Class Politics, Socialist Policies, Capitalist Constraints

The renewed appeal of a socialist political discourse, one hundred years after the Soviet revolution and thirty years after its ignominious endpoint, has astonished the punditocracy. It does indeed appear that socialism in the twenty-first century has finally broken free of the legacy of the Russian revolution which so defined – pro and con – the political discourse of the left through the twentieth century, often weighing ‘like a nightmare on the brains of the living’. The emergence of a twenty-first century socialism which neither defines itself by the Bolshevik model, nor abjectly shrinks from advancing a socialist project for fear of being tainted by it, is itself a historic development. This is not to say that the Russian revolution is forgotten, but only that as young socialist activists mobilize against the timidity of career politicians and the machinations of the old centre-left party and media establishment that keeps them in place, they are today far more likely to be inspired by elements of its original revolutionary spirit than its specific revolutionary methods. This makes it all the more imperative that socialists face squarely, and discuss far more openly than has yet been done, whether the policy proposals that are being advanced in the current conjuncture through an explicitly socialist discourse only amount to the revival of social democratic reformism, or foretell the emergence of a new strategy for structural reform which would create the conditions for taking capital away from capital. This is the remit of this essay. It is not written with the expectation that either Corbyn or Sanders are on the verge of electoral victories that would lead to their forming a government. Rather it seeks to clarify what any socialist-led government in the UK or US in the foreseeable future would have to face. That is, a still deeply-integrated global capitalism, with capitalist economic dominance domestically securely in place, with working-class forces not strong enough, or coherent enough, to sustain a full-blown challenge to that dominance, and with public institutions very far from having the capacity, let alone the orientation, to implement democratic economic and social planning.