In the spring of 1968 the art critic and Marxist John Berger published a eulogy to Che Guevara, who’d been killed while attempting to launch a revolution in Bolivia. Berger wrote:
Guevara found the condition of the world as it is intolerable. It has only recently become so. Previously, the conditions under which two thirds of the people of the world lived were approximately the same as now. The degree of exploitation and enslavement was as great. The suffering involved was as intense and as widespread. The waste was as colossal. But it was not intolerable because the full measure of the truth about the condition was unknown—even by those who suffered it. Truths are not constantly evident in the circumstances to which they refer. They are born— sometimes late. This truth was born with the struggles and wars of national liberation. In the light of the new-born truth, the significance of imperialism changed. Its demands were seen to be different. Previously it had demanded cheap raw materials, exploited labor and a controlled world market. Today it demands a mankind that counts for nothing.
Berger’s point is perpetually relevant. The “truth” that the present state of the things is intolerable and needs to be changed isn’t a judgement from the timeless realm of Reason or Justice but comes into being with the very attempt to change it. Marx himself rested his arguments for communism less on abstract principles of justice—in fact, he derided the “utopian socialists” for just this—than on an analysis of capitalism’s internal dynamics and by reference to the numbers and strength of the nineteenth century’s workers’ movements, comparable in that respect to the national liberation movement of Che’s time. But if so, how are we to assess the possibility of socialism when the workers’ movements, wars of national liberation, and revolutions in the West have failed to establish an enduring and just alternative to capitalism?
This is a bitter pill that I see no use in sweetening. The hopes of the Russian Revolution suffocated under Stalinism before the last, tiniest sliver of faith in them died in the nineties’ transition to capitalism, just as the massive ambition of the Chinese Communist Revolution (and the Cultural Revolution) failed to prevent the re-assertion of a class of party elites—both eventuated mass death, however one tallies the figures exactly—and the national liberation movements successfully overthrew colonial governments only to fall under the rule of neocolonialist ones. Meanwhile, in Europe, the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere, parliamentary social democracy was outflanked by the forces of neoliberalism and reaction. In the last half-century, the Left has experienced several successive and compounding defeats across the globe.
If I previously indicted capitalists for being unable to constitute themselves as a Hegelian “universal class” that could work together to save the planet from doom and the rabble from revolt, it’s only fair enough to indict the Left for the same, failing to establish itself as a hegemonic political force in most countries and achieving only a fitful international presence. Of course, capitalists—locally, nationally, and globally—never “played fair” with socialist governments, as witness the continual U.S. blockade of Cuba, any number of covert operations like Operation Condor to bury left-wing regimes in blood, or the double-standard in media coverage imposed on Bernie Sanders during his campaign for the 2020 presidential nomination.1 But these are simply the conditions leftists inherit, fair or not; they had to be surmounted somehow, and so far have not been.
I’ve talked harshly about the failures of previous anti-capitalist movements partly because for a long time I was wary of adopting the label of socialist because it seemed to commit one to lying about these failures. Obviously, I don’t think so anymore. To the contrary, I’ve found that the history of the Left is to a large extent the history of a long and ruthless self-critique; every issue I’ve brought up has been the subject of extensive analysis by thinkers and activists, informing their writing and practice. This tradition begins with Marx himself, who I previously noted often re-developed his ideas in response to historical developments. His virtuouso The Eighteenth Brumaire is the work of someone willing to restructure the coordinates of his thought in response to the concrete development of historical circumstances, for which Marxism as a body of thought is all the richer. Just as it’s all the richer for the contributions of writers like Althusser, Benjamin, Lukács, and Gramsci. These are thinkers typically assigned to the tradition of Western Marxist, whose “hidden hallmark,” Perry Anderson writes, is
that it is a product of defeat. The failure of the socialist revolution to spread outside Russia, cause and consequence of its corruption, inside Russia, is the common background to the entire theoretical tradition of this period.
But, with a different inflection, this can be said of Marxism in general. As Asad Haider notes, the “character of Marxism” as a theory is that “it must be interrupted… [s]o that what certain Marxists might interpret as threats to the coherence of the theory—the interruption or the crisis—really constitute its specificity and significance. If these things didn't happen it would be a theory or ideology like any other.” Lucky for us that it isn’t!
This reframes socialism as a political project. Being a socialist doesn’t mean being uncritically nostalgic for Soviet cafeterias or the revelries of May ‘68, as good as they might have been, but it does mean trying to understand why they were, for various reasons, what Brecht called a “weak goodness,” a goodness that failed.2 Bereft of some ideal model out of the past—though with plenty of instructive historical lessons at hand—socialism has to place its hopes rather in the future, a necessarily chancy venture. So Berger was really right that the truth of socialism is born with the decisions people make from conditions of radical doubt, uncertainty, and ambivalence. But not for all that unequipped either intellectually or politically.
Equipped how? Any era will have both promising and discouraging signs, but it is probably worth highlighting the good news that socialism is now “back on the table” in countries like Canada and the U.S. in a way it hasn’t been for at least forty years. The “integrationist” thesis that capitalism has subsumed the working class into the prosperity of the American Dream (or other national variations thereof) used to command a lot more attention, but nowadays it seems like every book on socialism includes a foreword with some variation of the sentence, “The 2008 Recession has made people interested in socialism again.” If the Left in the U.S. was on life-support during the 90s and 2000s, the Great Recession helped stoke embers of discontent that eventually erupted in a once-inconceivable outcome: a self-identified socialist nearly usurping the Democratic Presidential nomination from corporate Democrats. The crisis tendencies inscribed in capitalism I discussed in my previous post will surely be fertile ground for the Left in the coming years. Thus, in his piece on the climate crisis, “Who Will Build the Ark?,” Davis recognized among activists and researchers a “new willingness to advocate the Necessary rather than the merely Practical.” Wild, moon-shot ambition and even unembarrassed talk about that once-discredited term, Utopia, are once more proving to be the order of the day.
There are no guarantees. The blow-up of capitalism could just as well inaugurate something worse and more terrifying, a twenty-first century mutation of fascism, incubated for decades. Everything depends on what types of alternative social structures have developed, what contests for hegemony have been won, how the groundwork has been laid by billion of hours of patient and unrewarding discouraging work in the meantime, the meantime being right now. Socialists should heed Gramsci’s words: “Educate yourselves because we will need all your intelligence. Rouse yourselves because we will need all your enthusiasm. Organize yourselves because we will need all your strength.” They should also, of course, freely ignore, adapt, renovate, and rebuild Gramsci as necessary.
At hand for this monumental task is a real, durable, and serious Marxist tradition of both theory and practice, which provides any number of insights, angles of attack, and signal flares for exploratory missions. Of course, everyone will have their own influences or guiding lights—part of the reason I never stint on references in my posts to people like Piketty, Davis, Fisher, Marx, Jameson, etc. is precisely to act as a simple transmission belt for the ideas of these much more intelligent, brave, and far-seeing people. As for an example of practice, I’ll mention, purely because I studied them during my M.A., the Zapatistas of Mexico, whose radical democratic practices, tireless work, and collective sensibility in some of the most horrendous conditions of poverty and agricultural devastation as well as an unfriendly and often violent government aren’t just inspiring but, more to the point, instructive. When I became interested in the intersection of education and democracy, it was to the educational practices of the EZLN autonomus communities that I turned to as possible starting points, not to the North American school system.
The Zapatistas, who draw from the history of Latin American guerillas, indigenous philosophy, anarchism, the legacy of Mexican student radicals, and more, show how leftists adopt and re-invent the contributions of their predecessors, how socialism maintains itself in the most discouraging circumstances, and show the truth in Marx’s poetic image of the communist movement as a mole patiently digging out of sight, to rise at the decisive moment. But the reader can and should adduce or find their own examples: those putting their lives on the line to protest American-funded war in the Middle East, city-wide anti-capitalist organizations, tenant strikers, volunteers at legal clinics for the poor and indigent, workplace unionists, and so on.
The concrete meaning of socialism can only be constructed from collective struggle and democratic experimentation. In the meantime, it is nothing more and nothing less than the name for the possibility of humanity taking collective ownership over its destiny instead of making appeasing sacrifices of entire segments of the population at the altar of the profit motive while pleading for auspicious prophecies from the oracles at the London School of Economics or the White House; of turning the smoking charnel house of History into a greenhouse in which a just and democratic world slowly grows to green health out of ash; and of constructing a social order wherein “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” finally realizing all the endlessly betrayed dreams of liberalism.
For Berger, Guevara “represented a decision, a conclusion.” Each of us must make their own decision, but the options before us are now clearer than ever: As I warned you from the start, it’s socialism or barbarism.
With this post, I come to the end of my own entry in the Why Socialism? genre. These types of texts always have to walk a fine line between being explainers and arguments, and I’ve tried to make this as much of an argument and as little of an explainer as possible, working from common-sense premises and well-established facts while minimizing abstruse theory.
Naturally, it’s still imperfect in some respects. Some readers might find it frustrating that I include people of differing political affiliations, economic status, loyalties, etc. in “the ruling class.” Relatedly, I’ve paid little heed to the division often invoked or even praised by liberals between economics/the economy on one hand and politics/the state on the other. This touches on a very big debate in socialist analysis which it would be too long to get into here, and which I don’t think ultimately has any practical consequences for the argument I make (that these people actually can’t constitute themselves as a coherent ruling class, even though the economic and political buck stops with them), but interested readers might check out the discussions of this in The State Debate. I’d also have liked to have discussed the (in my opinion) red herring of capitalist social democracy more. Mea culpa.
Finally, I’ll note there are many, many resources for learning more about socialism. For density of information and intellectual depth combined with accessibility, not to mention style, I still haven’t found anything better than Mike Davis’s excellent long essay, “Old Gods, New Enigmas: Notes on Revolutionary Agency.”
I’m really not by nature a Debate Club-type, or even someone especially interested in the more finicky and economic nuances of Marxist theory, so I’m glad to be able to cap off this three-parter and return to writing more leisurely and enjoyable stuff about culture, which is after all this blog’s focus. Can you believe I started this series because I thought I could knock it out in one evening?
Check out that byline!
“Many of the persecuted lose their capacity for seeing their own mistakes. It seems to them that the persecution itself is the greatest injustice. The persecutors are wicked simply because they persecute; the persecuted suffer because of their goodness. But this goodness has been beaten, defeated, suppressed; it was therefore a weak goodness, a bad, indefensible, unreliable goodness. For it will not do to grant that goodness must be weak as rain must be wet. It takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak.”