30 million
unemployed (out of a total work force, as Yates notes, of 160 million, which
means 130 million still had jobs, making unemployed workers substantially
“invisible”), but has engendered fear for their jobs, as well as militancy,
among workers. But Yates’s Revolutionary
Impatience makes him too one-sided, seeing only the positive, but not the mixed
as well as the clearly doubtful and negative.
Also,
like so many given to ultraleftism, Yates is far too dismissive of Bernie
Sanders’s two Presidential campaigns in raising socialist consciousness, as
well as toward electoral politics generally—overlooking, for example, that
gains made through actions in the streets will have to be both codified and
universalized through legislation and executive action to enforce—which
requires both legislators and political executives! Further, while positively noting the massive
growth of DSA (of which I am an At-Large member) into the first consequential
socialist organization since SDS in the Sixties, or the Communist Party and
other radicals in the Thirties and Forties, DSA still has only a total membership
that could fit easily in the average major state university football stadium;
and which came into DSA in the first place through the Bernie campaigns!
Yates’s
prescriptions for “What Is to Be Done Next?” are also equally one-sided and wrongheaded. Toward existing unions he definitely is
advocating for a disastrous policy of Dual Unionism, a Third-Period
ultraleftism of forming “revolutionary” unions that, rather than being a thorn
in the side, so to speak, of the Labor Establishment, will merely isolate the
unionized higher-conscious. As examples
of “successful” left organizing, Yates offers only a smorgasbord, a potpourri
(really, just a hodgepodge?) of organized attempts scattered across both time
and geography—from (undated) Occupy the Land attempts in Brazil to Chavez’s
(but, pointedly, not Maduro’s) Venezuela, to the social programs of the US
Black Panther Party in the late Sixties and early Seventies in certain (by no
means very many) black-populated locales. All presented without detail or the
number of people involved and/or reached.
He cites and Australian unionizing effort of the Seventies and Maoists
organizing in Nepal and rural India, but, again, offers no details. Pointedly missing, however, from Yates’s
potpourri is the excellent Kurdish establishment of a cooperative socialist
polity in Rojava! Quite possibly, one of
the most significant bright spots of recent time in socialist organizing—but
much to the shame of our “anti-imperialist left,” given short shrift by this “left,”
and when Trump gleefully abandoned the Kurds to the reactionary Islamist Turks,
greeted again by this “left” with both glaring silence as well as blaming the
Kurds themselves for their being so betrayed!
Yates
has been seduced by that siren song on the far left, the notion that a
“correctly” radical, anti-capitalist, pro-labor third party can somehow
succeed, and woo workers, women, African Americans and other peoples of color
away from the Democrats despite all other left third party attempts to do so
failing substantially. But in the U.S.
winner-take-all two-party political system, third parties are irrelevant, they
are marginal protest votes only. The
only third party to ever do so in U.S. history, the Republican Party in 1860,
was able to do so only because the Whigs disintegrated and the Democrats were
heavily compromised, due to their failure to address the issue of slavery. All other major third parties have either
been absorbed or re-absorbed into the Democratic or Republican Parties since then,
leaving intact a stable two-party system essentially impervious to third-party
attempts to supplant it. (A quite good
discussion of this appears the socialist website New Politics, a source Yates
himself notes favorably in a footnote: Barry
Finger’s “Protest Vote or Independent Political Action?” posted on August 8,
2020, https://newpol.org/protest-vote-or-independent-political-action/.) Left third parties running Presidential
campaigns have failed traditionally to ever break that magic 3% of the vote
barrier all the way back to the Eugene Debs Presidential campaign of 1916; Debs
himself only garnered 6% of the vote in his most successful Presidential
campaign, that of 1912. The Progressive
Party of Henry Wallace’s run in 1948, the Green Party’s running of Ralph Nader
in 2000, the other campaigns of the Greens, the campaigns of the Peace and
Freedom Party, the Citizens Party, not to mention the sectarian left parties’ running
of Presidential campaigns, all have failed, and their campaigns becoming but a
blip on the running course of U.S. political history. In fact, left third parties have failed even
to do even as well as the leading right third party, the Libertarians! Ralph Nader himself noted in an op-ed in the March
25, 2016 Washington Post, “Why
Bernie Sanders was right to run as a Democrat,” https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/03/25/ralph-nader-why-bernie-sanders-was-right-to-run-as-a-democrat/, that the success of Bernie Sanders’s
Presidential run resulted from Sanders running a serious campaign for
President—in the Democratic primaries, and not as a third-party candidate or an
independent! Further, and this fits well
with Yates’s favorable view of DSA, DSA members running for lesser offices and
challenging incumbents as Democrats have scored a number of successes to date,
becoming House of Representatives members, state legislators, and city
councilpersons, where their actually holding political office gives them clout
that would not be theirs had they run—and lost—as third-party candidates or as
independents. The supposed exception of
Kshama Sawant as a Socialist Alternative city councilperson in Seattle proves
this rule: she comports herself as a serious politician and even reaches out to
Democrats to get things done, such as resist and not cave in to Seattle’s
economic behemoth, Amazon. Democrats or
not, socialists and radicals can run and exercise political clout, shape
positive legislation, engage successfully in local and state offices, and even
in the House of Representatives and the Senate, (think here of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
and Bernie Sanders), but only as serious “reformists,” not as intransigent
“left” symbols. Because of this
political reality, and like many others on the left, I am drawn thus to the
“inside-outside strategy” of working within the Democratic Party and embracing
“reformist socialist” Michael Harrington’s “left wing of the feasible” as the
only realistic way open now to the left to gain political power it can use for
the better.
When
I wrote this, in early September, it was just a little over fifty days until
the 2020 election. That means,
strategically and tactically, we, the left of fall 2020, have no choice but to
hold our collective noses and vote for Joe Biden to get Trump out of the White
House, and urge our friends and comrades to do likewise. Too much is at stake. Another four years of Donald Trump would not
only be disastrous for the left, and for the U.S. public, but for world
humanity as well. Not only would
defunding the police, a crucial left demand coming out of the Black Lives
Matter protests, not be on the political agenda, but replacing it instead
would be draconian “law and order” rule that would both give massive amounts of
money to police to carry on as they have, and worse—giving essentially a
“look-the-other-way” wink and approving nod to further police brutalizing and
even murder. On the political agenda as
well would be defunding Social Security and Medicare (which Trump wishes to do
by eviscerating payroll withholding taxes), and even the—Post Office! And who knows what else? But while not a particularly “left-wing”
choice, getting rid of Trump and putting into place to bide time a studied
centrist in the form of Joe Biden is at least feasible. We of the left simply do not have endless
options, as too many given to ultraleftism would like to pretend.
Michael
Yates might object that he’s speaking not for the short run of the present and
very near future, but for political change that could lead to a U.S. socialism
in “the long run.” But John Maynard
Keynes answered that most successfully by acerbically noting, “In the long run we
are all dead.” Positive social change
cannot be put off until the “inevitable” worker-led socialist revolution in the
advanced capitalist countries, as Marx and Engels envisioned, it must be built
in the here-and-now. Even if it’s
impossible to get all that we of the left would wish for. Even Yates himself notes this at the end of
his article, stressing that “we may not have much of a future” ahead of
us. (p. 32) In this time of coronavirus and depression,
we simply do not have a choice of “socialism or barbarism,” but rather a
starker, far more troublesome choice between a horrible barbarism now (Trump, and the other
right-wing leaders presently wielding power across the globe, from Hungary
through Brazil, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, to mention but a few of the most
notorious), and an even worse barbarism later (which we can stanch at least
partially and gain breathing room for the left by putting Biden in the White
House as someone at least partially amenable to pressure from a left pushing
him—something that would not even exist should Trump be re-elected). History and lived life do not always give us
choices we like; but they do give us choices—choices we can choose to fritter
away and neglect by wishing it weren’t so, or choices we can accept and do
within them all that we are able to do at the time. That, especially to me, is what we must mean
by the “left wing of the feasible.” We
are in troubled and troubling times, and just putting it in terms of choices
between leaders, past and present, underscores this—Biden or Trump, Abraham
Lincoln or Jefferson Davis, FDR and Churchill or Hitler. As Marx himself said in the Eighteenth
Brumaire, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they
please….” That, of course, holds for the
left as well.
There
are other shortcomings in Yates’s article.
He excoriates the Scandinavian countries, “the quintessential social
democratic states,” for their wealth inequality (p. 30), which he sees as
almost as bad as that of the U.S., yet overlooks the wealth inequalities under
“already existing socialism” that were also a matter of course in the
“revolutionary socialist” world of the former U.S.S.R., Eastern Europe, and
China. These were states where the nomenklatura
in power (leading members of their respective “Communist” parties) had far more
massive incomes and perquisites than did the workers and peasantry, even though
they were nominally “socialist”—but actually far more “bureaucratic
collectivist” or “state capitalist” states than liberating, humane socialist
ones! Such states also suffered from low
levels of social wealth accumulation, low productivity, scarce and shoddy
consumer goods, and, sad but necessary to say, Gulags as well, motivating one
anonymous working-class wag there to note in regards to working-class life
under such “socialism,” “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” Michael Yates would do well to read Donald
Sassoon’s One Hundred Years of Socialism (New York: The New Press,
1996), his history of social democracy in Western Europe—where “mere” social
democracy decisively broke the link between working-class and poverty, creating
the “affluent” worker that the Western European “far left” complained had been
“bought-off” and “bourgeoisified”! (The
analogue in the U.S. was, of course, the New Deal and its post-World War II
aftermath up until around 1969; with a corresponding “far left” complaining of
“bought-off” workers in the form of Herbert Marcuse, notably in One-Dimensional
Man, and the New Left of the Sixties.)
Another
shortcoming of Yates’s article lies in what he doesn’t
mention—“bourgeois right” in the U.S. in the form of fundamental civil rights
and civil liberties as enunciated in the words of the Declaration of
Independence, “all men are created equal,” and guaranteed through basic law in
the Bill of Rights of the Constitution.
Of course, it goes without saying, not always honored or protected, and
not always applying to all—but the foundation was laid through these
seminal documents of U.S. political and social life to fight for and achieve
their extension to greater and greater sectors of the population, through the
elimination of slavery, the granting of women’s suffrage, up to the present
through the desegregation of schools and public accommodations, recognition of
the right to abortion, allowing for gay marriage, guarantees of free speech and
a free press, and other vital matters of civil rights, civil liberties, and
openings for greater political participation.
In my opinion, the Founding Fathers, many of whom, as is well known,
were rich men who owned slaves, transcended themselves and their narrow social
milieu and created a polity far greater than they themselves were. For me, certainly as a socialist, the trouble
with liberalism is not that it is pernicious, but that it is incomplete: and
for me as a socialist, this means extending into the social and economic realm
the basic political rights as expressed in the Bill of Rights. Which, in important ways, has been done in
the U.S., and is still being done—by socialists and communists, by civil
libertarians, by activists, by people marching in the streets, and also, by
people voting at the polls. The road has
ofttimes been long and arduous, but thanks to determination and vigilance, and
despite the fragility of democracy and democratic norms that we now sense in
this era of Trump, this uneven traversing of that road has made us in
significant ways a better society than we were before. As but one example, it’s worth recalling that
in the U.S. universal manhood suffrage didn’t exist prior to 1825;
non-property holding men couldn’t vote, only those who owned landed
property could. And women couldn’t vote
nationally in the U.S. until 1920, and only after 1965 could African Americans
freely vote everywhere. As Martin Luther
King rightly noted, “The arc of history is long”—and for those of us on the
left given to revolutionary impatience, unconscionably long, and far too
tedious to traverse—“but it tends toward justice.” So, yes, as a socialist, I do find myself in
agreement with the notion of a Genius about the United States and its political
and social arrangements, a Genius that shines through even under a Trump: the protests of Black Lives Matter in the
streets being but one notable example!
Further,
as a writer and a poet, I am especially concerned with censorship and
self-censorship, lest I inadvertently pay for my indiscretion with a jail
sentence, or even with my life. Here in
the U.S., at least, I really don’t have to worry about a state-functionary
commissar looking over my shoulder and peering at what I write, lest I write
something “incorrect”—a mental ease I would not have had in the former U.S.S.R
of Stalin and Brezhnev, nor even automatically under Lenin and Trotsky; nor in
Maoist or even Dengist China, and certainly not today there under President Xi;
certainly not at all in North Korea; and not even in the freest of the
“socialist” states, Cuba! Is it too much
to ask that a really socialist criminology and criminal justice system not
include a Gulag?! For the absence of
such certainly wasn’t the reality under “already existing socialism,” to invoke
the euphemistic phrase of Brezhnev that accurately described not states that
were “socialist,” but were “bureaucratic collectivist” or “state capitalist” instead.
So,
for me, socialism means more than state ownership of the means of production—which
raises the question, who runs the state that owns such means of
production? That those who run such a
state are all members of a “Communist” party with a monopoly on all forms of
political and social expression certainly hasn’t, historically, guaranteed their
humaneness and willingness to tolerate disagreement, to say the very, very
least! So, for me, that must
mean—socialism is more than state ownership of the means of production, or even
collective, as opposed to strictly private, property. Socialism, to be truly sociable and humane,
must be thoroughly democratic, transparent, and accountable—precisely what the
“socialist” states to date haven’t been!
“Bourgeois
rights” of suffrage, freedom of speech and expression, a free press, antidiscrimination,
civil rights and civil liberties, are not afterthoughts, irrelevancies, or
circus-like distractions. They are as
vital for a socialist movement that is fully committed to freedom and democracy
as is the fight against egregious economic inequality, or for full, meaningful
employment. No one understood or
expressed this better than did a seminal socialist with impeccable
revolutionary bona fides, Rosa Luxemburg.
In The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism? (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1962), Luxemburg articulates this well, even
though, by certain contemporary “left” standards, she sounds like a “mere
bourgeois liberal.” (“The Russian
Revolution” was written in 1919, and unfinished at the time of her murder;
“Leninism or Marxism?” was originally published in 1904 in both Russian and
German, in the Russian socialist Iskra and the German socialist Neue
Zeit newspapers under the title, “Organizational Questions of the Russian
Social Democracy.” When first translated
into English, it was under the title “Leninism or Marxism?”) She bears quoting at length (all quotations
taken from “The Russian Revolution”):
Freedom
only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one
party—however numerous they may be—is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom of
the one who thinks differently. Not
because of any fanatical conception of “justice” but because all that is
instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this
essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when “freedom” becomes
a special privilege. (p. 69)
[T]he
remedy which Trotsky and Lenin have found, the elimination of democracy as
such, is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure; for it stops up the
very living source from which alone can come the correction of all the innate
shortcomings of social institutions.
That source is the active, untrammeled, energetic political life of the
broadest masses of the people. (p. 62)
We
have always distinguished the social kernel from the political form of bourgeois
democracy; we have always revealed the hard kernel of social inequality hidden under
the sweet shell of formal equality and freedom—not in order to reject the
latter but to spur the working class into not being satisfied with the shell,
but rather, by conquering political power, to create a socialist democracy to
replace bourgeois democracy—not to eliminate democracy altogether. (p. 77)
Without
general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without
a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes
a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active
element. Public life gradually falls
asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless
experience direct and rule. (pp. 71-72)
Yates also writes tellingly (p. 25) of the
necessity to establish universal comprehensive healthcare as a right, and
addresses the problem, made very palpable with the economic shutdown
necessitated by COVID-19, of mass unemployment and economic devastation,
overlooking that such necessities are already advocated in concrete legislative
form in Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All (originally endorsed, though later
repudiated, even by Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate Kamala Harris), as
well as in Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.
Thus does “reformist” reality from a “social-democratic” perspective
outpace the wish-list of the—ultraleft!
Truth is, and this goes to the very heart
of “left wing of the feasible,” it is better to concretely fight for and even attain,
when we can, the half-loaf of good bread now, rather than sit it out and
await the “inevitable” dozen chocolate eclairs that supposedly are coming our
way when we refuse to accept the “merely” feasible, as our ultralefts,
including Michael Yates, would have it.
We of the left in the advanced capitalist world have been waiting for
the “inevitable” worker-led socialist revolution ever since at least the
Chartists, and only on the “authority” that Marx and Engels said it would
happen. But such is not based on a
materialist analysis or realistic appraisal of existing condition, but, rather,
is an example of quasi-religious wishful thinking. (The opposite of the Third Comintern
Congress’s emphasis on “concrete analysis of concrete conditions.”) As Liu Shaoqi, second only to Mao in the
Chinese Communist Party before he was railroaded into prison where, again under
the aegis of Mao, he was allowed to die of untreated diabetes and pneumonia,
put it trenchantly, “Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Chairman Mao have all
made mistakes.” So, for that matter,
have Trotsky, Gramsci, the Castro brothers, and even scientific luminaries such
as Darwin, Newton, and Einstein! “Infallible popes and prophets” are best left
consigned to the “dustbin of history” where they belong as mere religious
artifacts. No such exist in the real
world. For, yes, results in the here-and-now
do count, and they are the lifeblood of a viable socialist movement. They are truly the essence of the “left wing
of the feasible,” and deserve our front-and-center attention and activism
precisely because of it.
**********
Biographical Note: George Fish is a socialist writer and poet
living in Indianapolis, Indiana, heart of Trumpland, where he is also an
“essential worker” grocery stocker and member of the UFCW. He has previously appeared in Monthly
Review (MR) and on MR Online four times:
with February 1988’s “Two Kinds of Atheism,” February 1994’s review-essay
“The Vietnam War at Home” in MR, and on MR Online with February 11,
2007’s “Soul-Shakers, Gone but Not Forgotten” and May 25, 2019’s “Review of
Alan Nasser’s Overripe Economy,” as well as other publications on the left. Fish genially describes himself at present as
a “right opportunist/Bernie Bro by default,” and was labeled a “backward
worker” by a prominent socialist professor of Indian Brahmin (i.e., elite) descent—to
which Fish retorts, he is not so much
“backward” as he is realistic. A white,
Baby Boomer, cis-male by accident of birth, George Fish has long since
transcended such “identities.
