International socialists believe President Obama is opening a window to socialism
To bring about socialism, American socialists work with everyone from environmentalists to Islamic extremists
The Left does not reject the prospect of violent socialist revolution
Wilson’s war socialism is not what the reds had in mind, at least in terms of its rhetorical content and its reliance upon industrial barons rather than the dictatorship of the proletariat. (Forget, if you can, that practically every socialist regime the world has ever seen has far more closely resembled Wilson’s version than Marx’s.) One of the reasons that socialists fail to recognize the socialism in Wilson is that Wilson was a nationalist—a frank one who made his mark on the world by making war on America’s enemies.
Socialism, as envisioned by Marx and his immediate acolytes, was to be an international affair. For the modern academic Marxists, it still is. But internationalist socialism is almost exclusively an intellectual affair, a theoretical exercise for tenured radicals and their epigones. There is an easily identifiable academic flavor to be found in the publications of the major academic journals of socialism. One does not imagine that Hugo Chávez or Kim Jong Il spends a lot of time reading them.
But we should revisit the internationalist tendency, if only briefly, because it tells us something about the kind of socialism we have in the United States, where the sort of socialism that grows amid Harvard ivy—as opposed to the socialism that grows up out of actual revolutionary movements, i.e., the socialism that grows from the barrel of a gun—has influence comparable to, if not greater than, the kind of socialism that comes down through the American tradition of labor radicalism and populist movements.
Intellectual internationalist socialism offers the sort of theoretical structure that proves irresistible to Western academics. It is easy to lampoon—in fact, it lampoons itself. Consider this recent essay by socialist writer Dan Jakopovich, titled, “In the Belly of the Beast: Challenging U.S. Imperialism and the Politics of the Offensive.” He begins,
This work is an exploration of the required strategic path of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggle in the United States, considered both in relation to the specific domestic circumstances and the global role and function of the U.S. and its capitalist socio-economic forces. I investigate how the achievement of international socialist change might depend on the state of U.S. imperialism, and how anti-imperialist resistance in the U.S. might have to strategically engage with the realities of the U.S. political system and social and economic situation.
I will begin by identifying certain possible political implications of the “superstructural” element (stressed by Schumpeter for instance) in the interpretation of variations in the nature of imperialisms, as applied to the United States.
In the next section, I briefly examine the differing strategic argumentation of Marx and Engels, Lenin and Samir Amin regarding the “spatialization” of anti-systemic change, the potential and presumed role of simultaneous anti-systemic victories across the capitalist center, and the opposite concepts of the (peripheral and semi-peripheral) “weakest links in the imperialist chain” and “delinking.”
Lastly, largely on the basis of a Gramscian theoretical instrumentarium, I try to adapt the notions of the “national-popular,” “self-emancipation,” and a “system of alliances” to the U.S. situation. I will attempt to concretize the dialectical interrelationship between united and popular frontist approaches in U.S. circumstances, and the main subjects of anti-imperialist change. This will necessitate an evaluation of some of the central strategic dilemmas and differences among the American Left, which I attempt to reconcile through a modified new strategic synthesis.1
Just so. Hugo Chávez simply seizes factories and whole industries when it suits THE PLAN, having no obvious need of a Gramscian theoretical instrumentarium, or an instrumentarium of the non-Gramscian sort, for that matter, and his spatialization seems to take care of itself. I doubt Chávez has read a word of Schumpeter. Mao just shot people, and that seemed to work for him.
Jakopovich’s first section is titled “Imperialist Subjectivity,” in which he sneers at lowbrow “vulgar Marxism.” But if you can get past the pretentious cant, Jakopovich does have some useful observations to make about how the supposedly internationalist creed of socialism got mixed up with nationalism in Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam, Venezuela, Iraq, Cuba, Iran—which is to say, virtually every place socialism has been seriously explored outside of university classrooms and nearby cafes. The problem, which Lenin immediately confronted after leading the first successful communist revolution, is that Marx’s vision of a simultaneous worldwide revolution among workers—whose countries exist at radically different levels of development and economic sophistication—is an extraordinarily unlikely thing. Jakopovich writes,
Lenin revised [the internationalist] thesis through his theory of the “weakest link in the imperialist chain.” He stressed that “the development of capitalism proceeds extremely unevenly in different countries. It cannot be otherwise under commodity production. From this it follows irrefutably that socialism cannot achieve victory simultaneously in all countries. It will achieve victory first in one or several countries, while the others will for some time remain bourgeois or pre-bourgeois. This is bound to create not only friction, but a direct attempt on the part of the bourgeoisie of other countries to crush the socialist state’s victorious proletariat.”
Despite his often greatly mistaken application of this principle, Lenin was right in attempting to dialectically integrate complex, context-specific tactics and strategies into a common strategic framework. “The mechanistic rigidity. . . cannot understand . . . how the Communist International does not for a moment abandon the world revolution, striving to use every means at its disposal to prepare and organize it, while the Russian workers’ state simultaneously tries to promote peace with the imperialist powers and the maximum participation of imperialist capitalism in Russia’s economic construction. . . . The mechanistic rigidity of undialectical thought is incapable of understanding that these contradictions are the objective, essential contradictions of the present period.”
. . . Only the failure of revolutions in the West fully raised the problem of delinking for Lenin and his party.2
This is an elaborate way of writing that socialism is, by its nature, opportunistic, and that, as a political philosophy, it provides its own rationale for its opportunism. If you can’t have a worldwide revolution, you can have national revolutions in Russia, China, and Venezuela. If you can’t have a national revolution, you can have socialism implemented bit-by-bit, a la Chávez. If you can’t have a real nationwide socialist program, you can still implement bits of socialism in the parts of the political economy that Lenin would have identified as the “weakest links.” In the United States, that means having a socialist education system and an increasingly socialist healthcare system, taking advantage of the fact that a misapplied body of moral reasoning holds that the most vulnerable—children, the sick—cannot be left to the devices of amoral capitalism. (In truth, it is the vulnerable who most need the plentiful resources provided by free-market economies.)
American conservatives have from time to time—and especially since the election of Barack Obama—described the progressive project in the United States as “socialism” and their opponents as “socialists.” This rhetorical gambit is largely met with scorn and derision on the part of the Democratic party, the Left at large, the traditional media (which is indistinguishable from the first two), and most of polite society, including much of conservative polite society. But there are some political analysts who take that argument seriously, and they are not part of the Right—quite the opposite in fact: they are the international socialists themselves.
A subsection of the Obama “movement” website “Organizing for America” is titled, “Marxists/Socialists/Communists for Obama.” In case you don’t get the picture, they explain, “This group is for self-proclaimed Marxists/Communists/Socialists for the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency. . . . We support Barack Obama because he knows what is best for the people!”
When it comes to the United States, “the battle against the militaristic Right . . .is a central component of an integrated international strategy for systemic change in our analysis,” Jakopovich writes. He offers up a laundry list of U.S. policies, foreign and domestic, that he believes should be the subject of close attention from the internationalist socialist movement: foreign policy in Latin America, military spending, trade policy, internal economic policy, etc. And lest you think that a revolutionary socialist would view both of the two major U.S. political parties with near-equal disdain, consider that, when it comes to questions of U.S. foreign policy initiatives that irritate the international socialists, “Obama’s presidency has already managed to largely reverse the escalation of these trends,” he writes.3
The idea that the American progressive agenda, and the agenda of the Obama administration in particular, is part and parcel of a coordinated, worldwide socialist program is a joke—to everybody but the socialists themselves. Jakopovich identifies U.S. policy as a top concern for South American socialist movements, insisting, “The non-revolutionary priority of confronting the far Right in the U.S. is a direct result of the non-revolutionary U.S. context. Yet this strategy can be clearly connected with Left strategies in countries where anti-capitalists are largely already in power, namely Venezuela and Bolivia.” He continues,
Venezuela’s, Bolivia’s and Ecuador’s resource nationalism (or the assertion of energy sovereignty), as well as different forms of Latin American integration (like the proposed Bank of the South, Petrosur plan for a joint South American state-owned petroleum industry venture, Mercosur, and especially the ALBA—Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas—initiative for regional economic and social integration based on mutual aid, outside of neoliberal coordinates) all might require a degree of peace and stability in order to be able to carve out a space for a certain developmental “autocentricity,” outside of confines imposed by the ruling neo-liberal dogma.
The current differences in the approach of U.S. policy-makers to state clientelism, manifested by the disagreements regarding Bush’s proposed trade agreement with Colombia (for instance), are not irrelevant, as further confirmed by the nervousness of the far Right elite on this issue.
. . . The recent aggressive doctrine of preemption is particularly dangerous for the Left’s prospects in Latin America. Socialists cannot leave these popular regimes and movements alone in the face of the ferocity of militaristic violence.4
It is important to note that the socialists’ call for cooperation against the capitalist Yankees extend beyond defensive fears that the United States will work to undermine—or even to overthrow—socialist governments in the Americas. Notice the high priority Jakopovich pays to questions of banking and state-owned enterprises—and, above all, to the pending U.S.-Colombia free-trade agreement. Free trade, as we have seen, is anathema to socialists of both the international and nationalist variety. (And, indeed, the two factions have learned to play together nicely since the 1930s. Note that the professed international socialist Jakopovich praises the “resource nationalism” of the Chávez regime.)
Turning to domestic U.S. politics, Jakopovich cites the progressive mobilization against the Bush administration—particularly the anti-war movement—as “a window to socialism.” Advancing the socialist agenda, he writes, is difficult when working in coalition with the Democratic party—because the Democratic party is, whatever its other faults, not a revolutionary Marxist front—but it is not impossible. The main shortcoming is that the Democrats’ piecemeal approach “conditions the principles on which socialist engagement with the Democratic Party should be based.” Thus, while he accepts the need for cooperating with Democrats against the Right, Jakpovich cautions socialists against being exploited as “embellishment for neoliberal and ‘realist’ foreign and domestic policies.” The focus, he says, “should remain on developing solidaristic structural reforms, as a ‘window to socialism.’ ”5
What does that “window to socialism” in U.S. politics look like for the internationalist socialists? According to Jakopovich, it looks a lot like Jesse Jackson. Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition” strategy—the formation of a group too weak to take over the Democratic Party but strong enough to cost Democrats elections and political power—appeals to American socialists, who lack both raw numbers and sufficient ready allies to enact their agenda or achieve electoral power on their own. (It’s worth remembering that in their literature, socialists incessantly denounce democracy per se. “Real democracy,” as they define it, is socialism. Democracy that produces outcomes other than socialism is not, in the socialists’ understanding, real democracy.) What Jakopovich hopes to create is a Rainbow Coalition for socialists:
Transitional politics could preserve their full meaning only if approached within this longer-term programmatic context. Some new “Rainbow Coalition” is probably unlikely at the moment (though it should remain a medium-term objective), but the current engagement with the Democratic Party (especially its “outer layers”) might serve as an important springboard for reviving mass social movements as an indispensable leverage for progressive electoral initiative. Jesse Jackson’s progressive-populist Rainbow Coalition, an opposition movement or “party within the party,” illustrated the serious potential of this strategy. For instance, it successfully mobilized over such issues like Reagan’s Supreme Court nomination of rightist Robert Bork. But it achieved much more than that. “As millions of Americans saw when Jackson spoke at the Democratic Convention in Atlanta last summer, the appeal of class . . . tapped emotions and released energies as no other politician in memory has been able to do. . . . At the end of the long season of primaries . . . Jackson had won elections or caucuses in almost every important city in the country (including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston and Los Angeles), a majority of the states in Deep South, as well as Michigan, Maine, Vermont, Alaska and other Northern states where a winning black candidacy had been thought impossible. He had mobilized millions of voters on a platform of “economic justice,” racial justice, and the realignment of America’s relations with the Third World. In Atlanta, his forces raised previous taboo subjects, such as Palestinian rights, “soak-the-rich” taxation and significant restraint in military projects and expenditures. . . . So impressive was the Jackson presence that Dukakis was forced to negotiate an “Atlanta Pact” promising the Jackson forces a prominent role in the campaign and in the administration if Dukakis won, plus support for Jackson on a number of special items on the Rainbow agenda.6
If you are wondering how a self-professed communist such as Van Jones ended up in Obama’s White House, why so many people affiliated with explicitly socialist and communist organizations have ended up with prominent roles (as well as behind-the-scenes roles) in the Obama administration, this should shed some light on the question. Obama was made president of the United States by the anti-war movement, and the anti-war movement, in the United States, was explicitly and unquestionably a creature of socialism. The most prominent of the anti-war rallies were staged by International ANSWER, an offshoot of the Stalinist World Workers’ Party. ANSWER’s steering committee is practically a socialist international in miniature. As Ryan O’Donnell reported at the time,
ANSWER’s steering committee reads like a “Who’s Who” of radical political organizations. The most influential member of ANSWER’s steering committee, Ramsey Clark’s pet project known as the International Action Center (IAC), is considered by many observers to be little more than a communist front organization for an obscure Stalinist organization known as the World Workers Party (WWP). Yet, the IAC is not the only member of ANSWER’s steering committee committed to extremist causes. The Korean Truth Commission and Pastors for Peace are staunch allies of Kim Jong Il and Fidel Castro, respectively, and both groups continue to support these murderous regimes’ violation of International law. In addition to its role as a front for the support of totalitarian/communist governments in North Korea and Cuba, members of ANSWER’s steering committee such as the Muslim Student Association and the Free Palestine Alliance continue to provide ideological, logistical and financial support for organizations devoted to the destruction of the state of Israel, including the terrorist group, Hamas. A comprehensive investigation of the members of ANSWER’s steering committee make it clear that the organization is in actuality one of Peace’s greatest enemies.
. . . ANSWER’s organizers, many of whom are documented members of the WWP, have frequently refused to let devoted political leftists and peace advocates speak at rallies if they hold a pro-Israel position. The most celebrated of these incidents occurred when Rabbi Michael Lerner was barred from speaking at a recent IAC anti-war rally in San Francisco. Yet, at its January march in Washington, ANSWER “handed a microphone to Abdul Malim Musa, a Muslim cleric who on October 31, 2001 appeared at a news conference at the National Press Club with other Muslim activists and members of the New Black Panther Party, ‘where speakers asserted that Israel had launched the 9/11 attacks and that thousands of Jews had been warned that day not to go to work at the World Trade Center.’ At that press conference, Musa blasted the ‘Zionists in Hollywood, the Zionists in New York, and the Zionists in D.C.’ who ‘all collaborate’ to put down blacks and Muslims.”7
Among the groups that marched in the October 2010 One Nation Working Together rally in Washington, D.C., hosted by MSNBC Democratic commentator and Obama enthusiast Ed Schultz:
• The Service Employees International Union, Barack Obama’s single largest campaign supporter
• Coffee Party Progressives, a group formed in reaction to the Tea Party movement
Okay, so those are the usual suspects. And they were joined by:
• Socialist Party U.S.A. (an official sponsor)
• Communist Party U.S.A (an official sponsor)
• Committee of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
• Democratic Socialists of Ohio
• Democratic Socialists of America
• Socialist Alternative
• Socialist Worker Party
• Organizacion Marxista-Leninista de los Estados Unidos
• Party for Socialism and Liberation
• New York City Democratic Socialists of America
• Ex-Offenders Association of Pennsylvania
At least the felons were ex-offenders.
Many of the Obama administration’s white suburban supporters—particularly its white, suburban, Jewish supporters—have been mystified by the administration’s hostility toward Israel, a dramatic break with longstanding U.S. foreign policy toward a critical ally. Many Democratic strategists have said in private they were equally perplexed by the administration’s controversial decision not to prosecute the New Black Panthers Party voter-intimidation case in Philadelphia, a case that saw a uniformed, jackbooted member of that explicitly racist organization menacing would-be voters with a nightstick. But if you understand the socialists’ “Rainbow Coalition” strategy—making common cause with environmentalists (Jakopovich goes out of his way to praise Iceland’s “Green-Left Movement,” which he ranks with the radical SYRIZA leftists in Greece as the great signs of international hope and change), Islamists, secular Palestinian militants, left-wing nationalists like Hugo Chávez, the anti-war movement, and anti-American movements of any serviceable type—then Obama’s hostility toward Israel and his administration’s solicitousness toward the New Black Panthers is understandable.
Barack Obama is a talented politician, and he understands the Realpolitik of the Left. He knows that it was the anti-war movement that helped him to defeat Hillary Clinton and ensured his victory over John McCain. And, since President Obama has no plans to make any sudden moves out of Iraq or Afghanistan, he has to court that socialist Rainbow Coalition in other ways. Jackson’s original Rainbow Coalition won him and his supporters a place at the table in a Democratic party still dominated by the likes of Michael Dukakis. The socialists’ new Rainbow Coalition is aimed at the same thing: winning them a place at the table in a party in which the Wall Street Democrats (Rahm Emmanuel, Peter Orzsag, Robert Rubin) are locked in a contest for power with the “community-organizing” gang (ACORN, the NAACP, the Democratic machines in New York, the District of Columbia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, etc.)
It does not matter much whether President Obama and the members of his administration see themselves as part of an international socialist vanguard (and, for the most part, they almost certainly do not see themselves that way). The international socialists themselves see the Obama administration as a part of their “window to socialism.” For the Obama administration and the Democratic Party at large, it’s enough that they know how to count votes. The most puritanical socialists are, of course, hesitant about getting all the way into bed with a party that courts corporate interests at least as vigorously as do the Republicans, and Wall Street interests even more so. Jakopovich, for example, advocates establishing local “Democratic clubs,” to be dominated by socialists, with the goal of taking over particular party organizations—from state parties to national groups such as the Progressive Democrats of America—one piece at a time, “pushing the boundaries of existing political space.”
I’ve relied heavily upon Jakopovich’s analysis here because he is one of the more lucid—and more open—of the self-professed socialists to have written on the subject specifically in the context of the waning Bush administration and the rising Obama administration. But one finds similar sentiments—and similar mixes of ideological and operational concerns—across the socialist spectrum.
It is worth bearing in mind that today’s socialists, for all their democratic rhetoric, do not disavow violence, either in rhetoric or in practice. Writing in a 2010 issue of the New Left Review, Slavoj Žižek, arguably the most influential leftist intellectual alive, calls explicitly for the use of violence—as he has in the past—and excuses—as he has in the past—the atrocities perpetrated by socialists in the name of socialism. In the same article, he explicitly disavows reliance upon democratic institutions for advancing the socialist cause. He refers to these twin proposals as the “de-fetishization of democratic institutions” and the “de-fetishization of violence.”8
It would be difficult to exaggerate the inhumanity of Žižek’s politics. “What was wrong with 20th-century Communism,” he writes, “was not its resort to violence per se—the seizure of state power, the Civil War to maintain it—but the larger mode of functioning, which made this kind of resort to violence inevitable and legitimized: the Party as the instrument of historical necessity, and so on.” Noting that U.S. policymakers have sought to use economic pressure to isolate and marginalize the brutal socialist regime in Venezuela—a government that suppresses free speech and engages in wanton political violence—he asks, “Are not defensive counter-measures in order?” He approvingly quotes one of Mao’s many mottos—“Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent!”—and goes on to argue that in a world without socialism, violence is always by definition legitimate:
From the standpoint of the subordinated and oppressed, the very existence of the state, as an apparatus of class domination, is a fact of violence. Similarly, Robespierre argued that regicide is not justified by proving the King had committed any specific crime: the very existence of the King is a crime, an offense against the freedom of the people. In this strict sense, the use of force by the oppressed against the ruling class and its state is always ultimately “defensive.” If we do not concede this point, we volens nolens “normalize” the state and accept its violence as merely a matter of contingent excesses. The standard liberal motto—that it is sometimes necessary to resort to violence, but it is never legitimate—is not sufficient.9
The point here is not that there exist fat and coddled European intellectuals with risible ideas about the use of violence; the point is that the Left still harkens to the call of Mao and Lenin, and that its calls for democratic approaches to socialist reform do not preclude other approaches to socialism, including its imposition through violence. The dictatorship of the proletariat is not a dream that dies easily. Žižek is not merely some crackpot radical ranting at a Parisian café; he is the toast of intellectual society in the United States and abroad, celebrated in the most rarified circles, lecturing and debating at the most elite venues, publishing in the most prestigious journals. His anti-establishment pose is amusing, but the more sobering fact is that he is the left-wing establishment, and he is still calling for the violent imposition of socialism by any means necessary.
“‘On ne saurait faire une omelette sans casser des oeufs.’ Translation: ‘One cannot expect to make an omelet without breaking eggs.’
“With those words in 1790, Maximilian Robespierre welcomed the horrific French Revolution that had begun the year before. A firm believer in using government to plan the lives of others, he would become the architect of the Revolution’s bloodiest phase—‘The Reign of Terror’ of 1793–94. Robespierre and his guillotine broke ‘eggs’ by the thousands in a vain effort to impose a centrally planned, utopian, ‘omelet’ society. . . .
“Every collectivist experiment of the twentieth century was heralded by socialists as the Promised Land. ‘I have seen the future and it works,’ the intellectual Lincoln Steffens said after a visit to Stalin’s Soviet Union. In The New Yorker in 1984, John Kenneth Galbraith argued that the Soviet Union was making great economic progress in part because the socialist system made ‘full use’ of its manpower, in contrast to the less efficient, capitalist West. But an 846-page authoritative study published in 1997, The Black Book of Communism, estimated that the communist ideology claimed 20 million lives in the ‘workers’ paradise.’ Millions more died in places like China, Cambodia, and North Korea.”
_________________________________
Lawrence W. Reed, Where Are the Omelets? 2005
When considering the American leftists who fall along the more moderate wing of the socialist spectrum, it is essential to keep in mind what that spectrum includes. As Adam Shaw put it in an American Thinker essay, “There are as many exact definitions of socialism as there are socialists. Yet they do have common characteristics. Love of big government, nationalization of industry, massive taxation, wealth redistribution, etc. all point towards socialism. Someone like [President Obama] would not even have to say he was a socialist in Western Europe; it would be assumed quite normally, without any fuss or conspiracy.”10
In fact, there are key aspects of Obama’s agenda that are socialist in all but name. But we have to understand that what the American Left has in mind is not red banners and workers’ committees. It is a top-down, managerial, Ivy League flavor of socialism, one that works its way through the “commanding heights” of the economy one sector at a time; having long controlled education and labor, they are looking to such issues as trade, finance, and energy. They have been emboldened by a major victory won for them by the Obama administration: the partial socialization of American healthcare.
This clearly is the way Žižek sees things. “I am a Leninist,” he said in a 2009 interview with The New Statesman. “Lenin wasn’t afraid to dirty his hands. If you can get power, grab it. Do whatever is possible. This is why I support Obama. I think the battle he is fighting now over healthcare is extremely important, because it concerns the very core of the ruling ideology.”11