Standpoint epistemology has turned the anecdotal account and categories of demography into badges of truth. But anecdotes don’t stand in place of general facts. A lazy person doesn’t explain the rate of joblessness. It only tells us why that person may not be working. And demographic categories are abstractions that cannot represent particular concrete situations. As I have said before on this blog, my whiteness reveals nothing about me as a person. As a white person, I could be anything beyond that meaningless classification. Now, anecdotes and demographics are stand-ins for objective or reasoned accounts of situations or interpretations of information. Our culture is shot through with these fallacies.
Perhaps nothing illustrates the latter fallacy—what I am calling the “appeal to identity”—better than the confrontation between Nina Turner and Hilary Rosen on CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time. In an argument intended to paint Joe Biden as bad on civil rights (a truth that may be accomplished in a myriad of other ways), Turner, a surrogate for the Bernie Sanders’ campaign, alerted viewers to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “warning” about “white moderates,” who, in a 1963 letter written from a Birmingham jail cell, suggested were “more devoted to ‘order’ than justice.”
The relevant clip is embedded in this clip from the Karen Hunter Show, the commentary for which represents the common interpretation of the dispute between Turner and Rosen (dwelling in Blue-no-matter-who land).
Rosen, defending Biden, countered that she understood MLK Jr. to be saying that “we should worry about the silence of white moderates.” Turner insisted Rosen’s interpretation was wrong. But instead of carefully explaining why, she responded indignantly with “Don’t tell me about Martin Luther King Jr. Are you kidding me?” Rosen interrupted. “Don’t use Martin Luther King against Joe Biden.” Then she said, “You don’t have that standing.”
Rosen apparently knew who Turner was going in, knew of her methods and politics, and expected that she was likely to pull something like this. Nina Turner sits on the faculty of Cuyahoga Community College where she teaches, among other things, African American cultural and intellectual history. One can see Turner in action on The Nina Turner Show, hosted by The Real News Network. There, for example, she has interviewed and expressed solidarity with Linda Sarsour, an Islamist and ally of the Nation of Islam, who expressed on Twitter a wish to take away outspoken secularist Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s vagina (Ali is a victim of female genital mutilation), saying that Ali didn’t deserve to be a woman. Bizarrely, Sarsour, who (sometimes) claims to be a “woman of color” (she is Palestinian), who argues that “oppression of women is absolutely shunned in the Islamic faith” (she entered into an arranged marriage at the age of seventeen), was tapped to co-chair the Women’s March on Washington. Turner’s interview with Sarsour was not a critical one. Like Sarsour, Turner is a paradigm of identity demagoguery.
With this awareness in mind, Rosen’s argument essentially took this form: “You don’t own the definitive meaning of King’s words on the grounds that you are black.” That’s what she meant by “standing.” Indeed, Turner doesn’t have standing as a black woman in this regard. This is nothing against Turner; nobody has standing in this regard. One’s racial identity lends no validity to one’s arguments. It’s a fallacious appeal to authority. It’s like supposing I have a special right to interpret the United States Constitution because I am a white man. Who would accept this claim but a white supremacist? However awkwardly she put it, Rosen wasn’t going to let Turner use skin color as an authority on the meaning of a text. Turner’s response was essentially said, “Yes, I will.”
The point of Rosen’s defensiveness was affirmed by Turner’s response. Rosen’s dismissal of Turner’s tactic infuriated Turner. She shot back, “Don’t tell me what kind of standing I have as a black woman in America! How dare you!” Rosen responded, “You have a lot of standing as a black woman in America.” “You don’t have a standing to attack Joe Biden using Martin Luther King’s words. That’s my point.” Turner came back with “Listen, don’t dip into what I have to say about the Reverend Martin Luther King. How dare you, as a white woman….” I have italicized key phrases to make sure the reader recognizes that Rosen did not inject race into the dispute. Turner was the one who asserted her race and insisted that it leant her point validity. She did this while diminishing Rosen’s interpretation on the basis of Rosen’s white identity. The appeal to identity is rooted in standpoint epistemology. This error is the basis of identity politics.
Predictably, the response has been overwhelmingly anti-Rosen. She “disrespected” Turner as a black woman. She “whitesplained” MLK Jr. to a black woman. That the backlash was directed at Rosen and not Turner tells us how far we have gone down the identity politics path. Turner is making a claim that being black means her understanding of Dr. King’s words automatically superior to that of a white person’s. She became apoplectic at the notion that a white woman would say such a thing to her (I suspect this does not happen very often). The left applauded.
Not to beat a dead horse, but you really do have to ask yourself: What does skin color have to do with the accuracy of interpretation? What special standing does a black person have to interpret another black person’s words? Do people working at Wal-Mart have a better understanding of Marx’s arguments in Capital than the Waltons, their class enemy? Why would poverty make people better able to grasp the complex economic and sociological forces that create and reproduce their situation? What on earth could explain the lack of class struggle and consciousness among the poor? Wouldn’t they organize and rebel against their conditions if they grasped the truth? Why are capitalists so damn good as keeping capitalism in place? How are the rich so damn good at keeping people poor?
Nina was trying to win the argument on the basis of her skin color. That’s not just nonsense, it’s racist. Imagine if the white woman tried that angle. What would the audience think? They’d think her a racist, of course. And they’d be right. Yet, in this case, the white woman sounds racist to many ears for not letting Turner use race to win an argument. Turner’s claim makes it appear as if Rosen is trying to erase Turner as a black person. This is a classic mark of identity politics. You can’t win an argument by asserting race or sex privilege. At least not rationally. You win arguments with facts and reason. You have to work from a theory.
Consider the correct method for going about such arguments. Karl Marx theorizes that there’s an objective structure shaping our lives, that one’s relationship to that structure determines his class location. These are material relations. One’s social location in the relations of production is not an imagined community. The proletariat is a class-in-itself. Some recognize the social class they’re in (the role of theory) and organize politically to become a class-for-itself. The capitalist class is a class-for-itself; because of this, its intellectuals have obtained a clearer grasp of the system. The bourgeois sees better because of its material advantage in knowing how the system works and in controlling that system. It does not see better because of its identity. Many capitalists are falsely conscious of their social location. Indeed, very few capitalists would admit that their power and privilege is oppressive and exploitative—and not because they are lying.
The counter to my argument might go something like this: “That’s like saying women don’t have any more insight into women’s suffrage.” Indeed, this was actually said to me by a comrade. But why would women have special insight into this? Some do. Some don’t. I know women who don’t know very much about women’s suffrage. Some know nothing about it. There is nothing about woman’s sex that makes her any better at interpreting a historical document or moment. This same comrade wondered about Bernie Sander’s privilege position with respect to the Holocaust on account of his Jewish identity. I asked him, why would Sanders be better able to grasp the history of the Holocaust on this basis? Is this a religious argument wherein God has put in Jews a privileged insight to have special standing in interpretations of this history? I put it sarcastically, but I was seriously. There’s a real problem here: if only Jews can see the truth of the Holocaust, then how can the rest of us know it? Is this an exercise in faith? Just trust the Jew? The argument reduces knowledge to ethnicity or religion and then gives ethnicity and religion privileged standing with respect to interpretation.
All my life I have had to listen to Christians tell me that I cannot have an opinion or valid interpretation of the Bible because I’m atheist. “How dare you, as an atheist, tell me, a Christian, what the Bible says!” But it turns out that, if you engage them in discussion, Christians routinely reveal a profound ignorance of the Bible. Of course, there are Christians who express opinions about the Bible that are quite sophisticated. But whether Christians get their Bible wrong or right has nothing to do with them being Christian. I don’t find this “As a Christian,” “As a Muslim,” “As a black women,” “As a gay man,” tactic convincing in the least. I find it obnoxious. Of course, the righteous indignation embedded in the throat clearing is strategic. But why do we put up with it?
Concerning Dr. King’s letter. I greatly admire Martin Luther King, Jr. But no man’s claims are infallible or always relevant. The Letter from Birmingham Jail, as it is most famously known, an open letter to King’s fellow clergymen, was unknown to the vast majority of the population at the time of its writing, even among many of those who were following or involved in the civil right movement. Its publication in the Atlantic Monthly under the title “The Negro is Your Brother” elevated its profile. The letter is strident in tone, roiling in anger and frustration. King writes:
“I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’ Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
Powerfully written, but it must be remembered that the white moderate, the liberal, was an ally to the civil rights movement. Without the support of liberals, the civil rights movement would not have accomplished nearly as much as it did—and in such a short time. What the movement accomplished within a generation was nothing short of a Second Reconstruction of American society, with court decisions, legislative action, and administrative policies dismantling the system of racial segregation, a system that had grown up over the decades following Emancipation, and criminalizing racial discrimination targeting blacks and other minorities. The fact is that Blacks were not in power during that period. White moderates were. White leaders were pressured by King and the movement, to be sure, but all the same, white leaders fought to change law and policy. They won, and the United States is a much better place today.
In our pursuit of justice, we must take care not to erase the work that people—black and white—did during this period by wrenching a polemic from its context. We must, furthermore, take care in using this polemic against persons living today, as if it’s a magical incantation that makes one’s point for her. It’s not that Joe Biden isn’t a problematic figure (it’s remarkable that he is earning so much support from the black community). It’s that the current period in which we live is such that an argument from 1963, written from a dingy jail cell in Birmingham by a man who was alone and frustrated, at a time when Jim Crow was the law in many states, is given more rhetorical prowess than it actually possesses. Much more relevant for our period is King’s words concerning the content of our character and equal treatment before the law. His sacrifice should at least have yielded that opportunity. It’s folks like Nina Turner who are keeping alive racial antagonisms.
Which brings me to the current situation in which Bernie Sanders and his supporters find themselves. It’s not over, but why is Sanders blowing it? He is blowing it. The 2016 version of the Sanders was on-message. His campaign eschewed identitarian nonsense. He told Americans truths that matter to everybody, such as the fact that mass immigration hurts American workers. (See Bernie Sanders Gets it on Open Borders Rhetoric—At Least He Did in 2015.) The 2020 version of Sanders is surrounded by such deeply unpopular figures as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Linda Sarsour, and Nina Turner. While he still advocates many of the same policies, his campaign has become corrupted by identity politics. These associations have compelled him to change one of his most pro-working class issues, his advocacy for restrictions on immigration. Indeed, he has taken it in the opposite direction (and this is still not extreme enough for Ocasio-Cortez, who has become a reluctant surrogate). The influence of identitarianism comes at an otherwise welcome moment in which people are rejecting progressivism and seeking to return the keys to the nation-state to the citizens. (See Bernie Sanders, Immigration, and Progressivism.) Working people don’t like people who run down their country. They want jobs and safe neighborhoods. They want their country to look out for them, to focus on their concerns. Tying socialism to identity politics kept working people home or casting their votes for Biden on Super Tuesday.
Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib holding Islamist Linda Sarsour’s book wearing a t-shirt erasing Israel.
The left will wander in the wilderness until it recognizes the meaning and importance of patriotism and sovereignty for working-class Americans. For example, the period of greatest progress and prosperity came after the nation restricted immigration and reduced the percentage of foreign-born from more than 13% of the population to less than 5%. During that period, it was the political right that wandered in the wilderness. Ever since those restrictions were removed (in 1965 by Democrats), working class fortunes have diminished and rightwing populism has flourished. Sanders could have represented a popular leftwing movement at a moment when populism is politics’ animating spirit. He could have made America American again. Instead his campaign has been hijacked by progressive identitarians, ideology extremists whose politics are quite useful to capitalism because they obscure class relations.
Nina Turner is not merely the surrogate for Sanders that she was in 2016. She is no less than the national co-chair of the Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. This means that Sanders has placed at the top of his leadership team a person who sees the world in racialist terms. Turner is part of a constellation of figures whom working-class Americans find profoundly alienating. Not because they are black or Muslim or whatever. But because this crowd doesn’t articulate the common interests of working-class America—at least not without smearing working class Americans as bigoted, nativist, and xenophobic. These cosmopolitan elites represent divisiveness when popular unity is needed. They speak ill of the very people with whom they claim solidarity. They call themselves socialists while disrupting class consciousness with identity politics. They’re misdirecting the left.
One cannot dismiss all this by claiming that identity politics are alienating to white working class folks because the latter are backwards and racist. All this is troubling to many blacks, as well, who are not going all in for Sanders. The immigration problem is particularly troubling for black Americans. Why do progressives defend mass immigration when so many black Americans are in need of work? It’s as if the power structure of America always wants black on the bottom. Foreign-born workers are desired more than black workers. Ocasio-Cortez and “the Squad” can get so exercised about immigration control. But why haven’t progressive cities established themselves as sanctuaries for members of the black community? Urban elites can’t allow ICE to find and remove criminal aliens from their cities, but the police kicking down doors and hauling black Americans to prison for drug possession is okay? No family separation there? The identitarian left seems to be all about immigrants. But not so much about citizens (black and white).
Bo Winegard, who was, until very recently, in a tenure-track position in psychology at Marietta College, has pinned an essay for Quintette, “I’ve Been Fired. If You Value Academic Freedom, That Should Worry You.” His case is very troubling for those of us who believe in the liberal values of intellectual liberty. But it is also troubling for those who have made their life’s work confrontation with right-wing ideas. It makes that job a lot harder.
Race realist Bo Winegard
Winegard does indeed appear to have objectionable views. While I am unfamiliar with the corpus of his work, I know a little something about it. I give a lecture in criminology on so-called “race realism” in my criminology class, and many of the folks Winegard quotes or admires are there exposed and criticized before students. Race realism is racism, I tell my students at the end—after telling them at the beginning to be patient with what they may find offensive as I avoid straw dogging the race realist argument. I show them the hazards of racial thinking and the many errors of evolutionary psychology, especially with the claims about differentiated grouped intelligence. I want students to know that racist hereditarian views are still around and are, in fact, mainstream. A cursory look at his work reveals that Winegard is at least sympathetic to many of the views I criticize.
One crucial piece of my critique is how the discipline of psychology continues to be a refuge for hereditarians like Winegard. IQ testing remains an industry and its aggregated findings reify racial categories. One routinely encounters the racist term “caucasian” in the discipline’s literature. Winegard can claim to have published peer-reviewed work because a discipline that accepts such assumptions will publish it. Racialists J. Philippe Rushton and his ilk are well published and have relied upon that fact to legitimize their racist views. Our job as rational humanists is to debunk this literature.
As important as debunking is, the RationalWiki pages used to undermine Winegard’s career are precisely the sort of stuff we must avoid using in this work. These pages are over-the-top, treating nationalism and concerns over population, immigration, and a certain pernicious religious ideology (Islam) as automatically “authoritarian” and “racist.” The entries are, frankly, obnoxious, the leftwing equivalent of Conservapedia. Its role in undermining intellectual freedom is akin to the rightwing’s TurningPoint USA and the professor watch lists. I would never use RationalWiki for debunking. It’s not a credible source. Such groups, whether on the left or the right, encourage students and others to harass teachers and disrupt their events, thus stifling free speech. In this case, interfering with the work of critique in the same arena.
I would never pursue the dismissal of a teacher or researcher on the basis of her views on this (or any other) subject. This is an argument that must be had in the open and on scientific terms. This can only happen if teachers and researchers are not punished for their views. Censoring, dismissing, harassing, and blacklisting people on the basis of political and ideological standpoint drives objectionable views underground where they remain unchallenged where they risk being accepted by those who do not have the expertise to doubt their veracity. Moreover, it gives them an argument that their views are so dangerous to the leftwing hegemonic structure of the contemporary academy that they must be censored and, on this account, they must be true. It allows them to paint themselves as modern-day Galileos.
This obsession with identity makes people put dumb things down in writing. The establishment seeks ways to divide the population into cul-de-sacs of identity (that are supposed to intersect in some way). It’s all about disuniting the proletariat, obscuring class relations, and undermining working class consciousness.
“Why can’t being a woman be an issue that guides us at the polls, when the political world has treated us unfavorably, limiting our reproductive rights, dismissing us in medicine, penalizing our careers when we choose to have families, providing us with no affordable options for child care and, generally, paying us less for the same work done by our male counterparts?”
Perhaps because not all women agree with everything Selinger wrote. Why does this writer think all women share her politics? Or that only a proper woman would. She does know that there are men who are committed to everything she has written here. It is about the issues or what’s between our legs? What are we struggling for?
“Part of this conflict lies with (mostly white) Republican women, 53 percent of whom voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Those women supported party politics over the ideology of womanhood — but maybe they shouldn’t have.”
Or maybe they should have. Or at least maybe they should not have voted for Clinton and instead voted for someone like Jill Stein. Maybe many of these women have sons, are tired of endless wars, and didn’t want to vote for a warmonger. I know several women for whom this was a major issue. That’s not a legitimate concern? Maybe they didn’t define themselves in terms of a master status and voted instead on an issue important to them as people.
Demographics make for shitty politics. It’s what the establishment does.
There are competing ideologies of womanhood. Many women prefer traditional values. The writer has a set of values and attempts to turn them into the one and only “ideology of womanhood” by wrapping them in an alleged essential identity.
This is the problem with identity. It makes a person think she can speak for everybody who shares her gonads or skin color or whatever. It’s presumptuous. Exclusive. Alienating. Those who don’t get it are not merely wrong. They are betrayers. They are bad people.
A study came out the other day showing how the more sexist an abstract man is the less likely he was to vote for Warren or other female candidates. But I hasten to emphasize that the question concerns a woman running as a Democrat. What if it were a woman running as a Republican?
But I wonder, does this relation run in the other direction? That is, are women more likely to support a woman running as a Democrat the more sexist they are towards men? Yeah, I know, sexism only runs in one direction. That’s a bunch of bullshit. I have sat in rooms and listened to women and their male allies (who virtue signal like mad) run men down. If they feel that it’s important for men to know what it feels like to be reduced to a personification of an abstract category, I have known what that feels like since I was a child. The point is that it is wrong, no? Then why do it? To be sure, it gathers power. But not to create equality. Besides, I don’t want to be part of a movement that runs people down on the basis of their gonads. I avoid those meetings if I can.
If identity is the reason to vote for a woman, then why not vote for a woman running as a Republican? Otherwise, don’t tell me I will never understand how important it is to little girls to see a woman president.
But let’s be honest. That’s not what is actually desired here. What is desired is a woman Democrat. It’s not even about enlightened politics. If that were true then the author would have voted for Stein. I bet she didn’t.
The argument boils down to a partisan appeal to “stay in your lane.” This is party ideology. The ideology of a bourgeois party. One that wages war constantly. One that operates on the politics of grievance. The identity angle is really about bringing people into the party of those terms. This was why the establishment selected Obama in 2008. These are exercises in hegemony.
When I hear progressives professing working class loyalties say, “This is our party,” I cringe. It’s not my party. Democrats don’t speak for me. Objectively, the party doesn’t speak for the working class. It speaks for the capitalist class.
Why do people assume I am down with this? But they do. And they know I am a Marxist and a socialist! “Does this mean you are pro-Trump?”
As the election season approaches (it’s already here!), I have been asked this question with increasing frequency. It’s as if we nobody has heard a damn thing we’ve said the whole time. Either one is a Democrat or one is a Republican.
You can’t hear other people when you live in a idea-proof box.
I can hear it now. “You can’t make this argument because you are a man.” Yet a lot women make this argument. Are they not really women? We see the same rhetoric with race. A black person doesn’t toe the progressive Democratic line and their blackness is suspect. They are an “Uncle Tom.” A gay man isn’t queer enough if he doesn’t accept the whole acronym (which he played no role in assembling).
Folks are actually individuals, and individuals come with different opinions. If one’s opinion is selected on the basis of sex or race, then has it actually been reasoned through? Sex is a material relations in a very narrow way. Race is not a material relation at all. Stop practicing cerebral hygiene.
Who was it who said that, and I paraphrase, it is difficult to reason oneself out of a position he did not reason himself into? When you start questioning the politics of identity, the entire system starts to unwind. That’s why resistance to articulating the points of opposition is so stubborn, even aggressive. You aren’t supposed to think as a person. You have to say in your lane. This was decided for you. Free thought is a right wing value.
While some may see the argument of Selinger’s piece as feminist (there are many feminist standpoints), this is not the feminism to which I subscribe. I very much desire to see the elimination of sexism in social life (same with racism). We increase our chances of making this a reality when we control the way society works. That will come through class struggle.
Capitalist relations have historically devalued women as a class because the system exploits the sexual division of labor. It’s not the first system to do this. But, if we organize in class terms, we might make it the last system to do this.
Under exploitative relations genotype becomes exaggerated and warped. In a socialist society, the relations of production and reproduction are laid bare, use values are ascertainable and subject to democratic processes, the equality of individuals becomes obvious.
Capitalist conditions us to deny our animality. They alter the dynamics of family and intimacy. The phenomenology of this is that the problem lies in sex and its relations in-themselves, not in the way in which capitalism exploits sex for profit.
(There are other systems of sexual oppression, of course. And they can be worse than capitalism. Consider how Islam exploits sex for extreme male privilege. Then consider how progressives celebrate the hijab. Once again, we see how identity makes people believe dumb things.)
Crucially, the way capitalism exploits sex is differentiated across the class structure, and gender becomes variable across time and space, at once essential and arbitrary. This is why affluent cosmopolitan types focus on sex to the exclusion of class, and thus widen the gulf between people across the class structure, which in turn undermines class solidarity.
Failure to recognize the dialectic makes for bad politics. Capitalist relations distort consciousness. It does no good to swallow the distortions and regurgitate them as identity politics. Diversity is no substitute for equality. Tokenism stands in place of justice.
The latest Uniform Crime Report by the FBI indicates that crime is down in all index categories. Except for murder, which is down for all but two population groups, all population groups experienced declines in crime. Some of these declines are substantial. This is very good news for working people.
After significantly rising in several categories under Obama, crime has been in decline during Trump’s presidency. Where there were already declines, they continue and in many cases at a faster pace. I discuss the matter of crime under the Obama administration (and more broadly) in my essay “Demoralization and the Ferguson Effect.” Go here for my previous reporting on the Uniform Crime Report.
The reduction in crime is associated with a reduction in immigration and unemployment and an increase in wages. As many readers know, I am a criminologist, and one of the chief theories in criminology is the association of crime with material deprivation and demoralization. Both of these sources of crime are lessening, with the result a substantial decline in crime and violence in America.
Tightening labor markets are translating into higher wages. Wages are rising faster for lower income workers than their more affluent counterparts. Blacks and Hispanics are seeing rates of joblessness at their lowest levels in decades. Poor and minority communities are most at risk for street crime and violence.
Significantly Trump’s policies have reduced immigration from more than one million immigrants annually under Obama to presently fewer than 600,000 immigrants annually. By reducing supply in the face of growing demand, American workers are benefiting. Higher wages translate to the higher standards of living. Higher standards of living reduce material deprivation and raise the importance of conformity. This softens criminogenic environments.
Did you hear? Trump renegotiated NAFTA. Trump pulled the US out of the TTP. China is on the ropes. You probably didn’t hear about this. You’ve been watching establishment media.
Economist Richard Wolff made an appearance on Democracy Now on February 24, 2020 debating fellow economist Paul Krugman on the question of the socialist character of Bernie Sanders’ politics, what the Vermont senator and presidential candidate for the Democratic Party calls “democratic socialism.” Krugman, a consistent left-of-center liberal, was right on the substance, while Wolff continued his habit of conveniently defining terms to fit his agenda. Typical of the progressive left these days, Wolff appealed to the fuzziness of terms.
Krugman argued that, by calling himself a “democratic socialist,” Sanders is handing Republicans their central talking point. This has been a tactic of conservatives for decades, he noted, calling government intervention or social provision they don’t like “socialist.” “In Arguing with Zombies, I have a whole chapter called ‘Eek! Socialism!’ which is about the Republican habit of playing three-card monte. You say that you’re for universal healthcare; they say, ‘That’s socialist.’ You say you’re for universal child care; they say, ‘Think about how many people Stalin killed.’ You know, it’s this crazy stuff. So, why use the word?”
Indeed, Sanders confesses to the accusation before it’s leveled. In this Sanders is doing the work of the bourgeoisie. When capitalist elites move to roll back progressive reforms—as they have been doing for decades—they can more effectively speak of freedom, choice, and markets over against the specter of socialism. By calling social democracy “socialism” Sanders imperils the future, not only of any reforms going forward (if any are actually made), but also reforms of the past.
Perhaps worse is a point Krugman likely wouldn’t make: Sanders’ rhetoric dresses progressive reform as socialism, and this benefits the capitalist establishment in the long run. It puts the language of socialist politics under capitalist control. Whether intentionally or not, Sanders is rebranding progressivism, a philosophy endeavoring to humanize capitalist relations and validate corporate governance structures.
And then there is this tactic of calling the kettle black. It irks me to no end to hear Sanders talking about tax cuts and subsidies for the rich as “socialism.” It’s a line appropriated from an unfortunately remark made by Martin Luther King, Jr. in a 1968 speech.
But enough about Sanders. The present blog is about Wolff’s understanding of socialism and his manner of thinking. Wolff is on record claiming that the Soviet Union was “state capitalist,” for example in his book, co-authored with Stephen Resnick, Class Theory and History. But he also shifts his definition to fit his argument.
In challenging Wolff’s understanding of socialism, I bring to this blog an argument I published back in 2003 in the journal Nature, Society, and Thought. Renick and Wolff’s book had just come out and I was surprised to see the state capitalist thesis reappear. Theories that the Soviet Union was something other than socialist roamed the periphery of left academia and politics throughout the twentieth century. Hillel Ticktin argued that the USSR was neither capitalist nor socialist. In his view, the Soviet Union was a historical cul-de-sac, a peculiar and moribund social formation. Antonio Carlo and Umberto Melotti both argued that, while not capitalist, the USSR was not socialist, either. Echoing the earlier theories of James Burnham and Max Shachtman, Carlo and Melotti claimed that it was a bureaucratic collectivist alternative to capitalism. In their view, the Soviet Union embodied a new mode of production. Tony Cliff and Raya Dunayevskaya, among others, maintained that the Soviet Union was, paradoxically, what communists struggled to negate—a capitalist social formation.
I felt then, as I do now, that it is important to address the character of the Soviet Union, because the Soviet Union is the paradigm of actually-existing socialist society for a lot of socialists, but also for bourgeois propagandists. Whatever it was, the Soviet Union was markedly different from the countries of the capitalist world economy.
We can of course check the character of Soviet Union against the consensus definition held among scientists and historians. Here, socialism is basically defined as collective or governmental ownership and administrations of the forces of production. It’s a system in which the means of production are controlled by the state. Democratic socialism suggests these arrangements are steered by means of popular consensus. For Marxists, emphasis is placed on the state representing the interests of the proletariat. If the economics of the Soviet Union substantially meet this definition, then it was socialist.
Resnick and Wolff’s Class Theory and History is a twenty-first century attempt to portray the Soviet Union as something other than a socialist society, which means another definition is needed. Claiming to have extended Marx’s concept of communism and to have employed an original Marxist theory of social class, the authors produce an analysis of the Soviet Union that is, according to them, distinct from theories promulgated by both defenders and critics of the USSR. Crucially, unlike theorists who reached their conclusion based on concepts of hierarchy and power, Resnick and Wolff profess to have relied on Marx’s concept of exploitation to reveal the capitalist relations that comprised the actual class content of Soviet “socialism.”
Class Theory and History was not the first work Wolff and Resnick co-authored. There was their 1987 Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical. Both works share a fundamentally flawed understanding of the historical-materialist standpoint manifest, particularly in the refusal of its authors to acknowledge property as a core component of Marx’s conception of social class.
A tacit acceptance of bourgeois assumptions emerges early in Resnick and Wolff’s book when they deny on grounds that the USSR was not socialist the legitimacy of criticisms finding Soviet socialism or communism to have failed.
Michael Parenti’s cogent analysis in Blackshirts and Reds, published five years before Class Theory and History, effectively challenges the logic that, if the Soviet Union was not state capitalist, it would be a state with classless production arrangements. This argument assumes that anything less than a classless society could not represent a form of socialism. How, then, could Wolff describe Sanders policies, which in no way portend the creation of classless structures, “socialist”? Wolff wants pragmatism. And Parenti scolds those who put “pure” socialism up against historical or “really existing” socialism. But the character of Sander’s reforms are progressive and not pragmatic from a socialist standpoint. Incorporating markets to create efficiencies in a socialist program is an example of appropriate pragmatism of a socialist character.
In contrast to Resnick and Wolff, Parenti cites the challenge of building socialism during a period of world capitalist hegemony and emphasizes the importance of theorizing from a realist standpoint. Parenti usefully designates the Soviet Union “siege socialist” (more on this later).
Readers interested in comprehensive study of the Soviet Union would be wise to look elsewhere. I can provide no treatment of this matter here. More sensibly, in this blog, I take account of the assumptions and arguments that comprise Resnick and Wolff’s thesis and assess their broader interpretation of the class character of the Soviet Union. Crucially, I raise these points to broach the matter of social class relations. Only in light of these is the proper attribution of socialism possible.
According to Resnick and Wolff, the two dominant approaches to the study of social class have heretofore posited either property relations or distribution of power (authority relations) as the determining features of class structure. In the former theory, ownership of the means of production—the basis of the social relations of production—establishes social class. In the latter, class is determined by who gives and who takes orders. The concept of class as power and authority is characteristic of previous state capitalist theories.
In contrast to both property and power conceptualizations, Resnick and Wolff focus on the production, appropriation, and distribution of social surplus. This “surplus labor” definition of class is, according to them, Marx’s definition. Consistent with their approach in Economics, Resnick and Wolff present no textual evidence to support this claim. The “surplus theory of class,” Resnick and Wolff aver, permits a clear demarcation between communist and capitalist class structures. In a communist class structure, the producers and the appropriators of the social product are the same persons. Laborers produce use-values and share or consume them. A capitalist class structure is one in which producers and appropriators are different persons. Therefore, exploitation occurs under capitalism because those who do not produce a surplus (capitalists) appropriate surplus labor from those who produce it (proletarians). Reprising the standard state capitalist formulation, Resnick and Wolff argue that capitalist exploitation can take two forms: “private capitalism,” in which nonstate actors are the appropriators, and “state capitalism,” in which state actors are the appropriators. In their view, the latter designation is the appropriate one for the Soviet Union.
Resnick and Wolff arrive at this judgment via a process of exclusion. They claim that Marxists recognize three basic forms of exploitative class structures: slave, feudal, and capitalist. In each structure, nonproducers appropriate the surplus. In order to know which form of exploitative class structure is present, one must establish the manner by which exploiters appropriate the surplus. Looking at Soviet history, they find that slave relations existed neither in the sense that human beings were property nor in the differentiation of society into master and slave power categories. Resnick and Wolff reach a similar conclusion with respect to feudal relations; generally absent in Soviet society were “formal relationships of interpersonal bondage.” That Soviet society was neither slave nor feudal means that, by elimination, it was capitalist.
Seemingly aware of the flimsiness of this argument, Resnick and Wolff defend their position by claiming that they did not judge the Soviet Union to be a capitalist society merely by eliminating the presence of other class structures. They suggest other points of convergence between Western capitalist countries and the class structure of the Soviet Union: Soviet industrial ministries were similar to the corporate boards of capitalist monopolies; workers in Russia, just as in capitalist countries, were compelled by mechanisms of structural coercion to sell their labor power; exploitation of the proletariat is a feature of both contexts, although in Russia it occurred in state-run enterprises. The authors find especially important the phenomenon of a discourse of freedom, rights, and equivalent voluntary exchange masking the exploitation of the Soviet worker.
Using a parallel demonstration procedure that is more illustrative than evaluative, they argue that since the surplus was produced in state enterprises, then appropriated and distributed by state entities such as the Veshenka (the Supreme Council of National Economy, later reorganized as the Council of Ministers), the Soviet Union was state capitalist. “The state bureaucrats leading this council functioned similarly to a centralized board of directors of a private capitalist industrial combine,” they write. Resnick and Wolff claim argumentum ad populum, that most historians “admit that the council functioned like a private capitalist board of directors,” yet err when identifying the fundamental difference between a board of directors and the Veshenka—namely that council members were appointed by the state, and that the economy was a state-planned, command affair whose class structure was distinguished by the collective ownership of the means of production. The problem with this explanation, in Resnick and Wolff’s view, is that it assumes “the theoretical framework that distinguishes capitalism from socialism and communism by reference to which group wields power over productive enterprises.” If historians adopted the surplus-labor definition instead, the fact that the Veshenka appropriated surplus would have compelled them to conclude that the Soviet Union was capitalist.
The problems with Class Theory and Historyare numerous. First, the existence of bourgeois characteristics does not mean that a social formation rests upon a capitalist mode of production. Marx emphasizes in his “Critique of the Gotha Program” that the initial stage of communism—what he described as “crude communism” in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts—is a social order emerging from the womb of capitalism. As such, socialism, as Lenin saw it, retains characteristics of bourgeois society, namely the existence of wage labor and the right of inequality. Yet, crude communism differs from capitalism because the social surplus is invested in the reproduction and expansion of the forces of production and the elaboration of social services for the benefit of the proletariat rather than being appropriated by private entities.
Extraction of the surplus from workers cannot therefore be in itself an indication of capitalist class relations. As Marx points out in chapter 49 of Capital 3, accumulation, and hence expansion of the process of reproduction even after the abolition of the capitalist mode of production would continue. Moreover, the existence of value will continue to prevail after capitalism: “After the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, but still retaining social production, the determination of value continues to prevail in the sense that the regulation of labor time and the distribution of social labor among the various production groups, ultimately the bookkeeping encompassing all this, become more essential than ever.”
Second, early in the Soviet Union’s development, the Bolsheviks combined features of central planning with retained capitalist relations and processes. Soviet leaders placed the economy under the control of the State General Planning Commission, or Gosplan. The state controlled heavy industry, finance, and foreign trade. However, with the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921, the worker-state permitted private agricultural production, retail trade, and control of small industries. The arrangement lasted less than a decade. Stalin established a command economy and emplaced successive programs of rapid industrialization and agricultural collectivization. To be sure, there were other moments of devolution similar to the NEP retreat. In a move to increase efficiency, for instance, Khrushchev permitted local councils to assume many of the functions of state ministries. Yet, each of these moments was eventually negated (for example, Brezhnev curtailed or eliminated Khrushchev’s reforms), and their bourgeois character is in every instance doubtful. It was not until Gorbachev and perestroika that the Soviet government permitted such bourgeois entities as small private businesses and forms of corporations.
Third, in confirming the absence of slave and feudal class structures in Soviet society, the authors rely on the two conceptualizations of social class they earlier rejected as inadequate: the distribution of property and power. The authors must turn to these other features of social class because their conceptualization of class as surplus labor is too abstract and incomplete to differentiate between concrete modes of production. To cover their resort to other criteria, they sneak them in through the back door using a rhetorical sleight-of-hand—they define property and power as “nonclass processes.”
Yet Marxists conceptualize property and power, along with surplus appropriation, as central and interconnected features of social class. It is through power derived from property that nonproducers expropriate the product of producers. “Slave masters and slaves constitute classes,” notes Erik Olin Wright, “because a particular property relation (property rights in people) generates exploitation (the appropriation of the fruits of labor of the slave by the slave master).” That exploitation takes place is a fact insufficient for determining the character of an exploitative class structure. One identifies a particular class structure by the concrete configurations of these several elements.
Resnick and Wolff’s neglect of property relations contradicts Marx’s concept of social class, a fact that would not necessarily undermine the book if its authors did not claim that they derive their thesis from Marxian thought. Marx emphasizes inCapital 1that ownership of past unpaid labor, that is, capital, is the sole condition for the appropriation of living unpaid labor on a constantly increasing scale. In other words, according to Marx, “property turns out to be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labor of others or its product.” Property rights derive from “the economic laws of commodity production,” which presuppose a historic process that “takes away from the laborer the possession of his means of production.” Essential to Marx’s theory is the argument that, although surplus production and appropriation occur in previous and other modes of production, the mechanisms by which these operate (the forms they take and their effects) differ fundamentally from those of the capitalist mode of production. At the core of this difference are the private ownership of capital by the capitalist and the ownership of labor power by the worker. Since private ownership of capital is, for a Marxist, one of the principal components of capitalism, it is unreasonable to continue calling something capitalist when revolution abolishes its defining economic relation and negates its legal categories.
Others working with the tools of historical materialism echo Marx’s emphasis on property relations. Even while his reformulation of Marx’s class analysis emphasizes authority relations, the late Wright observes in Class Counts the following: “Within the Marxist tradition of class analysis, class divisions are defined primarily in terms of the linkage between property relations and exploitation.” Elsewhere Wright notes: “Ownership of the means of production and ownership of one’s own labor power are explanatory of social action because these property rights shape the strategic alternatives people face in pursuing their material well-being.”
In Blackwell’s Dictionary of Marxist Thought, András Hegedüs cites Oskar Lange’s characterization of property as the organizing principle of capitalism, one that determines both the relations of production andthe relations of distribution. Hegedüs sums up his own view in the following fashion: “In Marxist social theory the notion of property and some related categories (property relations, forms of property) have a central significance. Marx did not regard property only as the possibility for the owner to exercise property rights, or as an object of such activity, but as an essential relationship which has a central role in the complex system of classes and social strata. Within this system of categories, the ownership of means of production has outstanding importance.”
Even orthodox sociologists grasp the central role property plays in class analysis from a Marxian perspective. The late Aage B. Sørensen, an authority on social stratification models, argues that Marx’s conception of class is based on property rights. At the same time, Sørensen recognizes that the core process of class relations is exploitation: the worker enriches the capitalist because part of the surplus produced in the labor process is appropriated by the capitalist. These elements of the theory—property and exploitation—are what make Marx’s project the most theoretically ambitious class-analytical framework. “It not only provides an explanation for inequality, it also points to an effective remedy: one must change the class relations that create exploitation.” Sørensen comprehends the essential point that property creates the opportunity for capitalists to exploit workers. Property as capital is the means of exploitation.
With the importance of property relations in mind, David Lane, writing in the pages of The Insurgent Sociologist, rejects the state capitalist argument. “The supposed ‘capitalist class’ is left with no proprietary rights.” Although state managers and administrators controlled Soviet production enterprises, they could neither dispose of their assets for their private good nor have their children receive any exclusive rights to nationalized property. Under the Soviet state, there was no identifiable group of persons that enjoyed a source of income derived from the ownership of property.” Moreover, Lane notes, such theories explicitly or implicitly privilege authority and control of the means of production over ownership. It is not just that they mix up the order of things—control substitutes for ownership in state capitalist theory. For Lane, such an approach, consistent with most bourgeois sociology, pays little attention to the scientific definition of social class.
Resnick and Wolff criticize state capitalist theorists who place too much emphasis on authority and control, but then fail to counter this one-sided conceptualization with a comprehensive definition of social class that includes property relations. Substituting exploitation for power without recognizing the historical property relations that stamp both with their specific class characteristic does not enhance the efficacy of state-capitalist theory. This problem is shown clearly when Resnick and Wolff criticize those historians who believe that the Veshenka was “marked by collective (rather than private) ownership of the means of production.” The authors are really indicating that the explanations with which they take issue are not those that founder on an abstract conception of power, but rather those that root power in property relations. The fact that the “board of directors” of a Soviet industrial ministry was answerable to the politburo instead of to shareholders is only irrelevant to Resnick and Wolff’s analysis because they ignore the role of property in social relations.
From the standpoint of a comprehensive conceptualization of social class, questions concerning the class character of a social system must take a different form. Were property relations in the Soviet Union like those that exist under capitalism? In a capitalist system, viewed from a historical-materialist perspective, we expect to find at least one class that privately owns and controls capital, extracts surplus value from workers in a wage-labor system, and realizes this value in a commercial market as profit. This class accumulates capital to strengthen its hold on society and increases the rate of exploitation to enrich itself. Similarly, we might ask whether collective ownership of the means of production in a society led by communists describes the Soviet Union.
In a socialist society, we would expect to find a communist party planning the economy with the goal of creating a level of productive capacity sufficient for raising social life onto a higher stage of human development. Resnick and Wolff avoid such falsifiable questions by denying the importance of property relations in determining social class and substituting an ahistorical conception of surplus labor extraction.
According to Parenti, socialist societies achieved a much greater degree of material equality than their capitalist counterparts. Soviet leaders organized the productive forces in the Soviet Union for the advancement of the proletariat, not for private enrichment or capital gain. Parenti notes that individuals could not hire other people and accumulate great personal wealth from their labor. The means of production were not privately held but were publicly owned. Human services were extensive and comprehensive. Soviet citizens were assured a minimal standard of economic survival and security, including guaranteed education, employment, housing, and medical assistance. It distorts Soviet history to suggest, as Resnick and Wolff do, that ministers were rewarded or behaved like capitalists and their managers in Western nations.
Parenti writes: “The perks enjoyed by Party and government elites were modest by Western corporate CEO standards, as were their personal incomes and life styles. Soviet leaders like Yuri Andropov and Leonid Brezhnev lived not in lavishly appointed mansions like the White House, but in relatively large apartments in a housing project near the Kremlin set aside for government leaders. They had limousines at their disposal (like most other heads of state) and access to large dachas where they entertained visiting dignitaries. But they had none of the immense personal wealth that most U.S. leaders possess.”
What was true of relations internal to the Soviet Union—that there was a greater degree of equality in Russia than in capitalist countries—was true of external relations between Russia and its allied countries. The Soviet Union did not pursue capital penetration of other socialist countries. On the contrary, its allied countries uniformly benefited from their relationships with the Soviet Union. “Lacking a profit motive” as a motor force, writes Parenti, the USSR “did not expropriate the lands, labor, markets, and natural resources of weaker nations.” In other words, the USSR “did not practice economic imperialism.” Instead, it intended its interventions to facilitate the development of alternatives to capitalism in the periphery of the world system and to strengthen socialist governments against insurgency.
In contrast to those U.S. leftists who “say that the communist states offered nothing more than bureaucratic, one-party ‘state capitalism’ or some such thing,” writes Parenti, the Soviet Union “constituted something different from what existed in the profit-driven capitalist world.” Parenti acknowledges the fact that the Soviet Union had to expropriate the surplus produced by labor “to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.” Again, this was as Marx said it would have to be after the abolition of the capitalist mode of production. As noted, because the Soviet Union faced threats to its existence both from the capitalist world encircling it and reactionary forces internal to it, Parenti characterizes its system as “siege socialism.”
Shirley Cereseto works, published in the Insurgent Sociologist, lends empirical weight to Parenti’s claims. Drawing on Marx’s theory that historically specific laws of motion govern social systems, Cereseto finds that the socialist world system rested on developmental principles fundamentally different from the capitalist world system. Under capitalism, the law of accumulation, because of its emphasis on profit maximization in the context of private property relations, inexorably leads to concentrated wealth and uneven development both in the internal structure of bourgeois societies and in the external relations among capitalist nations. Under “real, existing socialism,” the means of production were publicly owned and the imperative of profit maximization was abolished. Production was planned to meet basic human needs. The results were less inequality, falling poverty, greater economic security, and a higher quality of life. Moreover, these results occurred during periods of rapid economic growth. One should expect the opposite if capitalist laws were in operation. Cereseto concludes that “the new social formations” were “neither capitalist nor communist, but rather as being in the early stages of the long, arduous transition from one to the other.” These stages comprise what Marx called the “first phase of communist society,” which contains the deficiencies of the society from which they emerge. “They contain many other defects as well, some of which arise from errors made while traversing the yet uncharted, obstacle-laden path to communism,” writes Cereseto. “Yet, the data . . . clearly distinguish them from capitalist societies.”
Alex Dupuy and Barry Truchil mount a critique of state capitalist theory similar to Parenti’s. They contend that economic relations, such as commodity and labor markets, must be reckoned in terms of state ownership and control. Granting that the law of value continued to operate in the Soviet Union, Dupuy and Truchil argue that it was constrained by and subordinated to state economic planning. The surplus was used to achieve the goals of a socialist society, not for private enrichment. If by “commodity market” one understands a mechanism that regulates the operation of productive enterprises on the basis of supply and demand, then the Soviet Union cannot be said to have been a market economy.
Productive investments in the Soviet Union were decided on the basis of social need and not on the profitability of enterprises. As Marx predicted, where capitalistic forms of accounting were used, they were used “primarily as measures of efficiency and accountability,” serving “to modify and correct former planned projections.” The money form used for accounting purposes was not a source of accumulation. Indeed, because of state planning, Dupuy and Truchil contend the capital-goods sector had lost its commodity form. Moreover, wages served more as a rational means of distribution rather than a mechanism of exploitation.
The notion that state and party functionaries (apparatchiki) represented the functional equivalent of the capitalist class fails to differentiate accurately among various strata of the Soviet state, and to identify precisely which stratum corresponds to the capitalist class. It also fails to acknowledge the central reality that bureaucrats could not “accumulate wealth for their own private ends, viz., they [could not] accumulate wealth to purchase means of production or labor-power: the prerequisites for the existence of a capitalist class.” Directly contradicting one of Resnick and Wolff’s main contentions, Dupuy and Truchil emphasize the fact that the privileged position of state officials, which existed by “virtue of their position within the state apparatus,” did not “result from the retention of capitalist forms of distribution, i.e., the wage system and of commodity production in the consumer goods sectors.”
Dupuy and Truchil writes: “In sum, the proponents of the state-capitalist thesis for describing the socialist countries have not demonstrated that capitalist relations of production indeed predominated in those societies. Their analyses start from a certain set of sociopolitical contradictions—namely the absence of workers’ control and the extant hierarchical social division of labor between state bureaucrats and workers. From these contradictions they then generate a theory of state capitalism by postulating the resurgence and dominance of capitalist relations of production, without ever demonstrating that this has occurred.
On the questions of the law of value, state planning, and the functional equivalency of the apparatchiki and the bourgeoisie, Dupuy and Truchil “maintain that these societies must still be considered socialist in character.” This conclusion is as relevant to the present critique of Class Theory and History as it was for those upon whom Dupuy and Truchil turned their critical eye.
Theorizing from the concrete totality is the foundation of the historical-materialist method. Marx argues in the Grundrisse that the categories of political economy become empty abstractions if conceptualization substantially removes determinant relations from concrete historical arrangements. One can only speak of production at a definite stage of social development—that is, as socially determined production. It is not the mere presence of private property or surplus appropriation that distinguishes social classes. Indeed, as Eric Olin Wright points out, the fact of property rights alone is insufficient for judging social class. For example, homeowners and the homeless would not constitute classes even though they are distinguished by property rights in housing since this division does not constitute a basis for the exploitation of the homeless by homeowners. It is rather the historically specific character of private property and the socially determined manner in which the surplus is appropriated and to what ends that surplus is put that shape the identity of the class structure. Capitalism is varied, and so therefore are the categories abstracted from its historical forms; but these categories, precisely because they are abstractions from the concrete, are not so malleable as to apply to radically different social formations. To accomplish this, one must evacuate their empirical contents in the manner of the functionalist. Resnick and Wolff’s conceptualization of social class conflicts with Marx’s method not so much in its attention to the question of social surplus as in its habit of improper abstraction and its denial of the centrality of concrete property relations. In sum, the framework of Class Theory and History is insufficiently discriminatory to support a claim that the Soviet Union was state capitalist and tightening up their method shows the falsity of their conclusion.
Ultimately, Class Theory and History feigns historical materialism, just as did Economics before it. Consider these representative statements: “The Soviet victories of collective over private property and of planning over markets altered how workers continued to be exploited [but] did not eliminate the worker’s exploitation” (page 91). “The personnel changed (no doubt a significant event), but the exploitative juxtaposition of producers vis-à-vis appropriators of surplus labor did not” (page 162). These statements exemplify the level of abstraction at which the authors operate. While such statements may be true on their face, they are irrelevant to the question the book poses, namely, was the Soviet Union a state-capitalist socia formation? Does anybody really argue that the Soviet Union was a communist society? Pre-capitalists societies were exploitative, as well. Were they capitalist? The appearance of historical materialism in the book is achieved through the appropriation of Marxian terminology in phrases such as, “the rate of surplus value appropriation (exploitation) inside state capitalist industry” (page 239). Surplus value, the form social surplus takes under capitalist relations, is thus “discovered” in various places in Soviet society. Each such discovery is prefixed with the term “state capitalist” to validate its alleged character. The practice of assuming what must be demonstrated cannot pass for Marxist class analysis.
Unlike those who avoid anti-Communist flak with such rationalizations as “the communist or socialist alternative to capitalism never prevailed,” Parenti confronts history, acknowledging that Communist countries suffered from major system deficiencies, while at the same time confirming the stubborn fact that socialism transformed desperately poor countries into modernized societies.
To be sure, capitalism comes in many forms. Modern Sweden is different from Nazi Germany, and the U.S. system differs from either of these societies. Yet, these social formations—all capitalist—share in varying degrees the following features: capital is privately owned and controlled; commodity production is conducted primarily for exchange in markets and the generation of profit, not for personal use-values to be consumed by immediate producers; profits are reinvested to generate more profits for private individuals, not for generating public goods and services benefiting the whole population; a labor market exists wherein labor power is exchanged for wages under conditions of structural coercion; decisions concerning investment, production, and distribution are for the most part made by private entities not collectivities; the owners of capital and their managers ultimately control the labor process; the money-commodity is the near-universal medium of exchange; and the state and law are organized as the executive committee for the whole bourgeoisie.
Returning to the Krugman-Wolff debate, in a 180-degree reversal, we see Wolff now defining social welfare under capitalism as “socialist,” whereas fundamental socialist relations are defined as state capitalist. Were only those programs and systems that appeared as social welfarism in the Soviet Union socialist? Wolff rationalizes in the Democracy Now debate: “There is no agency, neither public nor private, that defines what a socialist is. If you follow the socialist movement for the last 150 years, you would discover that it has been a contested terrain from day one. There were different interpretations and different meanings.” Yet Wolff seems certain enough about the definition of socialism in previous writings as to determine that the Soviet Union was not socialist. To be sure, this was a crackpot definition. So why stick with it? Now Wolff defines socialism this way: “It’s the government having a big role in offsetting some of the awful qualities of capitalism.” If the Soviet Union was anything, it was this! But, of course, all of that is progressivism. Ironically, from his own assumptions, the United States fully decked out in social democracy wouldn’t be socialist. Yet Sanders, a social democrat, is a “socialist.” Everything here is super squishy.
Peter Weber’s article “Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders is too far left for Sweden’s ruling Social Democrats,” in the February 20, 2020 edition of The Week, is one of the more useful that has been published on the subject of Bernie Sander’s democratic socialism. He asked the right person, namely Johan Hassel, international secretary for the Social Democrats, and did some digging and reflecting. Everybody would do well to grasp the point of this article.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders
Sweden is a capitalist country. In many ways, Sweden is more market-oriented than the United States. For example, since the early 1990s, Sweden has allowed parents to yank their kids from government schools (what we call public schools) and use the social provision for education to put their kids in free schools (private schools). It may shock lefties to hear that Sweden has a nation-wide voucher system, but they do. It was shocking to many to hear Trump in his most recent State of the Union speech refer to public schools as “government schools.” Such rhetoric is not shocking in a context many Americans think is shaped by socialist sentiment.
Sweden’s Social Democrats are pro-corporate and neoliberal. They are not left wing. The party shifted decades ago. This shift reflects popular opinion in Sweden. The institutional structure of Swedish society is such that, even in the face of the neoliberal turn of the institutional party, the country enjoys comparative superiority over US society in terms of public infrastructure and social provision. Sweden long ago institutionalized social democracy, embedding its assumptions in its social logic. Widespread unionization and the corporatist model of capital-labor relations has made the erosion of social democracy slow and winding. At the same time, neoliberalism, regionalization, and mass immigration is speeding up the process of devolution. This is the reason nationalism and populism are on the rise.
What Hassel saw on the ground in Iowa is Sanders’ constituency, which appears more like the Sweden’s Left Party (formerly the communists) than the Social Democrats. Moreover, Sander’s rhetoric concerning wealth and income inequality and his criticisms of corporation power is alien to Sweden’s social democrats. In Sweden, corporate power is not viewed in this way. Labor is fully integrated into the corporate business structure. As a consequence, labor is pacified, its consent engineered. Swedes are more communitarian than Americans and less suspicious of concentrated power. They view our system as rather brutal because it lacks a social safety net. But with Sanders they hear socialist demagoguery. Swedes are progressives. This is how Hassel can suggest that a neoliberals like Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar fit more comfortably in the Social Democrats than does Sanders.
In part, Hassel is taking Sanders at his words. As MIT political economist Daron Acemoglu explains, “Democratic socialism seeks to fix the iniquities of the market economy by handing control of the means of production to a company’s workers or “an administrative structure operated by the state.” This is how everybody who speaks honestly and precisely defines democratic socialism. For Sanders, democratic socialism is a euphemism for progressive liberalism. At least this is what he says now that the socialist label is haunting him. But this use of the term is obviously incorrect to Swedes, who are for the most part anti-socialist. As Acemoglu notes: “European social democracy is a system for regulating the market economy, not for supplanting it.” Weber notes that the prime minister of Denmark, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, made the point in 2015: “I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism…. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy [albeit with] an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security to its citizens.”
Elizabeth Warren’s affirmation as a capitalist is consistent with the social democratic position. Sanders is on record saying that he is not a capitalist, which locates him outside that tradition. Indeed, he insists that he is a socialist. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar insist they are socialists. The Democratic Socialists of America is a longstanding project to redefine progressivism as democratic socialism. (I have expressed my uneasiness with this, as it strikes me as sheep-dogging for the capitalist class.) The leftwing publication Jacobin is popularizing and legitimizing the DSA line.
All this puts Sanders and his ilk to the left of the Swedish Social Democrats. The rhetoric makes a Sanders candidacy a roll of the dice against Donald Trump (let’s see what happens with the economy). Worse, it exposes the welfare state to roll back; by validating the bourgeoisie tactic of defining progressive reform as “socialist,” the democratic socialist crowd grows popular support for the neoliberal project of devolution.
You aren’t hearing much about this in the media, but Anthony Ferrill, the Molson Coors shooter, was black. Did he commit these killings because he was black? Of course not. However, as I demonstrated on my blog months ago (Everything Progressives Say About Mass Shootings is Wrong…and Racist), the effort to paint the problem of mass shootings as a “white male” phenomenon, part of the project to demonize that demographic, crashes on the rocks of the reality that white males are not statistically overrepresented in mass shootings. Killings are not caused by race. They have in back of them some motive, motives that may derive from ideologies (such as Islam) or from anger and resentment.
If we can stop the racist demonization of white men that would be nice. However, the project to keep the demonization going is intense. I had a Facebook post taken down for merely observing that the “white privilege” rhetoric is really just cover for the old “white devil” demagoguery.
“White people really don’t like being generalized about.” Robin DiAngelo claims. Do black people like being generalized about? If we say “yes,” we’re already generalizing.
I suppose there are white people who love to be generalized about. DiAngelo, perhaps? It seems so. But does she think it is right or wrong to generalize about people based on race? Here’s DiAngelo’s article in the International Journal of Critical Pedagogy on “white fragility”.
DiAngelo began her career in racial politics as a “diversity trainer.” She constructed her worldview in order to justify her work. DiAngelo is explicitly telling people—some people, at least—that it is wrong to see themselves as individuals. White people must see themselves as a race and learn what they are supposed to be thinking as the “white race.”
DiAngelo is not working to emancipate any individuals from racial categories. On the contrary. She is essentializing racial categories and generalizing about what people think who belong to those categories.
This is a new religion with white people (who buy this nonsense) simultaneously existing as folk devils and salvation seekers. Yet our rational institutions—corporations and universities—are compelling employees and students to participate in indoctrination sessions. They are being told how to think under penalty of discipline or dismissal. If they don’t agree with DiAngelo’s politics they are “fragile.”
Where it is not required, the masochism is sought out by affluent white women, hosting dinners in their homes for other affluent white women (at $2500 a dinner), their unconscious racism pulled from them (or at least constructed) by Regina Jackson and Saira Rao. “If you did this in a conference room, they’d leave,” Rao says. “But wealthy white women have been taught never to leave the dinner table.”
They call the program “Race to Dinner.” Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility supplies the scripture.
For some, this is a joyful place to be. It comes with a psychological wage. For others, it is undignified. But then what does Proverbs say? Pride goeth before destruction?
Of course, tribal stigma of this sort has a name. It’s name is racism.
But woe to you who have ever made a provocative statement, had a deviant opinion, played devil’s advocate, had a change of heart, or articulated a half-formed thought in working out a full one. The progressive archeologists may be excavating your past for evidence of transgression.
If you are ever called up, you will be called to an impossible position. This is characteristic of inquisitions. Even if exonerated, you will always have been accused. You may get the same treatment if you defend the accused.
It is an act of cruelty, beyond the obvious fallacy that the color of one’s skin—the stain of whiteness—makes her eternally suspicious. People are terrified to talk honestly for fear of making a faux pas. I mean committing a “microaggression.” (Part of antiracism is learning a jargon. Rituals must have myths and spells.)
Ignoring social pressure, autonomous individuals might brush all this off as the work of insecure narcissists looking for strokes. Except that, because he is useful to somebody, the antiracist has assumed command of the disciplinary machinery of the institution. He is, like the priest and his church, an authority appointed to defend doctrine and secure compliance. He seeks obedience. And he is on the prowl to make examples of people while ingratiating himself to the “community.”
Antiracism is the new theology. It proliferates councils with clergy who minister to those in need of saving. It has scripture for you to recite. It lets you see what a piece of shit you are. It instructs you to loathe yourself for things you did not do and cannot change.
Failure to seek its wise counsel is proof that you are more than unwise. Failure to seek help makes a bad person an even worse person.
The US military is not socialist. Socialism is generalized worker ownership of and control over the workplace. Even the standard dictionary definition of socialism (“a political and economic theory of social organization advocating that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole”) precludes the military from being socialist. Neither soldiers nor the community control the military. In the United States, the military is run by bureaucratic elites appointed by bourgeois politicians bankrolled by corporate power who use these means to keep the world open for capitalist markets.
The military is an instrument of production. Indeed, military systems in themselves are remarkably similar across modes of production. They are neither capitalist or socialist (same with government programs, which is why the concept of a “mixed economy” is a propaganda term not a social-scientific one). The military establishment serves the ruling class and the character of the ruling class and its needs are determined by the character of the mode of production in which it appears and operates. The United States is a capitalist society. As capitalist societies go, it is one of the least democratic. But it is not at all socialist.
Programs like Social Security were purposely designed to steal the play away from the socialists by removing objections. If socialists complain that capitalism is objectionable because it leaves old people to suffer after having exploited their younger bodies for profit over the life-course, then Social Security is there to make capitalism look humane. Public provisions of the social surplus have always been a part of capitalism. That isn’t at all the same thing as saying infrastructure, social services, and the military are “socialist.”
That your taxes pay for the military and all the rest of it is a manifestation of the phenomenon of externalization of costs. The public subsidizes the capitalist mode of operation. That’s not socialism. That’s capitalism.
When right wingers tell you that we need to cut social services because they are “socialist,” they are using a scare word to generate public support for devolution of public function in a particular area or domain. That’s why, when folks on the left call these programs “socialist,” claiming that the right wing already supports socialism in a vain attempt to shame the shameless into supporting the public function in question, they give the right wing ammunition to do the opposite. That’s assuming these left-wing voices are operating in good faith. At best, it’s ignorantly counterproductive.
Of course, progressive Democrats call government programs “socialism” in order to keep working class people from demanding an actual socialist party. “Pay no attention to the real socialists! Here, have some food stamps!” But the right wing doesn’t give a shit about the Democrat’s sheep-dogging. They love it that some Democrats self-identify as “socialist” and claim their policies are “socialist,” because that functions to keep them relevant and socialism on the run.
And the ruling class is down with all that because the two-party system going–owning and condemning socialism keeps the populace within the narrow hegemonic frame that perpetuates the capitalist mode of production.
For those who see the legacy of Reagan as uniquely awful (i.e. those more likely to share memes of Jimmy Carter with a hammer in his hand), it must feel like the world is coming apart.
That was one helluva State of the Union.
Folks question the president’s intelligence. They’ll be thinking the man is stupid all the way to his reelection. But they’re wrong.
While progressives drone on about what an awful place America is, the protest of ladies in white making the disdain all the more obnoxious Trump projects confidence, optimism, and patriotism. People prefer the latter.
The Democratic Party can’t even pull off a caucus let alone an impeachment. All night Pelosi looked like the loser she will be today when the Senate acquits the president of charges Democrats should never have brought to that body. Her tearing up his speech punctuated his victory.
The president has thin skin?
Trump eclipsed Reagan last night. He is delivering on the spirit Reagan exuded. Bestowing the Medal of Freedom on Rush Limbaugh was the master stroke. Wet eyes across America. (Not from me.)
Look, I’m a Marxist and a socialist. Don’t think I’m pleased. But we have get real here. The situation we’re in is the fruit of globalism, neoliberalism, and progressivism: the failure (really, inability) of left bourgeois elites to represent the interests of the ordinary American—to protect livelihoods and respect culture.
Want to know why wages are rising for workers? Because Trump cut immigration nearly in half. There are hundreds of thousands fewer surplus workers in our labor markets. Less competition means higher wages because labor becomes more valuable. Democrats want open borders. It’s a contrast deepened by the progressive’s penchant for white-bashing. One could see progressives telling themselves how fascistic, racist and xenophobic is all was. That’s the way the see the Heartland. They believe the people made a bad decision. It’s why Adam Schiff can’t trust 2020.
To be sure, workers will not find salvation in rightwing populism. But they won’t find it in progressivism, either. They can see Democrats striving to undermine their way of life and they’re rejecting it. (This is why the British working class demanded withdrawal from the EU and handed conservatives their largest majority since the 1980s.) Indeed, working people see the progressives getting more detestable everyday. AOC, Omar, Tlaib.
Tragically, this squad represents themselves as socialists. With nationalist populism, workers in the United States (and the UK) at least keep their country for a while longer yet.
If the left would only recognize that defending national integrity represents a core proletarian value, that defending the Republic is in the worker’s interest, that we cannot move forward without a common culture and language, then they might find the ground for articulating a vision that would resonate with Americans across the country.
freedom and reason 