In 1917, not only those parties engaged in insurrectionary revolution but even those committed to gradual reform still spoke of eventually transcending capitalism. Half a century later social democrats had explicitly come to define their political goals as compatible with a welfare-state variety of capitalism; and well before the end of the century even many who had formerly embraced the legacy of 1917 would join them in this. Yet this occurred just as the universalization of neoliberalism rendered threadbare any notion of distinct varieties of capitalism. The realism without imagination of the so-called ‘Third Way’ was shown to lack realism as well as imagination.
However reactionary the era of neoliberal globalization has been, it has seemed to confirm the continuing revolutionary nature of the bourgeoisie, at least in terms of creating ‘a world after its own image’.1 Nevertheless, the financialized form of capitalism that greased the wheels not only of global investment and trade, but also of globally integrated production and consumption, was clearly crisis prone.2 The first global capitalist crisis of the twenty-first century was rooted in the contradictions attending the new credit-dependent forms through which, amidst stagnant wages in the neoliberal era, mass consumption was sustained. Yet as the crisis has unfolded over the past decade, in sharp contrast to the two great capitalist crises of the twentieth century it did not lead to a replacement of the regime of accumulation that gave rise to it. Unlike the break with the Gold Standard regime in the 1930s and the Bretton Woods regime in the 1970s, neoliberalism persisted. This could be seen in the rescue and reproduction of financial capital, the reassertion of austerity in fiscal policy, the dependence on monetary policy for stimulus, and the further aggravation of income and wealth inequality – all of which was made possible by the continuing economic and political weaknesses of working classes everywhere through this period.
We are now in a new conjuncture. It is a very different conjuncture than the one which led to the perception that neoliberalism, at the height of its embrace by Third Way social democracy, was ‘the most successful ideology in world history’.3 While neoliberal economic practices have been reproduced – as has the American empire’s centrality in global capitalism – neoliberalism’s legitimacy has been undermined. As the aftershocks of the US financial crash reverberated across the eurozone and the so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), this deepened the multiple economic, ecological, and migratory crises that characterize this new conjuncture. At the same time, neoliberalism’s ideological delegitimation has enveloped many political institutions that have sustained its practices, from the European Union to political parties at the national level. What makes the current conjuncture so dangerous is the space this has opened for the far right, with its ultra-nationalist, racist, sexist and homophobic overtones, to capture popular frustrations with liberal democratic politics.
The delegitimation of neoliberalism has restored some credibility to the radical socialist case for transcending capitalism as necessary to realize the collective, democratic, egalitarian and ecological aspirations of humanity. It spawned a growing sense that capitalism could no longer continue to be bracketed when protesting the multiple oppressions and ecological threats of our time. And as austerity took top billing over free trade, the spirit of anti-neoliberal protest also shifted. Whereas capitalist globalization had defined the primary focus of oppositional forces in the first decade of the new millennium, the second decade opened with ‘Occupy’ and the anti-austerity movements in Greece and Spain dramatically highlighting capitalism’s gross class inequalities. Yet with this, the insurrectionary flavour of protest without revolutionary effect quickly revealed the limits of forever standing outside the state.
A marked turn on the left from protest to politics has also come to characterize the new conjuncture, as opposition to capitalist globalization shifted from the streets to the state theatres of neoliberal practice. This is in good part what the election of Syriza in Greece and the sudden emergence of Podemos in Spain signified. Corbyn’s election as leader of the British Labour Party attracted hundreds of thousands of new members with the promise to sustain activism rather than undermine it. And even in the heartland of the global capitalist empire, the short bridge that spanned Occupy and Sanders’ left populist promise for a political revolution ‘to create a government which represents all Americans and not just the 1%’ was reflected in polls indicating that half of all millennials did not support ‘capitalism’ and held a positive view of ‘socialism’ – whatever they thought that meant.
This transition from protest to politics has been remarkably class-oriented in terms of addressing inequality in income and wealth distribution, as well as in economic and political power relations. Yet as Andrew Murray has so incisively noted, ‘this new politics is generally more class-focused than class-rooted. While it places issues of social inequality and global economic power front and centre, it neither emerges from the organic institutions of the class-in-itself nor advances the socialist perspective of the class-for-itself.’4 The strategic questions raised by this pertain not only to all the old difficulties of left parties maintaining a class focus once elected; they also pertain to how a class-rooted politics – in the original sense of the connection between working-class formation and political organization – could become transformative today. Given the manifold changes in class composition and identity, as well as the limits and failures of traditional working-class parties and unions in light of these changes, what could this mean in terms of new organizational forms and practices? And what would a class-focused and class-rooted transformation of the capitalist state actually entail?
While leaders like Tsipras, Iglesias, Corbyn and Sanders all have pointed beyond Third Way social democracy, their capacity to actually move beyond it is another matter. This partly has to do with their personal limitations, but much more with the specific limitations of each of their political parties, including even the strongest left currents within them, not preparing adequately for the challenge of actually transforming state apparatuses. The experience of the government in Greece highlights this, as well as how difficult it is for governments to extricate their state apparatuses from transnational ones.
All this compels a fundamental rethink of the relationship between class, party and state transformation. If Bolshevik revolutionary discourse seems archaic a hundred years after 1917, it is not just because the legacy of its historic demonstration that revolution was possible has faded. It is also because Gramsci’s reframing, so soon after 1917, of the key issues of revolutionary strategy – especially regarding the impossibility of an insurrectionary path to power in states deeply embedded in capitalist societies – rings ever more true. What this means for socialists, however, as we face up to a long war of position in the twenty-first century, is not only the recognition of the limitations of twentieth-century Leninism, let alone Soviet state practices, but also an appreciation of what inspired the communist break with social democracy in the first place. This can be expressed in what Jodi Dean admires today as communism’s expression of the ‘collective desire for collectivity’; more concretely it encompasses a commitment to working-class internationalism as opposed to national class harmony between capital and labour, an orientation to class formation and organization in the struggle against capital, and a recognition that socialist economic planning requires taking capital away from capital.
Democratic socialism in the twenty-first century must encompass all that was positive about the communist vision even while negating twentieth-century Communist party and state practices by virtue of an indelible commitment to developing democratic capacities to the end of democratizing the economy and the state. This is crucial for retaining a clear distinction between democratic socialism and social democracy. Indeed, given the latter’s own history of incorporation into the capitalist state and embrace of neoliberalism, engaging successfully in the long war of position in the twenty-first century will above all require discovering how to avoid the social democratization of those now committed to transcending capitalism. This is the central challenge for socialists today.