9.

What’s in a Name?

I have a confession to make. You’ve been a terrific reader for these past eight chapters, enduring my weak metaphors and silly jokes for the noble purpose of learning more about socialism. Which only makes it harder for me to admit that I’ve been misleading you this whole time. Despite its title, this book isn’t really an introduction to socialism. It’s an introduction to just one branch on the socialist tree.

There have been all sorts of projects that have gone under the name of socialism, from tiny communes to military dictatorships to liberal capitalist democracies. What I’ve been describing, a revolutionary project based on the potential of the working class to overthrow capitalism and create a classless society, is more properly known as Marxism. Unfortunately, most people either haven’t even heard of Marxism or associate it with a college seminar. In any case, it’s not as if I could claim that this book represents all of Marxism either.

Marxists disagree (loudly) with one another over any number of subjects. Take the “Russia question,” which has been as much of a touchstone for the left as the Twilight movies were for a generation of teenage girls, only if Edward had his henchmen stab Jacob with an ice pick and liquidate his entire family. That’s what Joseph Stalin did to Leon Trotsky, who had become the leader of the forces opposed to Stalin’s destruction of the Russian Revolution. For decades after the radical left was divided between “Stalinists” and “Trotskyists.” As you can probably tell by now, I’m on Team Leon.

That’s just one of the many points of disagreement within the Marxist and socialist movements. We are often chided for our endless arguments, which can be a valid criticism, but not coming from those inside the US two-party system who spend their own days intensely following the screaming matches between the party that wages endless war and cuts food stamps and the party that wages endless war and cuts food stamps even more. Compared to that racket, the debates among socialists are far more profound.

The problem is that the origins of many of these divisions go back to the response various socialists had to the revolutionary wave that swept across Russia, Germany, and most of Europe almost a hundred years ago. This leads some to belittle socialists for “debating ancient history,” as if trying to learn from the past isn’t the essence of archaeology, evolutionary biology, and many other fields of human knowledge. New activists are often more eager to organize protests than to learn about past ones, but many of them eventually learn that they aren’t the first generation trying to change the world and come to identify with one or more of the distinct strains of radicalism that have come into being.

One strand of socialism is social democracy, which can be seen in its classic form today in some of the large socialist parties in Europe. A hundred years ago, these parties claimed to support the overthrow of capitalism by the working class but argued that this would occur not through revolutionary upheavals but via gradual implementation from elected governments. On this basis they opposed the Bolshevik-led revolution for being undemocratic. Over the course of the twentieth century, many of these parties won elections and had the chance to implement their lofty rhetoric of socialist transformation. In every case, they limited themselves to (at best) enacting programs of free health care and education that represented major progress but didn’t challenge the overall authority of the capitalist class to run the economy based on profit. As the capitalists and social democrats learned how to coexist—and even get along—social democracy moved away from even mild reformism. Today most of these parties model themselves after the Democratic Party, which former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips once called “the world’s second-most enthusiastic capitalist party.”

The revolutionary socialists who supported the Russian Revolution eventually split between the Stalinist Communist parties and the far smaller Trotskyist organizations that opposed the Soviet Union’s turn toward dictatorship and argued that socialism must be both revolutionary and democratic. As the world learned about the slave labor camps, mass executions, and other horrors of Stalinism, the revolutionary prestige of the Soviet Union faded, and the next generation found its inspiration in the wave of revolutions in China, Cuba, and the former colonial world across Africa and Asia. These revolutions reinforced the idea that radical change was possible and helped keep the United States from trying to completely dominate the globe (which has worked so well in recent years!), but since most of them had little to do with workers taking power they also pushed the concept of socialism further away from working-class democracy and toward the much more limited concepts of national independence and centralized economic planning.

By the middle of the twentieth century, socialism became defined as either mild social democracy on the one hand, or one-party “people’s” dictatorships on the other. This division was—and still is—commonly expressed as socialism versus communism, which distorted the original meaning of not one word but two. Earlier socialists like Marx and Lenin had used socialism and communism almost interchangeably. In some writings, Marx and Engels used socialism to refer to that first period after a working-class revolution and communism to refer to a later classless era. But this distinction didn’t stop them and other communists from going back and forth between the two words in the names of their books and organizations.1 I tend to use socialism because it has a less tainted reputation in the United States, but if the next generation of kickass working-class fighters calls itself communist, I’ll switch names in a heartbeat.

The irony of the supposed difference between “socialism” and “communism” was that both sides had more in common with each other than they did with anything Marx wrote. Both social democracy and Stalinism were a type of “socialism from above”—as Hal Draper wrote in The Two Souls of Socialism—in which workers would be granted their liberation by benevolent socialist leaders, whether they be elected in parliament or rolling in on Red Army tanks:

There have always been different “kinds of socialism,” and they have customarily been divided into reformist or revolutionary, peaceful or violent, democratic or authoritarian, etc. These divisions exist, but the underlying division is something else. Throughout the history of socialist movements and ideas, the fundamental divide is between socialism-from-above and socialism-from-below.

What unites the many different forms of socialism-from-above is the conception that socialism must be handed down to the grateful masses in one form or another, by a ruling elite which is not subject to their control in fact. The heart of socialism-from-below is its view that socialism can be realized only through the self-emancipation of activized masses “from below” in a struggle to take charge of their own destiny as actors (not merely subjects) on the stage of history. “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves”; this is the first sentence in the rules written for the First International by Marx, and this is the first principle of his life work.

Draper was part of the relatively tiny Trotskyist movement, which kept chugging along through the decades,2 trying to maintain what it viewed as the spirit of Marxism, with the emphasis on working-class democratic self-rule. But without any major country to point to as an example of “really existing socialism” (and to fund their efforts), Trotskyists often struggled to attract more than handfuls of intellectuals. The socialists most focused on working-class self-emancipation were ironically also the ones most isolated from actual workers. Some of them coped by developing a keen sense of humor, others by becoming miserable cranks. You’ll still find both at many a leftist gathering.

Stalinism, social democracy, and other forms of socialism all went into decline in the later decades of the twentieth century. But rather than helping Trotskyism, this led people around the world to reject socialism outright. As a result, many people looking to take on capitalism in recent years have been more influenced by anarchism, which rejects all forms of leadership and structured organization—no matter how democratic.3 Anarchists have produced some inspiring and creative protests, but for the most part they’ve been unable to create durable structures that extend wider than circles of like-minded people.4

But the fairly dismal history of socialism in recent years begs the question: Why keep using a name that has taken on so much historical baggage? Some activists say that what we call ourselves is less important than what we are do, like supporting strikes and fighting deportations. Fair enough, but strikes and deportations have root causes in capitalism, and avoiding words like socialism means that we’re not educating new activists about these root causes—or pointing a way forward to how we can ultimately live in a world free of all exploitation and national borders.

A related argument comes from those who don’t call themselves socialist or anarchist or any other “label” that they think would restrict their uniquely individual worldview. But deciding to be a socialist or anarchist doesn’t restrict your ideas. It gives them more structure, which actually helps you think for yourself in a society dominated by the ideas of capitalism. Most activists who reject all “isms” are deluding themselves that they are free thinkers when in fact they are limited thinkers, avoiding a systematic assessment of the big “ism” that shapes every aspect of our lives and thoughts. There is a similar phenomenon in elections, where there are now almost as many people registered as “independent” as those in the Democratic or Republican Parties. And yet this hasn’t led to any increase in political power independent from the two parties. It just means there are more people willing to go back and forth between the two lousy choices on offer.

Leftists who view themselves as political independents are almost inevitably part of a political tradition whether they know it or not: liberalism. Liberalism can encompass the opinions of a wide range of people—from immigrants’ rights activists to the Democrat who has deported more people than any other president in history. That’s because liberalism is a default category. You don’t have to make a decision to be a liberal—that’s just what anyone who isn’t conservative is called. But liberalism and conservatism both start from the proposition that capitalism is the best possible system—they differ in that liberalism thinks its problems should be reformed while conservatives fear the instability that comes with any form of change. Unlike liberalism, socialism must be a conscious choice: a rejection of the idea that humanity can’t do better than capitalism. That’s why identifying as a socialist doesn’t limit your intellectual horizons but frees them.

There are also those who argue that names actually matter a great deal, and for that reason we should come up with a new one that is less historically tainted than socialism. As with communism, I’m happy to welcome any new name that proves to work better than the old ones. I’ll be the shameless old guy eager to use whatever lingo the radical kids are using these days. But until that happens, I’m not going to waste my time trying to rebrand the revolution. Open Source Economy! Wiki-ism!

Most ideas for renaming socialism involve innocuous terms like “real democracy” that basically try to undersell the magnitude of what it means to overturn capitalism. These efforts remind me of the approach of the reformist leader of the Socialist Party of America, Norman Thomas. “The American people,” he said, “will never knowingly adopt socialism. But under the name of ‘liberalism,’ they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day, America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.” Unfortunately, Thomas’s prediction was turned on its head. Under the name of gradualism, reformist socialist parties around the world adopted every fragment of the liberal program until one day they were capitalist parties without knowing how it happened. Language does matter, and if we water down the words we use to describe our goals, eventually we’ll water down our goals, too.

It’s common sense among many activists that the best way to win influence is to be as broad and inclusive as possible to gain more people. But for that influence to mean anything, it is has to be based on some sharp and specific ideas that point a definite way forward. The socialism presented in this book is more far-reaching and radical than a vague alternative to capitalism. The bad news is that this socialism requires the majority class around the world to learn through its own painful struggles how to become the masters of society, which is a lot harder to accomplish than changing a few laws or even the whole government. The good news is this socialism envisions the majority class around the world learning through its own painful struggles how to become the masters of society, which will be a lot harder to undo by changing a few laws or even the whole government.

 

1. One of Marx and Engels’s early works was The Communist Manifesto. Their follow-up work was Engels’s pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. The Bolsheviks were first part of the Social Democratic Party. Later they changed the name to Communist to distinguish themselves from the moderates.

2. Sort of like The Little Engine That Could, except Trotskyists would have ruthlessly critiqued the mantra “I think I can, I think I can” for being wishful idealism that doesn’t factor in the poor little train’s material conditions.

3. There are some great anarchist activists who are much more flexible than this and understand the need for structure and organization. But it doesn’t say much for anarchism as a theory that its most effective practitioners are the ones who reject many of its core ideas.

4. I will not make a drum circle joke. I will not make a drum circle joke . . .