Extracts from a 2021 conversation with moderate Democrats

Here we have the farcical return of social fascism theory from the Weimar era Communists: the real enemy isn’t fascism, it’s social democracy/liberalism.

Making social democracy the enemy of true socialism certainly sounds like an ideological absurdity in the modern context, and no doubt it was one at the time. History’s not been kind to what seems to me nevertheless to have been a perfectly plausible theoretical dispute waged by a group of earnest, if relatively insignificant activists reacting to the ghastly stresses of early industrial capitalism. They can hardly be blamed for not seeing how poorly their ideas would scale. For God’s sake, did any of us see the sanity-rattling effects of Facebook or Twitter coming? Whoopee, Universal Democracy! didn’t scale nearly as well as we expected, nor did Omigod, Total Government Surveillance!

Social democracy and neoliberalism aren’t equivalent, but they are related, in the sense that neoliberalism is the clearest demonstration we’ve had to date of the reasons why the Marxist critique of social democracy was not simply a naive attempt to make the perfect the enemy of the good. Social democracies, even those with parliamentary majorities (I’d go so far as to say especially those with parliamentary majorities), are inherently weak. They cannot defend themselves against the predators among us who, when all else fails, can always blow the trumpet of xenophobia.

What should be as obvious to us good modern social democrats as it was to Marx, is that the Koch brothers of the world, not to mention the Jamie Dimons, will always find a way round our precious delusions about “equal justice under the law.” (Dear, sweet Joe Biden. Does anyone reading this blog actually think that he or the DNC have any idea why people whose great grandparents were yellow dog Democrats are now carrying Trump banners up the Capitol steps? Can nobody in Washington read German?)

But enough. The problem of the corruptions of power, of the subversion of good faith efforts to make human society less savage, won’t be solved any time soon, here or elsewhere. That’s the point of the Jacobin tweet, I think, at least if we’re willing to be charitable. If, in the end, social democracy can offer us only what Brecht once called die gerechte Verteilung der überirdischen Güter, then we really should be more charitable to our hardcore Marxist allies. Talk more, sneer less. It’s a start.

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Your reading is hardly naive, and you’re certainly not missing very much. What I’m proposing is less than an account, and very much less than a justification of historical reality. Rather I’m trying to emphasize how many more threads there are in that reality than there are in narratives such as yours —- or mine, for that matter — that purport to make some general sense of it.

When I say managerial class, I’m not insulting Marx, not in the context of this thread or any other. What I’m looking at, with a somewhat jaundiced eye, to be sure, is the evolution of the international economic and political order in the post-industrial age as examined most recently by Hobsbawm and Slobodian. Not from any great height, mind you, but from the much less exalted perspective of a kid who wanted to know why everyone around him seemed to think that getting his ass shot off in a global war to defend the ill-gotten gains of colonialism was not just the only path to an honorable manhood, but a sacred duty as well.

We all awaken in different beds, and ideology is a fickle mistress at the best of times, but I do think that there’s enough pathology in people who are sure they know where the outer boundaries of reason lie not to trust them to patrol them.

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Stalinism, as usual, has been muddying the waters here. I’ve been referring all along to the pre-1925 KPD, of course. Once Thälmann stuck his oar in, the identities of who represented the working class and who didn’t were of little real interest to anyone above the rank of corporal. As I’ve already said, this maneuvering was more or less the name of the game in the European politics of the 1930s—proxy wars of a kind less familiar to us now than those of the Cold War. To be honest, it baffles me that we didn’t recognize the latter for what they were, given that they arrived so promptly in 1947, even before all the remaining consequences of the 1930s had been decently interred.

Interestingly, these proxy wars were repeated in embarrassingly comic opera fashion in the 1960s, as anyone who was a member of the SDS or their European equivalents at the time could tell you. I have vivid memories of sitting on folding chairs in the damp cinder block basements of community centers or empty university classrooms back then, listening to emissaries from the CPUSA or SWP explaining at great length to us earnest cherubs of the New Left precisely how one recognized pre-revolutionary conditions. Sigh…. Green as we were then, we definitely weren’t that green.

Nothing for you to bother yourself about, of course. Just trying to keep the dog-eared edges of the leftist error archives all squared up for the next go-round with the forces of reaction.

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I don’t read steven t johnson’s comments, and as a result I’m not going to understand the meaning of your comment that begins with this remark unless you explain what it is that you think steven t johnson is right about.

Well, if you don’t read his comments, it must be for some reason. If the reason is that you haven’t found them worth your time, then you’ll probably come to the same conclusion about mine. Which, in the greater scheme of things, is probably as it should be.

One other thing, though. I’m happy to concede that whether or not the leadership of the KPD could rightly be called an insignificant group of activists depends on one’s perspective. Early on in this cataclysm we’ve been describing, they looked powerful enough. From my perspective, the street level characterization of their potential as a mass movement as depicted in Berlin Alexanderplatz, although somewhat romanticized, is probably accurate enough. In any event, Döblin was there, and I was not.

In the broader view, though, the backing of those who controlled the means of production went a long way toward making the NSDAP, rather than the KPD, the party of the working class. The Comintern was simply in no position to match resources with them. Similar events played out in Spain, Italy, and elsewhere in Europe. So, as an old SDSer (Students for a Democratic Society, not Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, just so’s there’s no confusion.) who still thinks the Port Huron Statement was a pretty good idea, I rate them insignificant in their effects on the outcome of the left/right battles of the 30s, not in the lingering influence of their ideas.

The left has always had the same enemies, and being able to outsmart them has rarely helped us much when it comes down to the inevitable power struggle. In that sense, the radical left of 1918 in Germany did turn out to be insignificant, as have I and my comrades of 1968. It’s a long war, though, and whatever happened during our own time in the trenches, we’ve no reason to regret the part we played in it. As insignificances go, I believe ours was very much worth pursuing. Presumably theirs was too, else why would I be here?

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This squabble over what the voting tallies revealed about which—if any—party represented the German working class pre 1933 is pretty much all my fault, and I apologize for the consternation I seem to have caused.

When I said that those who controlled the means of production were partly responsible for making the NSDAP the party of the working class, I meant it to be an ironic observation. Given the audience, I should probably have taken a little more straightforward approach. (Irony is dead, after all. It’s only the battle scars of us old curmudgeons on the left that make us shy away from assisting in the funerary preparations.) Anyway, in more detail, my view of the matter goes something like this:

a) In times of stress, the powerful in first world societies prefer the right to the left, and direct their support accordingly. This was as true of Trump, at least initially, as it was of Hitler, but we comfort ourselves with the thought that our institutions are more resilient, and our times are not as dire. So far that has proven to be true. Will it still be true four years from now, or even two years from now?

b) The Bolsheviks, most especially Stalin, considered control of European left parties to be essential to their geopolitical interests. (Which was probably not as paranoid an assessment as it might seem, given that they were still embroiled in fending off the White insurrection and its Western supporters.) If one is seeking a motive for the Comintern’s poisonous meddling in the affairs of all German parties of the left from 1918 on, there seems no reason to look any further.

c) The SPD was preoccupied with its own internal schism over the war, and was no longer the undivided voice of working class interests, if indeed it ever had been.

d) After the Hindenburg intervention, the Reichstag fire, and more particularly after the passage of the second Gleichschaltungsgesetz, there was arguably only one working class party in Germany, regardless of the private allegiances of individuals. And no, the responsibility for this outcome wasn’t directly or entirely attributable to the paranoia of plutocrats, but they were definitely a significant part of the unholy alliance that was responsible.

The moral of this story seems simple enough to me: the center, including so-called social democratic parties, invariably seeks to protect itself from the right, and the cheapest way to do this is to betray the genuine interests of the left. In desperate times this may mean making a Hawley or even a Quisling out of yourself. In times of relative stability, it’s generally safe to remain a Clinton.

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Yes, that might for the best. I am curious, though, given his pedigree and curriculum vitae, when and why you think he became a Trumpist extremist. Looking at the record, you could be forgiven for concluding he’s not likely to be a social democrat, but would you have figured him for a fascist collaborator?

As long as we’re considering metamorphoses, have a look at LBJ, the greatest American social democrat of our era. How come, do you suppose, he felt he needed to gift his enemies on the right with a colonial war? What do you make of Bill and Hillary, modest social democrats, at least by Arkansas standards? What in the name of Moloch does Bill’s welfare reform, or Hillary’s savagery toward the Honduran left have to do with the ideals of social democracy? If we skip over to Germany and look at the modern SPD’s support for Hartz IV, we could easily make the same observation. From my perspective, given social democrats like these, one might as well be a communist, assuming one is going to be a leftist at all.

You say the left is stupid to take positions that keep them from winning elections. The truth is, the beautifully reasonable with all deliberate speed folks, modest social democrats absolutely included, have led us to where we are today. Are they happy now? Is anyone?

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I’m pretty sure some people are happy now. Do you know nobody who is happy?

You say you haven’t heard of Döblin, but I’m guessing you probably have heard of Brecht:

Das arglose Wort ist töricht. Eine glatte Stirn/Deutet auf Unempfindlichkeit hin. Der Lachende/Hat die furchtbare Nachricht/Nur noch nicht empfangen.

And now I really am out of here. Thanks for all the fish….

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steven t johnson has the historical right of it here, I’m afraid. There just isn’t any sure way to reason in advance with the forces of history. You pays your political capital — to the extent that you understands it — and you takes your choice. Sometimes you end up face down in a ditch even before the issue is ever truly joined, sometimes you end up among the Trümmerfrauen, with only the vaguest inkling of what it was all about in the first place. Occasionally you survive to write an die Nachgeborenen, or establish and ordain the Marshall Plan and the Strategic Air Command.

So, okay, what have we really learned in the 100 years since Liebknecht and Luxemburg stumbled into martyrdom, and the SPD traded its birthright for a mess of nationalist pottage? Are we talking a modest reasonableness here, or sclerosis? One might be forgiven for thinking that the ship has been righted, and that we shouldn’t mess with it the way Jacobin would have us do, but I doubt even Francis Fukuyama believes that suppressing the antithesis is a foolproof guarantee that the dialectic will never trouble us again.

Did neoliberalism and the managerial class successfully navigate the end of the Pax Americana, and lead us not into temptation, but into a peaceful multipolar world order? In a word, no. Are we wrong to think that instead they gave us casino capitalism, the rustbelt, and in their zeal to eradicate anything to the left of the managerial class, the idiocracy of Trump? I think we could come reasonably close to making that case. No one wants us to, of course, who stands to lose from anything like a necessary and sufficient reform of the status quo. Sadly, this often seems to include, if not exactly everyone, almost everyone I get to talk to.

Still, we persist. I’m old, so my persistence is of less consequence than it used to be, but I do, nevertheless, make my tithe to the DSA, not the DNC, and reckon that Bhaskar Sunkara is underrated. Best I can manage under the circumstances.

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At 77, I’m hardly that young. Anyway, what my age has to do with the nature of our disagreement, I’m not entirely sure. I’m aware that many of the commenters on this blog think that stasis is the surest sign of rationality in politics — the slow boring of hard boards, and all that. A significant number of those same commenters also argue that progress is being made, however slowly, and that people of my political persuasion should take more care not to upset the applecart. In 1968, it was You fools, all you did was get Nixon elected. What I’m hearing now isn’t a lot different.

I disagreed then, and I disagree now. While the Democratic Party in the US continues doing its utmost to snatch defeat from the jaws of its occasional victories, I say this: Unless you’re prepared to lose in the short run, and use the loss to sharpen your arguments, you’re just part of the enemy’s baggage train.

In my more cynical moments, I also wonder at how rarely these putatively moderate positions are taken in good faith. (For the record, I don’t think that was true of LBJ. I agree with Halberstam’s assessment — and yours — about the honesty of his political calculations. Nevertheless I disagree that his was the wisest course possible at the time).

In the case of those Democrats, however, who are consistent in warning us that unless they behave like Republicans, they’ll never be able to govern, and we’ll all suffer for it, I wonder if it’s really the people’s suffering that’s motivating them, rather than the size of the rewards they’ll personally reap from their demonstrations of docility once they leave office. Whose ox is being gored? is always a legitimate question when listening to a politician’s rhetoric. As I look back to 1992–2000, for example, the most charitable thing I can find to say about the Clintons is that they both did their damndest to make sure that come what may, it was never going to be their ox that got itself gored.

As for pointless moral stances, consider the apocryphal quote, supposedly from Gandhi: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Consider Martin Luther King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail, or my observation that in the face of a threatened putsch by at least half of the Republican Party, Biden, like Obama, is still pursuing the chimera of national unity.

So no, you can’t govern if you can’t get elected, but there’s also little point in getting elected if you can’t accomplish what is needful once you do.