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The market under capitalism is different because you don’t just choose to participate in it—you have to take part in it to survive.
By virtue of owning a place of work, a boss has something any would-be employee needs. Without land to sow, your labor power by itself isn’t going to produce any commodities. So you rent yourself to Mr. Bongiovi, mix your labor with the tools he owns and the efforts of the other people he’s hired, and in return receive a wage, which is really just a way to get the resources you need to survive.
Without such luck or a trust fund to fall back on, you’re stuck subordinating yourself to capitalists who own private property and can make wealth out of your labor.
Under feudalism, it’s clear that a lord is exploiting a peasant—the peasant is doing all of the labor. Capitalism complicates matters: capitalists contribute to production as managers and conveners of labor, and their efforts are necessary to create new places of work. And, crucially, capitalists themselves are hostage to the market.
In Sweden, unlike in New Jersey, more spheres of life are decommodified, meaning they’re taken out of the market and enjoyed as social rights.
Capitalism is a social system based on private ownership of the means of production and wage labor. It relies on multiple markets: markets for goods and services, the labor market, and the capital market.
Outside of theory, there’s no such thing as a “free market”—capitalism requires both planning and a regulated market.
Two key markets under capitalism are thereby done away with: the traditional labor market and capital markets. But markets for goods and services remain. Too many informational problems exist for them to be done away with. Companies will also still have to compete with each other—inefficient firms will collapse (though the fall for individual stakeholders in a firm would be cushioned by the welfare state, even more so than it was in our idealized Sweden).
At its core, to be a socialist is to assert the moral worth of every person, no matter who they are, where they’re from, or what they did.
Freedom for working people today, however, means limiting the freedom of those who benefit from the inequities inherent in class society. Socialism is not so much about trading in freedom for equality but rather posing the question, “Freedom for whom?”
The socialist argues that wage labor is in fact an unacceptable form of exploitation, too, and that we have alternatives that will empower people to control their destinies inside and outside the workplace.
What separates social democracy from democratic socialism isn’t just whether one believes there’s a place for capitalist private property in a just society, but how one goes about fighting for reforms. The best social democrats today might want to fight for macroeconomic policies from above to help workers. But while not rejecting all forms of technocratic expertise, the democratic socialist knows that it will take mass struggle from below and messy disruptions to bring about a more durable and radical sort of change.
if there is a future for humanity—free of exploitation, climate holocaust, demagoguery, and the war of all against all—then we must place our faith in the ability of people to save themselves and each other.
Capitalism didn’t come about because markets grew to a certain point. Instead, what we understand as capitalism resulted from a societal shift, as we went from using markets from time to time to producing for the market as our all-consuming task.
A middle ground prevailed in England. Peasants stopped their ruling class from extracting a greater surplus from them through brute force, but they failed to win legal land rights.
Alexis de Tocqueville remarked, “Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish, here civilization works its miracles and civilized man is turned almost into a savage.”
But capitalism, that accident of history, had conjured a dangerous combination: immense, lucrative industries and a deprived and discontented class of people locked within them. This was the reality in which Marxist theory was first constructed.
Along with modern industry, the bourgeoisie produced “its own grave diggers”—the proletariat.
In other words, without the structural leap to socialism, all that is won is the momentary “suppression of the abuses of capitalism instead of suppression of capitalism itself.”
While the revisionists saw a path to reform through the existing parliament and liberal coalitions, radicals, armed with this new weapon, could present a vision of democratizing the state through street action.
American “exceptionalism”—an attachment to individualism and a limited state that goes back to the nation’s founding.
Though the media stoked fears about anarchistic and communist violence, it was private employer militias and state terror that made America’s nineteenth-century labor history more violent than Europe’s.
Sectarianism, failed unionization strategies, ethnic and racial divisions—all played a role in the disorganization of the country’s working class, but the threat of violent repression seems paramount.
In short, socialism seemed to be a stable, if not dominant, factor in American political life. But the war changed everything.23
Such was the scale and success of the repression that few today remember that the Oklahoma Socialist Party was among the most important political organizations in the state.
What could the SP have done to maintain itself despite its resolute opposition to the state? After all, socialists elsewhere had survived repression.
Finally walking that tightrope would mean creating an electoral strategy that can represent the distinct interests of working people, but without demanding that voters start immediately supporting unviable third-party candidacies.
Similarly, we need to grow and radically democratize the labor movement, but without asking workers to take a leap of faith and support fledgling “red unions.”
And in the developed world—where real wages have stagnated for a generation and millions have been left behind—the appeal of capitalism is in large part that there appears to be no viable alternative to it.
The “involuntary part-timer” or “1099-er”—unseen in the postwar era—is now a feature of our economic landscape.
Occupy Wall Street was in its revival of a form of mass protest and its foregrounding of the issue of austerity and inequality in an accessible way. It was a glimmer, more obvious than the Wisconsin uprising, that a simple message based on fairness and democracy could garner widespread support.
In the almost forty years since, Sanders’s message hasn’t changed: inequality in America is a yawning chasm, and only a coalition of working people can close
Rather than saying we were all going to work together to make a better America, Sanders declared that we were going to seize power from the same “millionaires” (and now even some “billionaires”) that he’d denounced a half century ago.
In this way, he is more closely aligned with socialists throughout history than with the liberal reformers he’s had to ally with to pass laws. Sanders gave American socialism a lifeline by returning it to its roots: class struggle and a class base.
As Sanders puts it, “The Clinton approach was to try to merge the interests of Wall Street and corporate America with the needs of the American middle class—an impossible task.”
Like Trump, and decidedly unlike Clinton, Sanders was able to speak to the anger simmering among many Americans, including white workers who had seen their living standards decline without even the limited social gains other groups in the Democratic coalition could point to.
A protégé of the late Tony Benn, Corbyn is a genuine radical and by far the most left-wing leader in Labour’s history. Like Bernie Sanders in the United States, he is an unreconstructed survivor of a different era of socialist politics. Unlike Sanders, he had the benefit of a close connection to progressive trade unions, social movements, and a wider milieu of left politicians to draw on for support, including such figures as John McDonnell and Diane Abbott.
The most striking thing about Corbynism is that its protagonists see the inherent limits of reforms under capitalism and aim to expand the scope of democracy and challenge capital’s ownership and control, not just its wealth.
Significantly, Labour is now the only traditional center-left party in the world drafting plans to expand the cooperative sector, create community-owned enterprises, give employees shares in the companies they work in, and restore the state’s control of key sectors of the economy.
Like Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, Corbyn’s breakthrough has shown that socialists can garner popular support by building a credible opposition rooted in an unapologetically left vision—that is, by offering hopes and dreams, not just fear and diminished expectations.
Collective action—either in the workplace or outside it—is often riskier than accepting the status quo. The dilemma for socialists today is figuring out how to take anger at the unjust outcomes of capitalism and turn it into a challenge to the system itself.
three ingredients necessary for almost every socialist advance of the past hundred fifty years: mass parties, an activist base, and a mobilized working class.
What we need now are organizations: working-class parties and unions that can unite scattered resistance into a socialist movement.1
1. Class-struggle social democracy does not close avenues for radicals; it opens them.
both of these leaders encourage a renewal of class antagonism and movements from below.
They have introduced a language of class struggle and redistribution to audiences that haven’t ever heard demands
Class-struggle social democracy, then, is generating working-class strength through electoral campaigns rather than subordinating existing struggles to the goal of getting a few people elected.
2. Class-struggle social democracy has the potential to win a major national election today.
The challenge is to take these individual “policy preferences” and bundle them into a coherent politics, but this has been precisely the Sanders campaign’s breakthrough.
