Victory in Defeat

When is defeat a victory?

When you have won the future.

One of the biggest strengths of socialist organizing is its focusing on mass movements and the future. The power of mass movements is that short term loses do not actually stop the movement.

There is no bill to be defeated.

No candidate to lose.

No date that marks the end of the struggle.

84%

Bernie Sanders won 84% of caucus goers under 29 and 58% of caucus goers under 44.

This is winning the future. In a decade people who voted for an avowed socialist for president will dominate the Democratic Party. There will be defeats and retreats in the meantime, but this is the future. Socialism is on the march and will not be destroyed.

Revolution or Democracy?

The major question facing socialists is the whether or not socialism is possible without total revolution.

Much of early Marxist theory and pre-WW1 socialism was premised on the idea that absent an actual revolution there was no way to overthrow capitalist control of the economy and government. Capitalists control the wealth of society and therefore have significant resources to overwhelm any non-violent movement to redistribute wealth. Additionally any move toward socialism would so threaten this group that even the smallest steps are likely to bring about swift retribution. Therefore it was the role of socialists to best bring about a worker revolution. The fury of the workers would wash over the capitalist institutions and the police protecting them through sheer numbers. Banks, business, and utilities would be forcibly taken from the capitalists and placed under democratic control.

Within this group there was a large division over Leninism and heightening the contradictions within capitalism. Lenin argued the revolution can only be carried out once the apex of contradiction within capitalism has been created; trying to bring about socialism incrementally was doomed to failure. Opposing this view was the majority of the international socialists, including Rosa Luxemburg. First and foremost it was the duty of socialists to help the workers and oppressed around the world, then to bring about the revolution. They persuasively argued that revolution was not possible without the trust of the workers, and it was necessary to help them in order to lead them.

While this was the major split in socialist thought prior to the First World War there were early manifestations of political actionists.

Political actionists argue for the position that capitalist democracy can be taken over and co-opted for socialist action. As a larger and larger percentage of the nation becomes wageworkers a huge natural constituency for socialist politics is created. From this a socialist party should be able to overwhelm capitalist candidates for office, and take over the levers of government. Laws can be passed nationalizing banks and utilities. This creates more popularity for the governing socialists, allowing them to push further democratic control of the economy. Eventually this process weakens the capitalist institutions to the point where they can be drowned in a bathtub.

Political Actionistism was particularly strong in the United States. All but the most radical US socialists believed in political actionism. Even the forth convention of the Industrial Workers of the World split in to two factions over this issue. Most intellectual socialists in the United States also supported political actionism, including W.E.B Du Bois. The most powerful and popular socialists in the United States were not just organizers and intellectuals, but politicians. Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas, Victor Berger.

Here Bernie Sanders is moderate, and thoroughly in the mainstream of US socialist thought. He believes that the time is right for the first steps of the political actionist agenda. Bring about a groundswell of popular support and sweep leftists and socialists in to control. From there enact the first stages of socialist reform. Eugene Debs believed that in the US context that a presidential campaign is most likely to bring about this political revolution.

It is somewhat ironic that in our current political context that many liberal wonks are implicitly supporting revolutionary socialism. By arguing that simple socialist steps, like single payer health care, are impossible in the political context of the United States they are really saying that the only way you will have any socialism is if you pry it out of capitalists by force. Their cries ring familiar to those of 19^th century German and British intellectuals. Patience! Restraint! Work with the System! One day Clinton Lloyd George will give us health insurance!

One or the other, the pen or the sword.

My Name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

"Look upon my works ye mighty and despair!"

"Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away."

I find this a fitting epitaph for the once mighty republican establishment. Reduced to recruiting hucksters like Glenn Beck to fight against a monster of their own creation. Their works all crumbled to dust in the face of angry bigotry.

Sanders

Bernie Sanders is not a socialist.

Socialism has a meaning, it has a program, it has an end goal.

For a politician or party to be socialist its ultimate aim must be democratic control of the economy. There can be differences over the exact program, the means to reach this goal, or the proper timeline; however, this must be the overarching principle of any socialist.

Bernie Sanders in not a socialist, democratic or otherwise.

Bernie Sanders does not believe in the collapse of capitalism.

Bernie Sanders does not endorse seizing the means of production.

Bernie Sanders does not want the state to control the flow of capital.

Then what is Bernie Sanders? He is a social democrat. He believes the worst impulses of capitalism must be controlled, and capital regulated. He wants to erect a welfare state similar to those in Scandinavia. He wishes for more democratic control of the government.

While these are all laudable goals, they do not fundamentally challenge capitalism as an economic theory. Nor do they truly change the class structure in the United States.

In many ways Sanders follows inverts the trajectory of the social democratic parties in Europe. When they were founded the major social democratic parties of Western Europe were avowedly socialist. Slowly, as they gained political power in the years following the two world wars, this position shifted to the modern social democratic parties we see in Europe today. They no longer advocate democratic control of the economy and capital, but merely seek to limit capitalist destruction. In the worst cases, such as France, they are fully subordinated to capitalist control.

Sanders wishes to alter this trajectory for the Democratic Party in the United States. He seeks to take a social democratic party that has been thoroughly corrupted by capitalists and begin to bend it back towards advocacy on behalf of the working class.

Whether this will work remains to be seen.

Здравствуйте товарищи!

I am no longer a member of the despised lumpen-proletariat, but have secured a position as a wage slave.

Due to this, and the impeding ascendency of glorious leader Sanders to the presidency, I have decided to resurrect my little blog.

The core concept will be somewhat different than the original purpose of this site. When I first blogged here it was to vent frustration at what passed for conventional wisdom in the foreign policy community. This will still be a portion of the content I produce, but I would like to spend time addressing actual socialist theory and practice. Expect about 20% theory, 30% sarcasm, and 50% analysis from here on.

I look forward to writing here on a regular basis in the New Year. To that end, my first post will be up later today discussing what socialism actually means, as compared to what Bernie Sanders talks about.