“The state,” Marx wrote, “is based on the contradiction between public and private life.” In other words, the vast number of individuals labour in full view while a small number of individuals reap the profits from the labourers’ work in secret. Social crisis erupts when the contradiction is laid bare. That is why, Marx believed, the capitalist state “must assert unity where there is conflict and contradiction”. This process of concealment, he wrote, amounted to an “exorcised contradiction”.
Leave it to the unbalanced Donald Trump, for the first time in the history of the modern capitalist state, to shrug off the concealment and make the explicit exposure of the contradiction between capital and labour part of his governing style. On the eve of America’s 250th birthday, these two headlines appeared nearly side by side in the New York Times: “Trump pulled in at least 2 billion dollars after returning to the White House” and “At Mount Rushmore, Trump veers from patriotism to ‘communism’” – following some progressive wins in Democratic congressional primaries, Trump warned about a coming left-wing apocalypse. The highest stage of capitalism, it seems, is not imperialism, but a merrily rapacious anti-communism.
The German economist Werner Sombart concluded that the triumph of capitalism in America, along with the absence of class consciousness, turned the American worker into “a sober, calculating businessman, without ideals”. It is perhaps inevitable that such a person is now what passes for an American president. But it’s 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 declared, “socialist utopias of every sort are sent to their doom”. America was, and still is – the major 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, rather than an economic, collapse. But then, the seeming rise of an American radical left is the result of the same forces.
Moving in lockstep with Trump, the Wall Street Journal, especially its mostly sclerotic opinion pages, has run one hysterical article after another warning about an imminent socialist, or communist – the distinction is never made (only Marx could get away with that) – takeover of the US. America’s right-wing Bolsheviks are about the only ones taking America’s left-wing Bolsheviks seriously. Just about every other liberal you talk to, who has the slightest sense of history, rolls their eyes when you mention Sanders, AOC, Mamdani et al.
This is partly because Sanders and AOC have been two of the least effective legislators in Congress. They posture a lot, and their posturing gets acclaimed by their supporters for “putting important issues on the radar screen”. There is something to be said for good old-fashioned consciousness-raising, for sure. But if the 1964 Civil Right Act, or the New Deal legislation before it, had been merely talked about, they would never have become law. Though a politician has to possess the backroom chops to achieve success 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 the southern senators to have their war in Vietnam in exchange for the 1964 legislation. One wonders: would they give the right their war on DEI in exchange for universal healthcare? What would they be willing to give up for free tuition at public universities, guaranteed affordable housing, a guaranteed living wage tied to inflation?
As for Mamdani, his pro-worker values are entirely admirable but, in reality, he is either modestly following along the lines of the progressive Bill Blasio, who preceded Eric Adams, Mamdani’s predecessor, or building on Adams himself, especially with regard to tepid initiatives in creating affordable housing. One thing he most certainly is not acting as is a socialist. Beyond rhetoric and a performative populism á la early Trump, he is not even coming close to a redistribution of wealth in New York City.
The idea that any of these figures, or the firebrand progressives who won recent congressional primaries 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 thinned out any sense of a historical context and perspective that just about any phrase can be plucked from the past, tried on in the new syncretic fitting room, and then cosplayed into an exciting new “vibe”. “Radicalism is again becoming chic in the intellectual world, a fate not even its worst enemies could suppose it to deserve… It is a ‘radicalism’ of the attic and the playground: old souvenirs dusted off, creaky limbs pressed to swing baby swing.” That was the democratic socialist Irving Howe writing in 1967 about the New Left, whose extremism ensured that Nixon won the presidency in 1968, and then again in 1972. Howe might as well have been writing about today.
It just so happens that Howe, along with Michael Harrington, founded the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), the precursor to the current Democratic Socialist Party (DSA), which is financially and ideologically behind Mamdani and some other progressive candidates who recently won primaries. Both men played important roles in the DSA also. (One of my first published pieces was for Howe’s democratic socialist quarterly Dissent, once the DSA’s chief critical organ. I met Howe a short time later and – carefully – remarked on one of its editors’ lengthy critique my piece. “One day you will be distinguished like me,” Howe said wryly with a warm smile, “and then no one will edit you.”)
Harrington, whose 1962 book, The Other America, inspired Johnson’s War on Poverty, wanted, as did Howe and others, to change the Democratic party from within. He knew America was never going to find its Clement Attlee and evolve into any type of welfare state. There is class in America, but there is no class consciousness. Tell someone that they are working-class and they will glare at you as if you had passed sentence on them. Social fluidity might be a chimera in America, but it is an official feature of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock in The Great Gatsby. Class consciousness is the enemy of social mobility.
It might not be the case that every man (using the old formulation) is a king, as the aspiring dictator Huey Long once claimed (and as the brutish Stanley Kowalski declared in Streetcar Named Desire, only to be properly castrated by Tennessee Williams). But the belief that everyone might fall one day and rise the next – “ridin’ high in April / Shot down in May”, as Sinatra sang at the peak of American power – is the quintessential American expectation. Another term for that is manic depression. Or is it simply a restatement of Machiavelli’s idea that life is defined by the battle between virtú (willpower) and fortuna? In that case, every American person is a Machiavelli, a “sober, calculating businessman, without ideals”. And also manic. Which brings us back to America’s current leader.
Emboldened by Occupy Wall Street and the ascendance of Bernie Sanders, the DSA’s 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 remarks 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 had its origins in the New Left. In The Struggle for a Decent Politics, Michael Walzer, who served as longtime co-editor of Dissent, tells, with distaste, the story of the DSA’s ostracising of a longtime fighter for labour rights because it came out that the man had once tried to organise a police union. Along with seeking the abolition of Israel as a Jewish state, the elimination of the police is now an official plank of the DSA program.
If socialism is defined by a commitment to change the structure of material distribution to relieve poverty, and all the forms of social oppression that accompany poverty, then the DSA has lost its bearings. From Mamdani to the recently triumphant progressive candidates in New York and Colorado – victorious in primaries where mostly only the true-believing base votes, and in deep blue districts – much of their rhetoric has to do with either leading America toward a democratic socialist future or destroying Israel as a Jewish state. The first will never happen short of a near-apocalyptic catalysing event; it will not happen 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 as they faced the long years of war.” And even then, it would never happen. Not in a country where the search 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 about 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 every other nation-state. The American left’s obsession with Israel and Palestine is hard to fathom. When not a word about the tremendous amounts of money poured into everything from the National Basketball Association to the Trump family by the UAE, the driving force behind the genocide in Sudan. Then again, the wealthy family of Mamdani’s wife live comfortably in Dubai. But what an obsession with anti-Zionism has to do with a true democratic socialist program is anybody’s guess. Unless the DSA has discovered, as Mamdani did when he ran for mayor, that tapping into a long-buried antisemitism, in the guise of a theatrical anti-Zionism, is a proven vote-getter. Otherwise, Americans struggling to pay for healthcare, or buy a house, or make sense of Trump’s chaos, could not care less. It seems the American left has never heard of Jeremy Corbyn.
The 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 up a fragile psyche with fun cultural attitudes than an actual left politics. It is mistaking American politics for a rave concert. And the idea that a democratic socialist politics should abandon reform from within and seek outright power from above is what Lenin called the “infantile disorder” of rejecting compromise that might lead to true victory. Never mind that Lenin’s goal was a society in which compromise was a criminal offense. The DSA is starting out with a punitive purity that Lenin at first only dreamed of. The question now is whether a combination of liberal spinelessness and right-wing fearmongering can convince Americans that this baby swing is the new face of the Democratic party.
[Further reading: The end of America’s beginning]
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