Sam Gindin - The Socialist Challenge Today

Published in 2018 by

The Merlin Press

Central Books Building

Freshwater Road

London

RM8 1RX

www.merlinpress.co.uk

Leo Panitch & Sam Gindin, 2018

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

978-0-85036-745-4 Mobi

978-0-85036-746-1 epub

This little book addresses the challenges facing socialists today by analyzing in historical and theoretical perspective the recent shift from protest to politics on the left. After assessing the expression of this through the Sanders electoral insurgency in the USA, and especially through the Syriza experience in Greece, the book turns to closely examining the limits and possibilities for class, party and state transformation in the context of Jeremy Corbyns leadership of the Labour Party in Britain.

We wish to thank Tony Zurbrugg of Merlin Press for encouraging us to considerably expand our essay Class, party and the challenge of state transformation in the Socialist Register 2017: Rethinking Revolution into this book, as well as thank Adrian Howe for so quickly and expertly preparing it for publication. The analysis offered of both Syriza and the Labour Party owes much to our conversations with too many friends and comrades a good number themselves political actors as well as observers in Greece and Britain to mention here. But we especially want to acknowledge the value of our interactions with Max Shanly in relation to following developments in the Labour Party. We dedicate this book to him as well as to his great political mentor, Tony Benn.

In 1917, not only those parties engaged in insurrectionary revolution but even those committed to gradual reform still spoke of eventually transcending capitalism. Half a century later social democrats had explicitly come to define their political goals as compatible with a welfare-state variety of capitalism; and well before the end of the century even many who had formerly embraced the legacy of 1917 would join them in this. Yet this occurred just as the universalization of neoliberalism rendered threadbare any notion of distinct varieties of capitalism. The realism without imagination of the so-called Third Way was shown to lack realism as well as imagination.

working classes everywhere through this period.

We are now in a new conjuncture. It is a very different conjuncture than the one which led to the perception that neoliberalism, at the height of its embrace by Third Way social democracy, was the most successful ideology in world history. While neoliberal economic practices have been reproduced as has the American empires centrality in global capitalism neoliberalisms legitimacy has been undermined. As the aftershocks of the US financial crash reverberated across the eurozone and the so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), this deepened the multiple economic, ecological, and migratory crises that characterize this new conjuncture. At the same time, neoliberalisms ideological delegitimation has enveloped many political institutions that have sustained its practices, from the European Union to political parties at the national level. What makes the current conjuncture so dangerous is the space this has opened for the far right, with its ultra-nationalist, racist, sexist and homophobic overtones, to capture popular frustrations with liberal democratic politics.

The delegitimation of neoliberalism has restored some credibility to the radical socialist case for transcending capitalism as necessary to realize the collective, democratic, egalitarian and ecological aspirations of humanity. It spawned a growing sense that capitalism could no longer continue to be bracketed when protesting the multiple oppressions and ecological threats of our time. And as austerity took top billing over free trade, the spirit of anti-neoliberal protest also shifted. Whereas capitalist globalization had defined the primary focus of oppositional forces in the first decade of the new millennium, the second decade opened with Occupy and the anti-austerity movements in Greece and Spain dramatically highlighting capitalisms gross class inequalities. Yet with this, the insurrectionary flavour of protest without revolutionary effect quickly revealed the limits of forever standing outside the state.

A marked turn on the left from protest to politics has also come to characterize the new conjuncture, as opposition to capitalist globalization shifted from the streets to the state theatres of neoliberal practice. This is in good part what the election of Syriza in Greece and the sudden emergence of Podemos in Spain signified. Corbyns election as leader of the British Labour Party attracted hundreds of thousands of new members with the promise to sustain activism rather than undermine it. And even in the heartland of the global capitalist empire, the short bridge that spanned Occupy and Sanders left populist promise for a political revolution to create a government which represents all Americans and not just the 1% was reflected in polls indicating that half of all millennials did not support capitalism and held a positive view of socialism whatever they thought that meant.

This transition from protest to politics has been remarkably class-oriented in terms of addressing inequality in income and wealth distribution, as well as in economic and political power relations. Yet as Andrew Murray has so incisively noted, this new politics is generally more class-focused than class-rooted. While it places issues of social inequality and global economic power front and centre, it neither emerges from the organic institutions of the class-in-itself nor advances the socialist perspective of the class-for-itself.transformative today. Given the manifold changes in class composition and identity, as well as the limits and failures of traditional working-class parties and unions in light of these changes, what could this mean in terms of new organizational forms and practices? And what would a class-focused and class-rooted transformation of the capitalist state actually entail?

While leaders like Tsipras, Iglesias, Corbyn and Sanders all have pointed beyond Third Way social democracy, their capacity to actually move beyond it is another matter. This partly has to do with their personal limitations, but much more with the specific limitations of each of their political parties, including even the strongest left currents within them, not preparing adequately for the challenge of actually transforming state apparatuses. The experience of the government in Greece highlights this, as well as how difficult it is for governments to extricate their state apparatuses from transnational ones.

All this compels a fundamental rethink of the relationship between class, party and state transformation. If Bolshevik revolutionary discourse seems archaic a hundred years after 1917, it is not just because the legacy of its historic demonstration that revolution was possible has faded. It is also because Gramscis reframing, so soon after 1917, of the key issues of revolutionary strategy especially regarding the impossibility of an insurrectionary path to power in states deeply embedded in capitalist societies rings ever more true. What this means for socialists, however, as we face up to a long war of position in the twenty-first century, is not only the recognition of the limitations of twentieth-century Leninism, let alone Soviet state practices, but also an appreciation of what inspired the communist break with social democracy in the first place. This can be expressed in what Jodi Dean admires today as communisms expression of the collective desire for collectivity; more concretely it encompasses a commitment to working-class internationalism as opposed to national class harmony between capital and labour, an orientation to class formation and organization in the struggle against capital, and a recognition that socialist economic planning requires taking capital away from capital.