land of cults and organizing
Indeed, the goal of The Socialist Manifesto seems to be specifically aimed at addressing this problem of how to maintain broad-based solidarity while still respecting diversity and pluralism within the movement. As we have seen from history, having a common enemy is not enough. To change the world, leftists need a shared vision of how to move forward once capitalism has been vanquished.
Sunkara’s passionate ninth chapter, “How We Win,” provides a concrete 15-point program that builds on his historical chapters to elucidate the core lessons from the socialist experiments of the 19th and 20th centuries. While Sunkara argues that “social democracy has just been the more humane face of neoliberalism,” he also believes the road to democratic socialism runs through social democracy. But rather that accepting a new version of capitalism with a human face, democratic socialists must move quickly from extracting concessions from capital to remaking the economy along socialist lines. Included in his 15-point program is a demand for socialists to “embed themselves in working-class struggles,” to democratize existing unions and abolish the electoral college, and to form new left-wing political parties like Die Linke in Germany or Podemos in Spain. Sunkara also calls for a universalist form of politics, working to overcome both racism and sexism without being internally divided by them.
For Sunkara, if there is anything to be learned from the history of Swedish social democracy, it is that expansions of the welfare state can easily be reversed as long as elites maintain private ownership of the means of production. When prospects for economic expansion faltered in the late 1970s and 1980s while globalization presented new challenges to the growth of private sector profits, Swedish employers reneged on their previous compromises with the working class, embracing neoliberal reforms that undermined the Meidner Plan for the socialization of Swedish industry.
On the other hand, the experience of the Soviet Union shows us that the overnight abolition of private property by administrative decree—and the imposition of socialism from above by a radicalized vanguard party without a mass base—can quickly devolve into authoritarianism, particularly when faced with both domestic and international counterrevolutionary forces.
For contemporary socialists, what Sunkara calls “class struggle social democracy” cannot be enough. A truly democratic and more egalitarian society—as well as a society that can adequately deal with the future threats of climate change and increasing automation—requires an end to capitalist exploitation through social ownership of the economy. Only when the profits of collectively-directed enterprises can be reinvested into society to serve the long-term goals of public welfare (versus the short-term aims of private profit) will we be able to reverse the multiple catastrophes of environmental degradation, extreme inequality, pathological individualism, and the alienation and loneliness that have driven millions into poverty, depression and premature death.