The Case for Social Democracy: Part 3

On the False Choice between Political and Economic Democracy

When the United Nations was founded, it was intended to serve as a guardrail to keep the human species from acting on its darkest impulses. It was also founded with the recognition that in order to accomplish this goal, a certain set of basic guarantees had to be put in place, such that every member of the human family would neither have their rights violated, nor feel inclined to violate the rights of others. These were initially codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, but the rapidly escalating tensions between the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union set the stage for a planet-wide competition of ideologies, both of which claimed to represent the path to freedom, but which did so in very different ways. Within the American-led coalition, the state-sponsored narrative was that the meaning of freedom was being able to choose your leaders, speak your mind without fear of persecution, and pursue personal enrichment, be it monetary or recreational. Within the Soviet-led coalition, on the other hand, the state-sponsored narrative was that the meaning of freedom was being able to have your basic necessities provided for and to not be exploited by profit-seeking industry. Neither side lived up to their own definitions of freedom, though, since those expressing views sympathetic to communism were persecuted in the United States, and the various state-run industries of the Soviet Union were perceived by many of its inhabitants as being just as exploitative as any private industry. At the same time, the worker protections enacted through FDR’s New Deal in the United States were gradually eroded, especially under President Reagan, while Soviet citizens had no meaningful say over their political representation in the Kremlin. Despite these shortcomings, both sides lent their support to two United Nations resolutions that aimed to further codify such founding principles; i.e. the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (although the United States merely signed the latter without ratifying it). The first of these included provisions such as the right to vote, practice one’s culture or religion freely, and be treated fairly under the law, while the second included provisions such as the right to decent working conditions, an adequate standard of living and free primary education. It is here that we can really see what both sides in the Cold War failed to understand—that a healthy society is not just one that regulates big business to provide for the needs of its workers, or one that protects the ideals of reason and open discourse, but one that can do both.

Americans today do not enjoy political or economic democracy, but we’ve had more exposure to the former. As a result, many on the left are susceptible to the same pitfall that ensnared the Bolshevik revolutionaries who founded the Soviet Union, i.e. that economic democracy is a truer form of democracy than political democracy, which has had its chance and failed to deliver. They’ve seen so-called free and fair elections be swayed by the interests of corporate profit, but drew the conclusion that elections are simply incapable of being the means by which positive, transformative change is brought about. They’ve seen the Democratic Party be perfectly content to be the “lesser evil” when it comes to choosing between them and the Republicans, a shadow of the force that it once was under FDR. So if providing workers with some say over the management of their workplace means doing away with a representative system of government, well, that doesn’t sound too bad to them. The major problem, of course, came with the way in which Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin went about bringing Marxist governance to the former Russian Empire. Whereas Marx had imagined that the transition to a socialist society would be effectuated by the widespread action of the working class, Lenin believed that in order to safeguard such a society against the forces of regression, a dedicated “vanguard party” of revolutionary elites had to maintain an iron grip on the levers of power (i.e. a one-party state), but insisted that such a system would be democratic because this party would be carrying out the will of the people. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin took advantage of the paranoid culture of obedience that Lenin had created and used it to carry out mass purges and cultivate an obsequious cult of personality, both of which were emulated by Mao Zedong after the communists achieved victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949. All of this has historically played into the hands of opponents of leftism, so that they can paint the ideals of progress and social justice as a slippery slope to losing one’s freedom at the hands of a secular Inquisition bent on ostracizing anyone who steps out of line. The promise of economic democracy also went unfulfilled, since instead of workers having a say in the management of their workplaces, they tended to be run by the party.

The consequences of this historical blunder are still rippling out today. Specifically, the dissolution of the Soviet Union (which was essentially triggered by a coup attempt in August 1991 against Mikhail Gorbachev by communist hard-liners to prevent him from introducing political democracy to the country) came as a profound blow to Russia’s international prestige and standing as a great power, to say nothing of the hardship that it inflicted upon ordinary Russians, which was exacerbated by pressure from the West to rapidly adopt laissez-faire capitalism. The stage was then set for Putin’s cabal of oligarchs to shape the country into a fascist dictatorship, from which Putin now leads not only a physical assault against the former Russian dominion of Ukraine, but also an ideological assault against the values of the Enlightenment that were responsible for making modernity possible. Despite this, some leftists hesitate to support the Ukrainian struggle for self-determination, which they see as merely serving to further the interests of Western imperialism and the military-industrial complex. Sometimes, real life is stranger than fiction could ever be.

Social democracy is viewed with skepticism or distaste by some self-identified socialists and others further to the left for three main reasons. The first is because it does not call for the elimination of private industry and is generally not in favor of an armed revolution, at least as anything other than a last resort, as discussed in the first part. However, I do not believe that all private industry is necessarily evil, just that it has to be regulated to keep it from meddling in the political process and to ensure that its successes are shared by the workers and wider society that made them possible, and I certainly don’t think that all private industry is as evil as sending peasants who are slightly wealthier than their neighbors to the gulag. Another commonly heard argument from leftists who are against social democracy is that it (allegedly) simply moves the exploitation of workers from the home countries of large businesses to so-called “third-world” countries, where things like minimum wage are often nonexistent under governments that they see as being propped up by the West to serve capitalist interests. The solution to me seems to be to simply pass laws at home that would prosecute companies engaging in this kind of outsourcing, but of course this would seem unrealistic to someone who doesn’t think that elections can accomplish such an outcome. The third and potentially most convincing rationale for seeing social democracy as insufficient is the history of social-democratic parties gradually abandoning their commitment to the cause and adopting bland centrism and/or conservatism-lite as their brand. This has happened to varying extents on at least three noteworthy occasions, i.e. the Democratic Party in the U.S., the Labour Party in the U.K., and the Social Democratic Party of Germany. This, I believe, is the product of a strategic failure in messaging that has left these parties feeling that they have no choice but to move to the right whenever they lose an election to a more conservative party. I am not as sure what the solution to this would be, except to rally behind leaders who demonstrate a real conviction in their beliefs; two such figures, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are at the time of writing the most popular politicians in America for this reason.

Despite its temptations from time to time, I am hesitant to attach myself to the “socialist” bandwagon, not only for the reasons I’ve described here, but also because I find that the boundary between “social-democrat” and “socialist” (although sometimes blurry in that people on both sides of the boundary generally share many short-term goals) tends to line up fairly closely with the point where progressive politics goes from being about inspiring people to build a better world to riling people up to get revenge for past injustices. Just in the same way that I don’t want to live in a right-wing society fueled by grievance and hate, neither do I want to live in a left-wing society that’s fueled by the same, especially not one that, in so being, replicates the same forms of injustice that it once sought to abolish. And ultimately, at least in the U.S. at this moment, the word “socialist” simply carries too strong of a negative connotation to have any realistic chance of making inroads into swing voter communities, regardless of whether we feel that it ought to have that connotation or not.

Social change is not just about reshaping society to be how you want it to be, but also about convincing other people that it should be how you want it to be. That doesn’t mean compromising your principles; it means knowing your audience, and I recognize that that’s not something that everyone’s good at. Not everyone is meant to serve as an ambassador for the movement; there are plenty of other roles that one can fill. It does mean, however, especially in the age where individuals go viral for statements made on social media, that one has to be mindful of how they might sound to someone who might not already be inclined to agree with them. At this point, we have to explore the various ways in which progressives or leftists sometimes fail to do so.