Something New and Something Old
Sometimes, after each cycle of struggle ends, there remains a sad job for its participants. We are to trawl through the movement’s records, weigh on each crisis point and political crossroads, and collectively write the ‘Lessons of the XYZ years’ article in the Party paper. The strange years between 2015 and 2020 prove fertile ground for such a project in the Anglo-American arena. In the middle of the decade, the diffuse street politics and largely organisationless horizontalism of the Occupy movement and the British student movement gave way to its inversion; the self-same activists who, before 2015, had occupied and marched and refused to issue demands lest they legitimise the state to which they were addressed,1 entered en masse into traditional parties and electoral efforts which scant months earlier appeared as fundamentally useless vehicles for a transformational politics.
Quite suddenly, the real prospect of left governmental power, made possible by the unexpectedly successful leadership campaign of Jeremy Corbyn in the British Labour Party and the candidacy of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party presidential primaries, directed all energies into these projects. These energies birthed new and reinvigorated old institutions.
Democratic Socialists in the USA
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), for thirty years a fringe caucus on the margins of the Democratic Party with just enough influence to perpetuate itself,2 was one such institution. While the 2016 Sanders campaign functioned somewhat as an “ad hoc proto-party”,3 allowing those participants of Occupy and other social movements to gather in one political space, the campaign’s failure that year meant those now organised individuals needed somewhere to continue their political action: for many, that was the DSA. In the year following Sanders’ defeat and Trump’s election, DSA membership more than tripled.4 Over the whole period, membership went from 6,500 members in 20145 to 92,000 in 2021.6 The DSA became an organisational centre for this new and newly state-oriented, socialist US left. Its members set about agitating for further democratic socialist electoral candidates and undertaking work in the community and workplace.
Alongside the more formal organisations of the new democratic socialist left in the US came a similarly successful network of media outlets. At the forefront was Jacobin magazine – a socialist print magazine set up in 2010 by DSA member Bhaskar Sunkara, which experienced a meteoric rise alongside the Sanders campaign and the DSA. In the summer of 2015, Jacobin had 10,000 subscribers; it gained 16,000 in just two months after Trump was elected.7 There was also a proliferation of podcasts and video broadcasts – Chapo Trap House, The Michael Brooks Show, Richard Wolff’s Economic Update, amongst many others – which served to create a further cultural basis for democratic socialism as a force in the USA, particularly amongst a Millennial base.8
Democratic Socialists in Britain
Similarly, in Britain, the energy created by Corbyn’s Labour leadership saw speaking venues nationwide suddenly packed to overflowing and spawned an organisation: Momentum. Unlike the DSA, which asserted organisational independence, Momentum, though formed by personnel from within and outside of Labour,9 placed itself firmly within the greater party. Nevertheless, it too became the organisational core of the new democratic socialist left in Britain. While most of its membership remained broadly non-active throughout Corbyn’s leadership beyond becoming mobilised during election campaigns,10 a minority of members became involved in community and workplace organising, as well as local cultural projects.11 Members also became activated around internal Labour elections, such as those for the National Executive Committee (NEC), where Momentum campaigned for socialist slates and representatives committed to democratising the Labour Party (another of Momentum’s central aims).
As part of this commitment to Labour Party transformation, in 2016, Momentum sponsored an event parallel to the annual Labour Party conference – The World Transformed Festival (TWT) – which would function as a place for the Labour Left and those socialists sympathetic to the movement to gather and practice political self-education. Though TWT panels and events took a wide variety of topics, and film, sport, and parties took spots in the programme, a general focus was maintained on the nature and strategic possibilities of the Labour Party, and the festival usually finished with a rally with MPs from the Socialist Campaign Group (SCG) and other key figures.12
The period of Corbyn’s leadership and left growth within and adjacent to the Labour Party also saw the rise of a network of left media organisations. At TWT 2018, Tribune, historically a popular magazine associated with the soft left of the Party, saw a relaunch under new management and with a specifically democratic socialist position.13 Novara Media, a radio, video and written news outlet founded in 2011 by those involved in the student movement, also experienced success: an interview with Corbyn before his election in 2015 received tens of thousands of views, and their YouTube subscriber count increased by over 760% during the period of left leadership of the party.14 Their editors and regular contributors became known figures in the movement through their appearances on national television and presence at TWT and other Momentum events.
These institutions gained prominence on both sides of the Atlantic; they developed a strong sense of shared self-perception as democratic socialist; they developed shared networks of theory production and exchange; in their contexts, they fought elections and made genuine attempts toward a radical agenda. Then, in 2020, the real prospect of national governmental power faltered. The Labour Party’s right wing finally replaced Corbyn after his second unsuccessful general election as leader. Sanders failed again to secure the nomination as fear of a Trump reelection gripped the Democratic electorate. Many institutions remained, but the period of immediate possibilities seemed over. The George Floyd Uprising shook the US. A deadly pandemic swept the globe, taking the lives of over 3 million in its first year. And perhaps the most prominent thinker in the Anglo-American democratic socialist movement, Leo Panitch – mentor to the editors of Jacobin and Tribune, among many others – passed away aged 75 that December.
As fertile ground this period is for a much longer and much more wistful obituary, we shall refrain from it. Let us linger instead on a specific question thrown up by this period and by the rise and apparent fall of Anglo-American democratic socialism: the question of its strategy.
Strategies of our Democratic Socialists
It has been often argued,15 by the left, and occasionally its opponents alike, that the ‘democratic socialist’ formations that arose in 2015 were fundamentally social-democratic. Perhaps they were more rhetorically radical, perhaps they cleaved closer to the original essence of post-war social democracy, and perhaps they represented a powerful force in contrast to the pasokification of the old social-democratic parties of the European continent. Nevertheless, social-democratic – lacks a real opposition to capitalism that a properly socialist orientation would represent. Such arguments16 point to the aims of the Corbynite Labour Party and the Sanders campaign: state investment in infrastructure, elements of workers’ control, and reform of union laws.
But all these arguments, it seems, lack the good faith to engage with the output of the movement itself – its literature and its intentional political manoeuvres – beyond a flick-through of the manifesto pledges. Other, better critiques17 on this theme do consider the movement’s approach. Still, they do so only to identify the most basic signifiers of the democratic socialist strategy – the engagement with elections, the demand for reforms – and unproblematically read off of them a whole strategy against which they can then apply vague, cookie-cutter arguments: democratic socialism is the very picture of ‘reformism’, idealistic and doomed. Alternatively, for many on the right,18 who note the movement’s occasional populist rhetoric of the ‘political revolution’, it is an anti-Western Stalinism, a secretly undemocratic insurrectionary socialist project whose victory is ‘unthinkable’.
Strategic Challenges
But all this stands quite against both the theory and intentional activity of the movement. If we inspect these two elements, we can see quite clearly that democratic socialist actors of the period were often acutely aware of the failures, in the context of capitalist democracy, of a gradualist social democracy on the one hand and straightforwardly revolutionary socialism on the other. Leo Panitch, in his essay Capitalism, Socialism and Revolution19 wrote:
We must surely, finally, escape from the simplistic dualisms that have bedevilled the Left throughout this century. The Left has beaten itself up, sometimes quite literally, with debates over parliamentarism versus extra-parliamentarism, reform versus revolution, and most notoriously even today, party versus movement, as if one ruled out the other, black and white, or, rather, grey and red. Such dualisms are terribly misleading. Posing the issues this way gets us nowhere. The question is not parliamentarism versus extra-parliamentarism, but what kind of parliamentarism will not give rise to the illusion that all people need to do – all they ought to do – is vote for representatives who will then put everything right. […] The question is not, by the same token, reform versus revolution, but what kinds of reforms, including reform in ‘the machinery of government’ itself, produce the structural changes that can be said to be revolutionary […] And most important, the question is not party versus movement, but what kind of party, in what relationship to the state, on the one hand, and to party members and supporters, on the other, can sustain an organized thrust for education, organization and participation over the broadest possible range of popular struggles for social justice; so that the intellectual and organizational capacities that are nurtured thereby yield the popular resources and support which are, in the end, the essential condition for revolutionary change …
If we are to learn anything from the period of political struggle defined by democratic socialism, we must inspect it in good faith. We cannot simply look for the signifiers of politics we distrust and quickly write off the whole project. Nor, on the other hand, should we drop our critical faculties and make the easy argument that the movement, whatever its failures, provided some hope that things could have been different, that it was, at least, better than this shit, and that that is enough. This call by Panitch in 1989, or at least its sentiments (for it was something he repeated many times in the following 30 years in various reformulations), was one that would come to echo through the whole thought and practice of the movement as it would come to exist.
As we will see, the idea that democratic socialist politics might consist of a particular strategy that is neither straightforwardly revolutionary nor gradualist but hopes to navigate productively between the problems of both (in a capitalist-democratic context) became a defining feature of the project. Whether we can understand the democratic socialist formation that came to prominence in 2015-2020 depends almost entirely on understanding this. Naturally, then, if we are to evaluate democratic socialism, whether to measure it up against its aims (did it navigate between these two strategic poles?) or whether to critique it more broadly (did it find success in this act of navigation?), we must properly consider it in the context of these navigational challenges which, as we will see, it often set itself.
Roughly, as per Panitch’s 1989 formulation, this strategic challenge appeared in three spheres, which this series of three articles will explore: the reform (or revolution), the state (to wield or to smash), the election approached as a political party (or its rejection). Let us proceed, in our best attempt at good faith, to see the democratic socialists for what they were and think about the movement by thinking about the challenge it set for itself: to navigate between the straightforwardly revolutionary and the gradualist, reformist strategies in these three spheres.20
Non-Reformist Reforms
During the height of the democratic socialist left, one could hardly step into a meeting without hearing the apparently contradictory phrase non-reformist reforms. But before we explore its usage in that movement and before we explore it as part of an answer to the democratic socialists’ strategic challenge, let us briefly define it more abstractly. As with much of the democratic socialists’ strategic lexicon, we can see its origins in those New Left thinkers who today are associated with the events of 1968. It was, in this case, the Austrian-born socialist André Gorz who defined the reformist reform and supplied an alternative. The reformist reform is simply one that “subordinates its objectives to the criteria of rationality and practicability of a given system”.21 We might imagine reforming the police service by supplying it with more funding for better bias training or more body cameras. Because the rationality of policing is one of maximising resources and, thereby, power, such a reform is reformist.
As non-Gorz readers can guess, the non-reformist reform is an inversion of the reformist. The non-reformist reform seeks to cut against the system’s rationality, causing destabilisation of that system and opening up the possibility for further, more destabilising reforms. They are ‘non-reformist’ in the sense they are designed to “advance toward a radical transformation”22, an actual rupture, or series of ruptures, which ever-compounding fissures in the existing system provoke. As such, reforms must be tied tactically together and escalate. There must be, too, the will and intention of political actors to capitalise on their disruptive effects. Without this, the destabilisation caused will quickly settle into a new normal; the reform quickly becomes reformist.
Gorz provides a set of example reforms to extend workers’ control over their work, including the right of the workers to “negotiate the speed or rhythm of work, the piecework rate, the qualifications required for a job, the hours”.23 Such a reform would not itself represent the end of capitalism, but winning it through struggle would entrench workers’ power within the enterprise and spur the movement to further and deeper (albeit still difficult and partial) victories. Against the system of capitalism, Gorz saw non-reformist reforms as a tool, in relation to a most crucial project for contemporary socialists, “to create the objective and subjective conditions which will make mass revolutionary action and engagement in a successful trial of strength with the bourgeoisie possible”.24
Gorz’s pronouncements came in a year when France faced the possibility of an exceptional government of the left being swept into power.25 The question, therefore, naturally arose: what should such a revolutionary government’s policies be? It is, perhaps, not such a surprise that the non-reformist reform came to the forefront again when there existed the tantalising possibility that the left, albeit in a less revolutionary fashion, might take to government in the US and Britain in the latter half of the 2010s. In the US, throughout the period of democratic socialist prominence, we can see a whole host of official documents, resolutions, manifestos, and analyses that advocate for a set of non-reformist reforms, all arising from this new democratic socialist left. In DSA’s national strategy document in 2016,26 its National Convention minutes from 201727 and National Convention resolutions from 2019,28 we see the call for ‘non-reformist’, ‘structural’ and ‘transformative’ reforms, all terms invariably used to refer to Gorz’s central concept. Various key figures in the DSA – writers, activists, elected officials, or, more often, individuals fitting all these categories – called for the same. Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara’s Socialist Manifesto,29Joseph M. Schwartz and Sunkara’s What Should Socialists Do?,30Vivek Chibber’s Our Road to Power,31Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht’s Bigger Than Bernie,32all contain proposals for non-reformist reforms and theorisations of their role.
In Britain during the same period, the picture is similar. Discussions in Novara Media, statements by its key figures,33 writing by Momentum co-founder James Schneider,34 articles in Tribune35andofficial policy recommendation reports by the Labour left36 all theorise the non-reformist reform as a key goal and the most productive possibility of a Corbyn-led government and its supporting movement. Influential on both sides of the Atlantic, democratic socialist theorist Leo Panitch repeats the call alongside his long-standing collaborator Sam Gindin in his 2018 survey of the British/US democratic socialist left,37 quoting Gorz verbatim.
Let us turn to the substance of the proposed reforms, i.e. the policies themselves and how their democratic socialist actors theorised them. We can see an intention to navigate between the problems (as the democratic socialists saw them) of revolutionary and reformist strategies. We might first look at proposals made by British democratic socialist economist Grace Blakeley, a staff writer at Tribune and a regular contributor to Novara Media during the period, as an indicative example. Blakeley argues for the creation of a whole system of public banking with democratically determined priorities of investment, as well as the nationalisation of key utilities with democratic input by workers and users.38 The choice of such policies, as Blakeley herself asserts, is grounded in their potential to, as non-reformist reforms, empower a mass movement and undermine ruling class power. They look to provoke a backlash that the movement, empowered by the reform itself, can capitalise on to go beyond the initial reform. Specifically, in the case of democratised finance, Blakeley posits her reforms as a means to undercut the power of the capitalist class to veto socialist policy via falling ‘business confidence’, whereby investment is withheld and the national economy slumps. Now, in this scenario, when such a crisis occurs, it is one which can be defended against using democratised financial institutions wielded by an emboldened working-class movement. In this empowered, consolidated position, the movement’s struggle against the now openly hostile capitalist class is heightened, making further transformation more likely.
This concept of backlash and crisis is significant because it completely contrasts with the reformist, social-democratic vision of reform, even one that has, albeit vague, nominal socialist aspirations. Celebrated theorist of social democracy Adam Przeworski spells this out:
Reform and revolution do not require a choice within the social democratic view of the world. To bring about ‘social revolution’ [. . .] it is sufficient to follow the path of reforms. Reforms are thought to be cumulative and irreversible. [. . .] Mitigating the effects of capitalism and transforming it piece by piece would eventually lead to a complete restructuring of society.39
Crisis is the death of this gradualist social-democratic project of steady, cumulative reform; it is the very function of the democratic socialist reform project. It is in the absence of crisis that the democratic socialist reform fails, or in the crisis which settles comfortably into a new capitalist status quo. Without the crisis, a policy such as Blakeley’s cannot go beyond itself as she intends it to.
In the US, Jacobin editor Sunkara and theorists and activists Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht similarly theorise crisis. Indeed, they do so, making explicit this distinction from social-democratic strategy.
[T]he more successful we are at winning ambitious reforms, the more open the capitalist class becomes in its attempts to undermine workers’ gains [. . .] That’s a fight worth having, especially if we’re strong enough after decades of struggle to potentially emerge victorious. As Sunkara writes, “The route to a more radical socialism will come from the crisis of social democracy our very success initiates.”40
Sunkara, with Day and Uetricht, raises a host of policies that could perform this function. Still, all writers return consistently to Medicare for All,41 the demand for a free-at-the-point-of-use, state-funded health insurance option, as a reform that could perform the simultaneously destabilising and empowering role necessary of a non-reformist reform (at least in the US context). It would represent a powerful class attack on the medical insurance industry while freeing workers from the ability of the employer to dictate healthcare policy, increasing their ability to self-organise to defend their new freedom. “If unions don’t have to negotiate for better health care contracts, what else can they fight for? If an employee doesn’t have to worry about losing health insurance when they lose their job, how much bolder can they be in standing up to their boss?” writes Day.42 The conception of Medicare for All as a non-reformist reform was echoed across the DSA, which set up a campaign organisation focussed entirely on the demand, with its own steering committee and regional organisers – DSA for Medicare for All.
As we can see, looking at Day and Uetricht’s quotes above, it is not simply that democratic socialists advocate reforms like Medicare for All explicitly against the social-democratic conception of reform, but that they do so in part because of the failings of that conception as a strategy. For Sunkara, the social-democratic strategy always tends toward capitulation and pacification43 because the gradual, cumulative reform process requires capitalist stability44. A social-democratic healthcare policy that faces crisis, or even light pushback, instigated by the capitalist class, will fold and be reversed. The democratic socialist strategy provides an intentional antidote to this problem in its particular strategic orientation to crisis, hoping to turn it to its advantage.
Neither Reformism nor Revolutionism
Staying with the democratic socialists’ concrete proposals, we can see that not only do they hope to avoid a reformist road to socialism, but so too its revolutionary cousin. It may appear trivially obvious, perhaps, from what we have discussed so far that democratic socialist policies do not represent a revolutionary strategy despite their anti-reformism. However, with proper inspection, we can see a specific anti-revolutionary bent in the democratic socialist strategy, which, frequently with explicit intent, hopes to address some of the problems of a straightforward revolutionary one.
While the Labour manifestos of 2017 and 2019 are cautious documents, partly reflecting the left leadership’s embattled position and representing a compromise with the party’s right, the same cannot be said for two reports – 2017’s Alternative Models of Ownership45and 2019’s Land for the Many46– seemingly commissioned directly by the leadership of the party.47 Land for the Many recommends a gradual but mass transfer of various categories of land from private to shared ownership, and explicitly on the basis that it might function as a non-reformist reform – as a measure that may open up the possibility for broader collective ownership of housing, among other more transformational changes. Alternative Models of Ownership, meanwhile, discusses various possible measures for altering the ownership of firms in the economy and revives the classic concern of the Labour left of avoiding the bureaucratic nationalisations of the post-Second World War Labour government. 48 Again, we see an emphasis on a transfer of power to the community and workers away from capital and the opening up of further possibilities that this may provide.49
The policies recommended by the two reports reflect a preoccupation seen also in recommendations for Medicare-for-All and democratised finance, that is, ‘decommodification’. In its broadest sense, decommodification refers to the attempted removal of some good from the market and from influence by capital, whether to be held in common (land and housing in Land for the Many) or privately owned by any combination of state and worker- or community- collective, with democratic input (firms in Alternative Models, healthcare or financial institutions elsewhere).
This starkly contrasts the conceptualisation of a purely revolutionary orientation to reform that we see critiqued in the democratic socialist literature. For democratic socialists, such as Vivek Chibber,50 Leo Panitch,51 and Eric Blanc52 (theorist of Panitch’s preferred DSA faction,the influential Bread & Roses caucus53), a pure revolutionary strategy is a straightforward offensive manoeuvre. This is invariably represented by the imaginary of the Russian Revolutions, State and Revolution, and the so-called ‘Leninist’ approach:54 “there will at some point be a deep crisis and the emergence of institutions of dual power (like workers’ councils). For the revolution to succeed, these dual power institutions will have to, through an insurrection, overthrow the entire existing state and place all power into the hands of workers’ councils or some equivalent form of organisation.”55 The revolutionary’s attitude to state-enacted reform is of apparent neutrality. A reform only seems worthwhile if it builds up the capacity for insurrection and establishment of dual power. In the opposite of the reformist strategy, where the revolutionary break is subordinated to the needs of reform, the revolutionary utterly subordinates the reform to the needs of the offensive revolutionary act.
The democratic socialist reform, however, creates an intentionally defensive position for the socialists.56 A revolutionary offensive risks creating a crisis that undermines the living conditions of the working class – an investment strike, a coup, a civil war – and therefore undermines their support. The promise of policies of decommodification, however, is the ability to precipitate a crisis in which the working class is given both a stake in defending its gains and the capacity to do so. Decommodified and democratised industries, utilities, healthcare, and land hope to, as non-reformist reforms, provoke ruptural crisis whilst providing the working class with a shield to protect it from the worst excesses of that crisis and a base of semi-autonomous power which the capitalist class is forced to attack. All this is in the form of real concrete gains that improve people’s lives,57 which, as such, they are disposed to mobilise to defend. Blakeley contrasts such decommodification and democratisation with Thatcher’s ‘right-to-buy’ scheme, which created a social base – a conscious middle class with an interest in defending property rights and backing the British Conservative Party. The non-reformist reforms of a democratic socialist government, on the other hand, would ground the interests of the whole working class in a class liberatory project and provide the tools to carry it out.
It becomes pretty clear, then, that the democratic socialist strategy of non-reformist reforms is quite coherently and intentionally not social-democratic nor revolutionary socialist. Where the social democrat sees reforms as sufficient in themselves, and the revolutionary sees them as only sufficient when utterly subordinated to the act of overthrow, the democratic socialist attempts to put reform and revolution in service to one another. Where the social democrat’s grey, restrained reforms require capitalist stability, the democratic socialists precipitate a crisis. Where the revolutionary socialist’s strategy has us storming a heavily guarded Winter Palace, the democratic socialist’s has us daring the ruling class: come on, try it. This proved, we can now discard the various critiques of the democratic socialist left, which simply retread criticisms of reformist social democracy. The American anarchist group Black Rose Anarchist Federation, for example, argued in 2018 for the insufficiency of democratic socialist reforms based on their status as unthinkingly running alongside the rationality of capitalism rather than challenging it.58 Given our analysis, it’s clear this misses the point. The fact that this kind of criticism was raised at all, however, when it seems that democratic socialists are pretty clear in their non-reformist orientation, prompts a more interesting critique. That is, how is it that social-democratic and democratic socialist orientations to reform became blurred? This is not a concern we should dismiss.
Between Social-Democracy and Democratic Socialism
In his original formulation of non-reformist reforms, Gorz59 makes clear that non-reformist socialist actors may agree with social democrats (and vice versa) on specific reforms. We can see this in action in the period 2015-2020, with even the right of the British Labour Party (arguably not even qualifying as social democrats) campaigning for reforms championed by the democratic socialist left as non-reformist, such as nationalisations of certain industries with worker input.60 The social democrat may advocate nationalisation on the basis of improved living conditions for workers under capitalism and the necessary role of the state to provide in a capitalist society what cannot always be provided by market forces.61 The democratic socialist may advocate for the same nationalisation as an attempt to shift the balance of power from capitalists to workers and as an advance that hopes to provoke a backlash that a subsequently more empowered working class can defensively combat, opening up further potential reforms. Given this possibility of agreement, however, any strategy of non-reformist reforms must always run a risk of degeneration into simple reformism that Gorz associates with social democracy.62 For Gorz, who presents the intuitive solution, such degeneration can only be avoided if these differences of intent are not masked and are instead an explicit centrepiece of debate between the two groups. In any alliance between non-reformist socialists and social democrats, socialists should make clear their differences and educate to that effect within their ranks. It is undoubtedly a practical barrier to democratic socialism’s success that this did not often happen, and masking of differences often seemed to occur in the Anglo-American context.
Since the democratic socialist left both in the USA and Britain found itself, 2015-2020, bound up with organisations within which it was not a dominant member (Democratic Party on the one hand and Labour Party on the other), a certain structural ‘masking’ effect was perhaps inevitable. Democratic socialists campaigned vigorously to get candidates elected (Corbyn, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez) who represented those organisations and had supporters with a broad ideological range of views. With pessimistic fairness, we might ask how practically possible establishing strategic independence is in such a scenario – where the socialist organisation is dwarfed by its liberal or social-democratic partner, both in organisational capacity and in its ability to impact broader discourse. If, in an alliance of social democrats and democratic socialists, the social democrats can mobilise resources and media contacts far beyond that of the socialists, the shared cause of nationalisation of utilities will surely take its reformist form, not the form preferred by the democratic socialists.
Yet, even internally, at the level of theory produced by the democratic socialist left, this problem – of masking the differences of intent between social-democratic and democratic socialist reform – could be seen. Looking at James Schnieder’s How We Win,63 the Momentum co-founder holds up the NHS as an example of a non-reformist reform. While, at the point of its formation, the NHS represented a radical demand that surpassed the otherwise radical calls by liberal reformers for single-payer social insurance and was championed by socialists both inside government and within the workers’ movement,64 Schnieder fails to acknowledge how a defence of the NHS functions in a contemporary context. Arguments in favour of the NHS in Britain today can be found across the political spectrum and are often made based on a sensible policy in the national interest,65 that is to say, a policy that obscures class differences altogether and can effectively exist to aid the stable functioning of the capitalist nation.66
Reforms which: a) can function as non-reformist but that are also championed by social democrats as reformist; b) are called for without explicitly making clear the transformational aims of democratic socialists against those of social democrats – these kinds of reforms slip into their reformist variant and can be seen all too frequently in the democratic socialism that was prominent in the period. Where calls for these (insufficiently non-reformist) reforms dominate, the democratic socialist strategy of reforms must fall into all the problems of an uncritical social democracy. In general, such a tendency leads to eschewing the end goal of socialism,67 and an implicit disavowal of the need for a theory of the eventual transformation that non-reformist reforms are supposed to provoke. Too often, this tendency was present within the democratic socialist movement, as the ability of a non-reformist escalation of reforms to shift the balance of power was emphasised, while their aim to “create the objective and subjective conditions which will make mass revolutionary action […] possible”68 was pushed into the background.
It seems, then, that whether the democratic socialist strategy of non-reformist reforms can bear any fruit, stands or falls on the ability of democratic socialists to maintain their explicit differences with and independence from social-democratic actors – in propaganda and theoretic output, in political and electoral alliances, and internal communication and education. This is a difficult task because it seems to require organisational power and capacity, which democratic socialists lacked, even in 2015-2020, and which non-reformist reforms themselves hoped to, in part, create. This presents a perhaps fundamental challenge to the strategy. If non-reformist reforms do require a starting point of relative power for the socialist forces (to maintain political independence in campaigning and in government and actually to kick-start the ratcheting effect of the initial reforms), then plausibly, they will face debilitating pushback at the opening stage. Without a significant working-class movement already behind them, a non-reformist socialist government will simply not be permitted to initiate even their first reform. Gorz himself stressed as much.69
As a strategy for the 2015-2020 project, non-reformist reforms seemed stuck behind a contradiction, hoping to create the conditions for a movement that it ultimately already required. What remains is the unsatisfying call, against the immediate excitement and energy of the Corbyn and Sanders moment, to reverse the dual disorganisation of the working class and socialists themselves through building politically independent organisations of organisers.70
In this first article of three, we gave an overview of the Anglo-American democratic socialist movement of the late 2010s and explored their strategy of non-reformist reforms. Two key strategies remain, however, relating to the state and elections, and these shall be the focus of the articles to come.
Notes
1 David Graeber, Occupy Wall Street’s anarchist roots, Al Jazeera, 2011, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2011/11/30/occupy-wall-streets-anarchist-roots/.
2 Meagan Day and Leo Panitch, Searching for Socialism: from Protest to Politics, Corbyn, Sanders and Syriza, The World Transformed, 2020, https://youtu.be/9CaPlFKT0yQ.
3 Ibid.
4 Matt Pearce, Seeing red: Membership triples for the Democratic Socialists of America, Los Angeles Times, 2017, https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-democratic-socialists-20170308-story.html.
5 Joseph M. Schwartz, DSA Convention Adopts National Political Priorities, Democratic Left, 2017, https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/dsa_convention_adopts_national_political_priorities/.
6 Democratic Socialists of America, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) – Working towards a Better Future for All, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20210525084313/https://www.dsausa.org/.
7 Robert P. Baird, The ABCs of Jacobin, Columbia Journalism Review,2019, https://www.cjr.org/special_report/the-abcs-of-jacobin-socialist-magazine.php.
8 Tim Jelfs, Will the revolution be podcast?: Marxism and the culture of “millennial socialism” in the United States, in: Marxism and America, ed. Christopher Phelps and Robin Vandome (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), 241-263.
9 Ashish Ghadiali, How Momentum Came Together, Red Pepper, 2018, https://www.redpepper.org.uk/how-momentum-came-together/.
10 Grace Blakeley, Futures of Socialism, (London: Verso, 2020), 86-88.
11 Momentum, Community Organising, 2021, https://peoplesmomentum.com/campaigns/community-organising/; Beth Redmond and Isaac Rose, There’s More to Life Than This, Tribune, 2019, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/12/theres-more-to-life-than-this.
12 The World Transformed, Programme, 2018; The World Transformed; Programme, 2019.
13 Grace Blakeley, Why Socialism, Tribune, 2019, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/10/why-socialism.
14 HypeAuditor, Novara Media, 2021, https://app.hypeauditor.com/en/youtube/novara_media-UCOzMAa6IhV6uwYQATYG_2kg/.
15 Angry Workers of the World, Thoughts on Democratic Socialism in the Wake of UK Labour’s Defeat, 2020, https://blackrosefed.org/thoughts-on-democratic-socialism-in-the-wake-of-uk-labors-defeat/; Jelfs, Podcast, 241-263; Warren McGregor, A Workers’ Party and Elections or Class Struggle? The Question of State Power and the Anarchists’ Answer, 2019, https://zabalaza.net/2019/02/26/a-workers-party-and-elections-or-class-struggle-the-question-of-state-power-and-the-anarchists-answer/.
16 Ibid.
17 Black Rose Anarchist Federation, Socialist Faces in High Places: Elections & the Left, 2018, https://blackrosefed.org/socialist-faces-in-high-places-reader/.
18 Lee Edwards, The Looming Threat of a Socialist America, National Review, 2020, https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/the-looming-threat-of-a-socialist-america/amp/.
19 Leo Panitch, Capitalism, Socialism and Revolution: The Contemporary Meaning of Revolution in the West, Socialist Register25, (1989): 1-29.
20 Going forward, it will be necessary to take a somewhat idealised picture of ‘democratic socialism’ as such. The actual positions of the individuals that took part in this democratic socialist movement of course varied a good deal, but in order to properly analyse a democratic socialist strategy, we will look at the theoretically dominant strain, or orthodoxy, as reflected by the movements’ output – its literature and political action.
21 André Gorz, Strategy for Labor: A Radical Proposal, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 7.
22 Ibid. 6.
23 Ibid. 44.
24 André Gorz, Reform and Revolution, Socialist Register 5, 1968, 111-143.
25 Ed Rooksby, ‘Structural Reform’ and the Problem of Socialist Strategy Today, Critique 46, no.1 (2018): 27-48, 43.
26 Democratic Socialists of America, Resistance Rising: Socialist Strategy in the Age of Political Revolution, 2016, http://www.dsausa.org/strategy/resistance_rising_socialist_strategy_in_the_age_of_political_revolution/.
27 Democratic Socialists of America, Minutes from the 2017 DSA National Convention, 2017, https://www.dsausa.org/national-updates/2017conventionminutes/.
28 Democratic Socialists of America, 2019 DSA National Convention Results, 2019, 66. https://www.dsausa.org/files/2019/06/2019-Resolutions-Approved.pdf
29 Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto, (London: Verso, 2020), 222.
30 Joseph M. Schwartz and Bhaskar Sunkara, What Should Socialists Do?, Jacobin, 2017. https://jacobin.com/2017/08/socialist-left-democratic-socialists-america-dsa
31 Vivek Chibber, Our Road to Power, Jacobin, 2017. https://jacobin.com/2017/12/our-road-to-power
32 Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht, Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism, (London: Verso, 2020), 150.
33 James Butler, Ash Sarkar, and Michael Walker, Beyond Brexit: The Potential of Corbynism, Novara Media, 2019, https://novaramedia.com/2019/02/08/beyond-brexit-the-potential-of-corbynism/.
34 James Schneider, How We Win: The State, Novara Media, 2021, https://novaramedia.com/2021/03/17/how-we-win-the-state/
35 Grace Blakeley, Putting the Cat Back in the Bag, Tribune, 2020, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/05/putting-the-cat-back-in-the-bag.
36 The Labour Party, Alternative Models of Ownership, 2017, https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Alternative-Models-of-Ownership.pdf; George Monbiot et al., Land for the Many, 2019, https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/12081_19-Land-for-the-Many.pdf.
37 Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin and Stephen Maher, The Socialist Challenge Today: Syriza, Corbyn, Sanders, (London: Merlin Press 2020).
38 Grace Blakeley, Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialisation, (London: Watkins Media Limited, 2019), 240-246.
39 Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 31.
40 Day and Uetricht, Bigger than Bernie, 150.
41 Sunkara, Manifesto, 22; Day and Uetricht, Bigger, 153.
42 Meagan Day, Single-payer is a “non-reformist reform”, Medium, 2017, https://medium.com/@meaganday/single-payer-is-a-non-reformist-reform-fe3751aa7f27.
43 Sunkara, Manifesto, 221.
44 Ibid. 220.
45 Labour Party, Models.
46 Monbiot, Land.
47 Panitch, Gindin, Maher, Socialist Challenge, 56-58.
48 Ibid. 57.
49 New Socialist Editorial Collective, Labour’s Alternative Models of Ownership Report, New Socialist, 2017, https://newsocialist.org.uk/labours-alternative-models-of-ownership-report/.
50 Chibber, Road to Power.
51 Panitch, Gindin, Maher, Challenge.
52 Eric Blanc, Socialists Should Take the Right Lessons From the Russian Revolution, Jacobin, 2021, https://jacobin.com/2021/07/democratic-socialism-russian-revolution-leninism-workers-movements.
53 Blakeley, Futures, 88; Doug Henwood, The Socialist Network, The New Republic, 2019, https://newrepublic.com/article/153768/inside-democratic-socialists-america-struggle-political-mainstream
54 Since allusions to ‘Leninism’ by the literature are almost always simply references to a particular strategy, and rarely historical considerations of the actual strategy employed the Bolshevik Party or advocated by Lenin himself (which is highly contested), we shall continue to use the term ‘revolutionary socialist’ and similar.
55 Eric Blanc and Charlie Post, Which Way to Socialism?, Jacobin, 2019, https://jacobin.com/2019/07/socialism-revolution-electoral-politics-mass-action.
56 Eric Blanc, Finland’s Revolution, Jacobin, 2017, https://jacobin.com/2017/05/finland-revolution-russian-empire-tsarism-independence-general-strike.
57 Schneider, The State.
58 Black Rose Anarchist Federation, Elections, Power, & the DSA: The Failure of the Left in Power, 2018, https://blackrosefed.org/elections-power-dsa-left-in-power/.
59 Gorz, Reform, 115.
60 Ben Davies, Tory Rail Privatisation Has Been a Disaster – for the Public and the Climate, Tribune, 2021, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/10/tory-rail-privatisation-has-been-a-disaster-for-the-public-and-the-climate.
61 Przeworski, Capitalism, 39.
62 Rooksby, Socialist Strategy, 46.
63 Schneider, State.
64 Ronan Burtenshaw, How the NHS Was Won, Tribune, 2019, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/07/how-the-nhs-was-won.
65 The Conversative and Unionist Party, Forward, Together, 2017, https://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/ukmanifestos2017/localpdf/Conservatives.pdf.
66 Leo Panitch, Ideology and Integration: The Case of the British Labour Party, in: Working Class Politics in Crisis: Essays on Labour and the State, (London: Verso, 1986), 57.
67 Renzo Llorente, The Contradictions and Confusions of “Democratic Socialism”, Cosmonaut Magazine, 2021, https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/12/the-contradictions-and-confusions-of-democratic-socialism/.
68 Gorz, Reform, 111-143.
69 Ibid, 113-114.
70 Communist Caucus, Our Moment: Proletarian Disorganization as the Problem of Our Time, 2022, https://communistcaucus.com/our-moment/.
