The Many Menus of Socialism

The many menus for socialism

“Voting for Socialism is not Socialism any more than a menu is a meal. Socialism must be organized, drilled, equipped, and the place to begin is in the industries where the workers are employed…Without such economic organization and the economic power with which it is clothed, and without the industrial co-operative training, discipline and efficiency which are its corollaries, the fruit of any political victories the workers may achieve will turn to ashes on their lips.”-Eugene V. Debs

Doesn’t this sound strikingly similar to Bernie Sanders’ message?

On the left we refer to the many different self-professed “socialist” or “communist” political parties as the “Alphabet Soup Groups.” This is because they all abbreviate their names into initials, like SP, SLP, SDUSA, SWP, CP(ML), CPUSA, RCP, PLP, and so on and so forth. They all have differing catechisms of belief systems that are very much like the catechisms of religions: if you disbelieve what you are told to believe you can and will be excommunicated. Most leftists who are excommunicated will cast about until they find a new organization to accept them until such time as you run afoul of the new catechism you adopted to get in, at which time you are once again excommunicated.

Those who think for themselves just don’t fit in well with the Alphabet Soup Groups. To mock this state of affairs amongst Maoist organizations, one malcontent set up a Catholic confessional booth at an anti-war coalition’s fundraiser: one booth was labeled “Criticism” and the other “Self-Criticism” because at that time it was the chic thing to do in Maoist organizations of going through rituals of “criticism” and “self-criticism.” It was very similar to the Synanon cult’s practice of “The Games” which was even brought into the administrative practice of the United Farm Workers by Cesar Chavez (other practices of Synanon also came into de facto effect in the California Association of Licensed Investigators [CALI] promulgated when ex-Synanon private investigator Chris Reynolds became president; when he tried to pull those tactics on me, I knew it was time to go and resigned from the Board and all committee assignments).

In light of the campaign of Bernie Sanders, many of the Alphabet Soup Groups (ASG) have written critiques and circulated them about why Bernie is or is not a “socialist” because he does or does not agree with their particular menu of what socialists are supposed to propose programmatically. The fact is that most of these critiques are by people who, if they actually majored in Political Science at a college level, probably missed the requisite course in Methodology (or took it and didn’t understand it) and therefore place the ideology of socialism (as they believe it to be because their ASG says so) before the science. This leads to surreal internal discussions amongst leftists where even the terminology can be the opposite of the way political scientists define concepts.

Two examples:

1. ASGs universally refer to political parties as “Cadre” and “Mass” parties in exactly the opposite meanings of how political scientists who study and write about political party theory and sociology use those terms;

2. ASGs almost universally define “fascism” according to a definition which describes the demographic characteristics of the fascist political parties of the 1930s-40s without recognizing that “ism” refers to an ideology. In the ASG definition it is always an obligatory article of faith that to be fascist something has to be a movement involving the middle class. This led former Trotskyist turned Green Party History (not political science) major Peter Camejo to make the absurd claim that William Simon – largest financier of the overtly fascist Catholic Opus Dei order in the United States – was not a fascist because Opus Dei was not a mass movement (seriously…Peter and I engaged in a series of “open letter” polemics over his defense of William Simon; see http://janbtucker.com/blog/2011/09/04/fascism-for-dummies/). The ASGs almost universally reject and ignore the nature of fascism as an ideology as being the right wing version of Communitarianism as opposed to Catholic Liberation Theology as left-wing Communitarianism; if they admitted the distinction they might have to admit that the way Fidel Castro organized Cuba was based on Communitaian rather than Marxist principles and that Allende’s program for Chile was decidedly Communitarian rather than Marxist.

At this point let me state that there are some brilliant political scientists who have intellectually honest views of the history of socialist and Marxist ideological development. I recommend in particular Roy Medvedev of Russia and Wolfgang Leonhard of Yale University. Additionally I would point out that “socialism,” that is “social ism” as an ideology did not start with Karl Marx and to put that into context, people should peruse the writings of [see my blog, http://janbtucker.com/blog/2011/11/12/tristanism-acunism/] Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, Francois Marie Charles Fourier and especially Flore-Celestine -Therèse-Henriette Tristan-Moscoso (Flora Tristan). Nor will “socialism” end with so-called Marxists as the only bearers of the true faith. The existentialists, myself included as a phenomenologist (as a methodological school of thought in Political Science) have had as much to offer socialist thought in the 20^th and 21^st centuries as anybody else.

WHAT DOES ANY OF THIS HAVE TO DO WITH THE REAL WORLD?

This has all been introductory for how I think Bernie Sander’s “socialism” should be seen contextually and judged in the modern world; forget the cluttered and muddled pronoucements of the ASGers.

The first Meidner Plan was designed to produce social democracy-the second democracy-within Swedish macro-economic policy

The best context to understand what Bernie has been talking about is that he is programmatically advancing the first two democracies of the 2^nd Meidner Plan of the Swedish Socialist Party’s theory of the three democracies. Whether or not Bernie sees it that way I don’t know, but like me he realizes that it’s pointless to advance the third democracy—economic democracy—until we’ve achieved the first two: political democracy and social democracy.

Reducing the power of the Swedish monarchy to a ceremonial role was a critical element of the “first democracy”

The first democracy in Sweden entailed the curtailment of the powers of the monarchy, the establishment of universal suffrage, the consolidation of the original five-house parliament system into the workable unicameral parliament (each of the original houses in essence became one of the traditional political parties, as the old sysem represented in Lutheran Sweden a Communitarian governance model straight out of the Catholic doctrines of St. Thomas Aquinas) and similar examples of what we call “small d democracy.” In the United States this fight is similar to Sanders’ calls for abolishing the Citizens United ruling, making voting easier for everybody, and generally curbing the power of the rich to dominate elections.

The second democracy achieved by Sweden is social democracy: the rights of women, minorities and LGBTI people; universal health care; a limitation on rents; the rights of workers to organize trade unions and the other institutions we equate with the so-called “welfare state.” Again, these are the kinds of reforms that Bernie is pushing when he calls for single payer health care, “immigration reform,” an end to police violence and corruption and tuition free higher education.

What of the third democracy, “economic democracy?” Professor Kjell Östberg of history at Södertörn University in Sweden wrote on September 10, 2015 [https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/09/sweden-social-democracy-olaf-palme-assasination-reforms/] on this topic:

The trade unions wanted to. In 1976 the LO called for the establishment of wage-earner funds. Under the proposal, every year a proportion of a company’s profits — in the form of shares — would be transferred to union-controlled funds. After anywhere from twenty to seventy-five years, workers would control a majority of shares in most companies.

The plan’s call for gradual socialization roiled the party. Palme and the party leadership favored what they used to call “functional socialism”: the deepening of democracy, a growing public sector, greater state planning resources, laws to reduce the influence of employers. Ownership itself they refused to touch.

The “Meidner Plan” was an attack on this credo, and Palme spent several years killing the proposal’s radical elements. His reaction demonstrated that, for all his reform accomplishments, he was not prepared to step beyond the boundaries of capitalism.

While Bernie has not gone there yet, other relatively mainstream politicians have. Former Congressional Representative and Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, repeatedly introduced the National Health Service Act in Congress. I wrote of the proposed NHSA in contrast to “single payer” health care at http://janbtucker.com/blog/2012/01/18/pass-sb-810-for-single-payer-health-care/. Because Dellums was actually doing something to create economic democracy rather than just sit around writing menus of socialism, he was the target of the Peace & Freedom Party’s “Berkeley Bullsheviks” who opposed his attempt to be cross-nominated by the PFP along with his Democratic Party nomination one year.

Because Bernie did not actually propose the third democracy the ASG and related groups like the Berkeley Bullsheviks denounce him as not being a “socialist.” This is because they lack Karl Marx’s understanding of the dialectical progression of history; because they fail to appreciate Marx’s notions about the difference between the sub-structure of society, the superstructure of society and that they are just a pimple on the super-structure; because they have no concept of “The Political Consequences of Modernization” [1972 by John H. Kautsky, the son of the Karl Kautsky denounced by V.I. Lenin as “the renegade Kautsky”]; and because few of them have actually gained a well-grounded education in political science or any social science for that matter.

So, unlike Bernie and the movement he’s unleashed, who have advanced the first two democracies far beyond what anybody imagined was possible just a year ago, these ASG pundits prate on about how he’s not a real socialist because he hasn’t put the third democracy on the menu yet. For those of us who already took Eugene V. Debs at his word that “”Voting for Socialism is not Socialism any more than a menu is a meal” I am willing to settle for Bernie’s having organized a movement that is moving towards socialism faster than anything I ever anticipated in the last 50 years.

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