Here's some food for thought, which has been in my Drafts Folder for quite some time since running into this material through Balkinization. It's an article and commentary on that article addressing the composition of the Left.
I think it's interesting, especially given that dingbats and asswarts keep on calling Barack Obama a "socialist," the decline of capitalism looks more possible this year than it has for some time, and the party many of us fight for itself is likely to be renamed tomorrow, by the Steering Committee of the RepoMan Party, as the "Democrat Socialist" Party, whose symbol, I assume, will be something kicking the hell out of an elephant.
Mostly, I thought we could use some intellectual stimulation -- plus my Drafts Folder is too cluttered.
First I have a selection from Sheri Berman, writing in Dissent:
We don’t always remember that Marx thought capitalism had amazing qualities. "[It] has accomplished wonders," he wrote, "far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades." But its extraordinary accomplishments, he argued, came at a fearsome human cost. Capital was like a vampire that "lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks." And in the end, having fulfilled its historically "progressive" function of destroying the old order and releasing humanity’s productive potential, it would collapse. Marx was convinced that just as the internal contradictions of feudalism had paved the way for capitalism, so the internal contradictions of capitalism would pave the way for its successor. It was, as he once put it, "a question of . . . laws . . . tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results."
Everyone on the left agreed with Marx on the first two points. By the late nineteenth century, however, some of its sharpest minds began to disagree on the third. For instead of collapsing, capitalism was showing great resilience. It emerged stronger than ever from a long depression in the 1870s and 1880s, and then revolutions in transportation and communication led to a wave of globalization sweeping over not just Europe but the world at large. Several advanced bourgeois states, meanwhile, had started to enact important economic, social, and political reforms, and, for most of the public, life was actually getting not worse but better (however slowly and fitfully).
Berman notes that the Left then split into three factions. One, guided by Lenin, was socialism (or aspirational communism), in which the birth of a new social order had to be induced by a vanguard party willing to use violence. The others were democratic and non-violent, and the battle between them has been the main theme of the Left for the past century. They are, respectively, "democratic socialism" and "social democracy"; she attributes many of the problems of the Left to the "incomplete victory" of the latter. She introduces the distinction between them this way:
One democratic faction ["democratic socialism"] believed that Marx may have been wrong about the imminence of capitalism’s collapse, but was basically right in arguing that capitalism could not persist indefinitely. Its internal contradictions and human costs, they felt, were so great that it would ultimately give way to something fundamentally different and better—hence the purpose of the left was to hasten this transition. Another faction ["social democracy"] rejected the view that capitalism was bound to collapse in the foreseeable future and believed that in the meantime it was both possible and desirable to take advantage of its upsides while addressing its downsides. Rather than working to transcend capitalism, therefore, they favored a strategy built on encouraging its immense productive capacities, reaping the benefits, and deploying them for progressive ends.
Read the rest if and as and when and how you wish. The portion I've quoted and summarized is enough for a discussion, if you'd rather stick to it alone. I like the idea of more people being able to distinguish "democratic socialism" and "social democracy," which do indeed seem, in relevant ways, to underlie some of the disagreements we have here (for both large and small values of "we.")
Andrew Koppelman, writing in Balkinization, was the one who introduced me to Berman's article. His commentary is itself very much worth reading (and probably an easier row to hoe), and I think I can justify quoting four paragraphs of his long piece without traducing Fair Use:
Berman worries that the left doesn’t fully appreciate what they had accomplished. "Some forgot that the reforms, while important, were merely means to an end—an ongoing process of taming and domesticating the capitalist beast—and so contented themselves with the pedestrian management of the welfare state. Others never made their peace with the loss of a post-capitalist future."
If we use Berman’s taxonomy, Obama is firmly in the Social Democratic camp, and the label "socialist," when applied to him, rests on a confusion (willful or otherwise varies, I suspect, with the speaker) about the distinctions on the left just enumerated. Rosa Luxembourg understood almost a century ago why Obama is no socialist. He has no interest at all in dismantling capitalism. He told the Times: "the thing I constantly try to emphasize to people if that coming in, the market was doing fine, nobody would be happier than me to stay out of it. I have more than enough to do without having to worry the financial system. The fact that we’ve had to take these extraordinary measures and intervene is not an indication of my ideological preference, but an indication of the degree to which lax regulation and extravagant risk taking has precipitated a crisis."
Social Democracy aims to deploy the state for two central purposes. One is to correct capitalism’s operational failures, where capitalism wastes wealth instead of producing it. The current market collapse is an example: many well-functioning businesses that were competently producing goods and services have been destroyed, in a spreading cycle of depression. Obama’s stimulus measures and bank bailouts aim to stop this downward spiral.
The other big aim of Social Democracy – and this is what the accusation of "socialism" is really about - is to ameliorate the market’s distributive consequences by spreading around the wealth that capitalism produces. That was Obama’s big theme in his campaign, before the economic crisis hit, and it is embodied in his tax and health care reforms. The second aim of Social Democracy is more controversial than the first. Bush and McCain were both willing to do whatever was necessary to keep the recession from becoming a depression, but neither had any interest in redistributing wealth.
Discuss, or don't discuss, but I thought we might want to class up the joint a bit tonight.