Bhaskar Sunkara's Socialist Manifesto begins by entering an imaginary world. It's 2018 and “you” are a die-hard fan of Jon Bon Jovi, “the most popular and critically acclaimed musician of this era.” So devoted are you to the singer-songwriter that you've found work at the pasta sauce factory his father owns in New Jersey. The job isn't great, but it's better than nothing. After a year, your wages rise from $15 an hour to $17, a 13 percent increase that fails to match your recent 25 percent increase in productivity; meanwhile your colleague Debra, who's been working there for three years, is still only making $13 an hour. Your grievances lead to the formation of a union.
Yet the rigors of the global sauce economy—low-wage competitors in India are fierce—strain the firm's owners and its workers to the breaking point; though the union blocks management from issuing layoffs and extending the workday by an hour, things are bad regardless: “At the end of every day you're physically and emotionally exhausted and unable to do the things outside of work you used to love.”
The scene then shifts to a fantasy Sweden, “the most humane social system ever constructed,” where strong labor laws and unions ensure your wages are high and an ample welfare state permits you to choose and change jobs with far greater ease; it's good, Sunkara says, but we can do better. Now imagine that you're back in Jersey, here transformed into “the epicenter of a radical political upheaval” that eventually catapults “a new left-populist movement fronted by Bruce Springsteen” into power. Controlling the White House and a congressional majority, the movement passes laws remaking the United States into a Swedish-style social democracy. Since “the economy is still driven by private enterprise,” the gains of social democracy are resented and assailed by a capitalist class eager to recover its former privileges and profit margins. Yet the organized Left now firmly controls the political high ground and successfully pushes to abolish capitalism as such: Though markets for nonessential goods continue to operate, primary resources such as food, affordable housing, and education are guaranteed and the banks are nationalized. “The decades pass on, and you eventually retire, cared for by the society that you contributed so much to, while enjoying the love of friends and family.”
Who is this scenario written for? The narrative tends to abstraction, but Sunkara does not entirely skirt the question of his audience's identity. “Your ancestors were peasants,” he stipulates. Much later, near the book's end, he returns to “your” medieval history. If you lived centuries ago, you would have been conscripted for war by your feudal lord: “You rallied under a blue banner with a griffin or some such creature on it.” In the present you recognize Bon Jovi and Springsteen as cultural touchstones; furthermore, “You're an above-average student, a hard worker, and capable of thinking creatively and solving problems.” Like the final porridge bowl to Goldilocks, like Eddie Van Halen to David Lee Roth, you're just right. If you're not educated, pale, and left of center already, you can certainly imagine reaching that level of development; a little bit of bland imagining is all it takes. In other words, “you” are part of the 99 percent of the United States, a formation understood to be essentially white; as with Jacobin, the magazine of politics and policy Sunkara founded as a DC undergraduate in 2010, the core audience for the Manifesto is swing voters who prefer their critiques of capitalism unsullied by identitarian cant about racial divisions. The “ordinary people” the Manifesto cites are simply united; and who can fault Sunkara as he deigns to appeal to the people as they are?
A former vice-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, Sunkara can plausibly present himself, at the age of twenty-nine, as the éminence grise of a nascent American socialist movement. The Socialist Manifesto is written in the same style and bears much the same tone as his regular columns for The Guardian. A stickler for concision, Sunkara packs into its 288-page frame, alongside the inaugural speculative fiction, a condensed history of prior socialist movements across the world and a program for what is to be done politically by “our” present-day American Left. This trinity—what might be, what once was, what will be—is elaborated with a clarity best described as Orwellian. No sentence is difficult to diagram; the imposing analytic thickets typical of Western Marxist writing have been leveled down to the simplicity of grass.
Sunkara's history of socialism begins by detailing the early decades of Germany's Social Democratic Party (SPD), where for the first time ever Marx's pupils headed a mass organization of the urban proletariat; the book retraces their arguments regarding policy and strategy—reform or revolution? for or against imperialism?—with diligence and insight. As a narrator Sunkara aspires to flat description. Yet his preference for Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the “radical democrats” who founded the German Communist Party, is unmistakable. Their murder in 1919 by protofascist paramilitaries in collusion with the ruling SPD represents the closure of two historical paths: Capitalism remained undefeated in the West, and socialism, forced to fend for itself outside the developed world, was barbarized. “In its most formative period,” Sunkara writes, “isolated in the harsh conditions of Russia, socialism became synonymous with a bloodied collectivism.”
The book's survey of Third World socialism presents similar evidence in the service of the same conclusion. After recounting the experience of Chinese Communism in substantial detail—its birth in the extremities of foreign invasion and civil war, its dictatorial triumph, its apocalyptic famines, its waves of mass political killings, its eventual stabilization without democratic freedom—Sunkara delivers the same verdict he did on the Soviet Union: The Chinese Communist Party's revolution “is best understood as a national, authoritarian project, capable of delivering progress at times but far removed from the classic vision of socialism.” A cursory tour of the rest of the Red Global South (too poor, too bad, Cuba's workers don't have rights) concludes with an authoritative statement: “The Third World's experience with socialism vindicates Marx. He argued that a successful socialist economy requires already developed productive forces and that a robust socialist democracy requires a self-organized working class.” In other words, the presence of undemocratic socialism in the Third World is taken as proof that democratic socialism is possible only in the First World.
Read Full Article »
