“The state,” wrote Marx, “is based on the contradiction between public and private life.” In other words, a large number of individuals work in full view, while a small number of individuals reap the benefits of the workers’ labor in secret. Social crisis erupts when the contradiction comes to the fore. This is why, Marx believed, the capitalist state “must protect unity where there is conflict and contradiction”. This process of concealment, he wrote, amounted to an “exorcised contradiction.”
Let the unbalanced Donald Trump, for the first time in the history of the modern capitalist state, give up hiding and make the clear exposure of the contradiction between capital and labor part of his governing style. On the eve of America’s 250th anniversary, these two titles appeared almost side by side in the New York Times: “Trump withdrew at least $2 billion after returning to the White House” and “On Mount Rushmore, Trump Goes from Patriotism to ‘Communism'” – after several progressive victories in the Democratic congressional primaries, Trump warned of a coming left-wing apocalypse. The highest stage of capitalism, it seems, is not imperialism, but a gleefully predatory anti-communism.
German economist Werner Sombart concluded that the triumph of capitalism in America, coupled with a lack of class consciousness, turned the American worker into “a measured, calculating businessman without ideals.” It is perhaps inevitable that such a person should now be what passes for an American president. But it is not just America’s fabled – and exaggerated – lack of a class structure that has doomed socialism here. It is the simple fact of American prosperity. “On the reefs of roast beef and apple pie,” Sombart famously said, “socialist utopias of every kind are sent to their doom.” America was and still is – the main irritation of “unaffordability” notwithstanding – the most prosperous society on the face of the earth. Its current right-wing revolution is the result, not of material deprivations, but of cultural ones; and of a general psychic and not economic collapse. But then, the apparent rise of an American radical left is the result of the same forces.
Keeping up with Trump, Wall Street Journalespecially its largely sclerotic opinion pages, has published one hysterical article after another warning of an imminent socialist or communist – the distinction is never made (only Marx could get away with it) – takeover of the US. America’s right-wing Bolsheviks are the only ones who take America’s left-wing Bolsheviks seriously. Almost every other liberal you talk to who has the slightest sense of history rolls their eyes when you mention Sanders, AOC, Mamdani et al.
That’s partly because Sanders and AOC have been two of the least effective lawmakers in Congress. They stand tall, and their stance is praised by their supporters for “putting important issues on the radar screen.” There’s something to be said for good old-fashioned consciousness-raising, for sure. But if the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the New Deal legislation before it, had been simply spoken, they would never have become law. While a politician must possess the back chops to succeed in any Democratic legislature in the world, the idea of backroom “deals” is anathema to purists like Sanders and his circle. They would never have allowed Lyndon Johnson to, in effect, allow southern senators to have their war in Vietnam in exchange for legislation in 1964. One wonders: would they have given up their war right to DEI in exchange for universal health care? What would they be willing to give up for free public university tuition, guaranteed affordable housing, a guaranteed living wage tied to inflation?
As for Mamdani, his pro-labor values are perfectly admirable, but, in reality, he’s either modestly following along the lines of progressive Bill Blasio, who preceded Mamdani’s predecessor Eric Adams, or he’s building on Adams himself, especially with respect to tepid initiatives in creating affordable housing. One thing he sure isn’t acting like a socialist. Beyond rhetoric and a performative populism THE Trump to begin with, he is not even close to a redistribution of wealth in New York City.
The idea that any of these figures, or the fiery progressives who won recent congressional elections in New York and Colorado, are socialists, let alone “communists,” is about as accurate as the idea that Trump was ever a “populist.” First search engines and now AI have so flattened and diluted any sense of context and historical perspective that almost any phrase can be plucked from the past, rehearsed in the new syncretic editing room, and then emerged in an exciting new “vibe.” “Radicalism is becoming fashionable again in the intellectual world, a fate which even its worst enemies could not suppose it deserved… It is a loft and playground ‘radicalism’: old souvenirs the dusty, creaking limbs crushed to rock the baby’s swing.” This was the democratic socialist Irving Howe writing in 1967 for the New Left, whose extremism ensured that Nixon won the presidency in 1968 and then again in 1972. Howe could have been writing about today.
It so happens that Howe, along with Michael Harrington, founded the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), the forerunner of the Democratic Socialist Party (DSA), which is financially and ideologically behind Mamdani and several other progressive candidates who recently won primaries. Both men played important roles in the DSA as well. (One of my first published pieces was for Howe’s Democratic Socialist Daily Disagreementonce the main critical body of the DSA. I met Howe a short time later and – cautiously – noted one of her editors’ lengthy critique of my writing. “One day you will be DISTINGUISHED like me, – said Howe with a warm smile, – and then no one will edit you.)
Harrington, whose 1962 book, The other Americainspired Johnson’s War on Poverty, wanted, as Howe and others did, to change the Democratic party from within. He knew that America would never find its Clement Attlee and would evolve into some kind of welfare state. In America there is class, but there is no class consciousness. Tell someone they’re working class and they’ll glare at you like you’ve punished them. Social fluidity may be a chimera in America, but it’s an official feature of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—the green light at the bottom of Daisy’s docket. The Great Gatsby. Class consciousness is the enemy of social mobility.
It may not be the case that every man (using the old formulation) is a king, as aspiring dictator Huey Long once claimed (and as the brutal Stanley Kowalski declared in Tram named Desireonly to be properly castrated by Tennessee Williams). But the belief that everyone can fall one day and get up the next – “crash in April / fall in May,” as Sinatra sang at the height of American power – is the quintessential American expectation. Another term for this is manic depression. Or is it simply a restatement of Machiavelli’s idea that life is defined by the struggle between them VIRTUE (will) and luck? In that case, every American is a Machiavellian, a “prudent, calculating businessman without ideals.” And also manic. Which brings us back to America’s current leader.
Encouraged by Occupy Wall Street and the rise of Bernie Sanders, DSA membership grew exponentially in 2016. It also absorbed the left’s turn to culture. Howe seemed to have a premonition of the consequences of that turn when he made his scathing comments about the New Left in 1967—in fact the DSA was the product of a merger, in 1982, between the DSOC and the New American Movement, which originated in the New Left. IN The fight for a decent politicsMichael Walzer, who served as longtime co-editor of Disagreementtells, with disgust, the story of the DSA’s expulsion of a long-time labor rights fighter because it emerged that the man had once tried to organize a police union. Along with seeking the abolition of Israel as a Jewish state, eliminating the police is now an official plan of the DSA program.
If socialism is defined by a commitment to change the structure of material distribution to alleviate poverty, and all the forms of social oppression that accompany poverty, then DSA has lost its bearings. From Mamdani to the recently triumphant progressive candidates in New York and Colorado—winners in primaries where only the true-believer base and deep-blue constituencies vote—much of their rhetoric is about either leading America toward a democratic socialist future or destroying Israel as a Jewish state. The first will never happen except for a near-apocalyptic catalyzing event; it will not be until an American leader can say, as Attlee said in 1945, in the ruins of the Second World War: “We are facing a new era and … the people of Britain are facing that new era with the same courage with which they faced the long years of war.” And even then, it would never happen. Not in a country where the quest for status is a permanent denial of the existence of class.
And Netanyahu and his gangsters aside, the abolition of Israel as a Jewish state is as likely to happen as the abolition of France as a French state. The country has as much right to exist along its own lines as any other nation-state. The American left’s obsession with Israel and Palestine is hard to understand. Not to mention the enormous amounts of money poured into everything from the National Basketball Association to the Trump family from the United Arab Emirates, the driving force behind the genocide in Sudan. Then again, Mamdan’s wife’s wealthy family lives comfortably in Dubai. But what an obsession with anti-Zionism has to do with a genuine democratic socialist program is anyone’s guess. If the DSA has not discovered, as Mamdani did when he ran for mayor, that the use of a long-buried anti-Semitism, under the guise of a theatrical anti-Zionism, is a proven vote. Otherwise, Americans trying to pay for health care, or buy a home, or make sense of Trump’s chaos, couldn’t care less. It seems the American left has never heard of Jeremy Corbyn.
DSA’s fixation on abolishing the police, abolishing the Jewish state, equating capitalism with racism – tell that to the people of Malaysia, or Singapore, or Japan, etc. – has more to do with loading a fragile psyche with fun cultural attitudes than actual left-wing politics. It’s confusing American politics with a live concert. And the idea that a democratic socialist polity must abandon reform from within and seek absolute power from above is what Lenin called the “infantile disorder” of refusing the compromise that could lead to real victory. Never mind that Lenin’s goal was a society in which compromise was a criminal offense. The DSA is starting with a punishing purity that Lenin at first only dreamed of. The question now is whether a combination of liberal spinelessness and right-wing intimidation can convince Americans that this minor swing is the new face of the Democratic party.
(Further reading: The end of America’s beginning)
