The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

by Bhaskar Sunkara

To be a socialist today is to believe that more, not less, democracy will help solve social ills—and to believe that ordinary people can shape the systems that shape their lives.

Democratic Socialism vs National Socialism

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.

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.

Outside of theory, there’s no such thing as a “free market”—capitalism requires both planning and a regulated market.

With the power to withhold investment, with the economy still reliant on their profits, capitalists were able to hold democratic governments hostage and roll back reforms. Their economic power translated into enduring power over the political process.

Often maligned as utopians with eyes only on the future, socialists in fact have from the beginning been students of history. Today’s socialists must follow in the same tradition.

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.

In most accounts, capitalism appeared sometime between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, as our tendency to seek market opportunities finally saw people begin to break free of the shackles of feudalism,

He was a historical materialist, which meant that he thought various forms of society reflect different material possibilities and constraints.

Marx could not have been expected to see perfectly into the future. But he proved remarkably farsighted. Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776 and died in 1790. He only saw the very beginning of capitalism. It was Marx who gazed at the great factory cities, steamboats, and railroads, and guessed that more marvels were to come.

what Marx left us wasn’t scripture but a method of looking at the world and a set of concerns to animate us.

The socialist movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries never ended up inheriting the world. Not just poorly led, they ran into a recurring problem of collective action. Though workers could only win gains through class struggle, they had more than their chains to lose in revolutionary politics. They relied on capital to survive and could not so easily break with the system that oppressed them and marched them off to war.

Throughout most of the nineteenth century, radical movements were dominated by non-Marxists—first “utopian” socialists, who sought to build harmonious societies through creating a “new man” in communes, then intransigent anarchists who posed a maximalist opposition to both capitalist domination and the state itself.

Social Democratic Party had amassed a considerable base of support—one in five German voters backed it in 1890. This didn’t translate into political victories. Germany was intensely federalized, and different states had different suffrage laws. Where social democracy was strongest—such as in Prussia—representation was also less democratic, and conservative rural districts were heavily favored.

Not unlike today in the United States with rule conservative states favoring the Senate

“Without political rights, the working class cannot carry on its economic struggles and develop its economic organization. It cannot bring about the transfer of the means of production into the possession of the community without first having obtained political power.”

The SPD wasn’t just a party: It was an alternative culture, where workers could educate themselves in a day school or through reading seventy-five affiliated papers, play in sports leagues or gymnastic clubs, and find friends and lovers at picnics and party taverns. This sense of collective belonging was cemented by lectures, rallies, and rituals.

Bernstein ventured furthest from his previous views when he insisted that capitalism had found ways to self-regulate and avoid crises, and that the working class had won the means, in the form of parliaments, to shape its development and slowly legislate reforms.

“the ultimate aim of socialism is nothing, but the movement is everything.”

His view that “the ultimate aim of socialism is nothing” didn’t mean that he abandoned socialism, but rather that he saw the path to it as gradual rather than through revolution. Fittingly, the English-language collection of his work was titled Evolutionary Socialism.

Bernstein’s insistence that social democracy would reach new heights when it freed itself from “obsolete phraseology” and was “willing to appear what it really is today; a democratic-Socialist reform party” foreshadowed postwar social democracy, when new opportunities appeared to manage the capitalist state in the interests of workers.

Fabian socialists

The Fabian society

Divisions emerged between the more moderate trade union members and the more radical SPD general membership, but unions were themselves increasingly dominated by a conservative leadership. Growing trade union membership meant more staff to manage their affairs. This was no doubt necessary, but it created a bureaucratic layer of people who worked in the name of the working class but were increasingly alienated from its day-to-day experience.

What made the situation in 1907 especially difficult was the fact that the tactics of the SPD had found imitators on the right. New membership organizations won support for imperialism, as a more populist German nationalism competed with social democracy for the allegiance of workers.

That Stalinism had its roots in Bolshevism is no surprise. The extremism of men like Dzerzhinsky, confident the utopia they were building was worth any cost, made it all but certain.

However, the equation of socialism with Stalinism—a common rhetorical tactic among centrists and conservatives—is wrong, and not only outside of Russia. As we’ll see, throughout the early Russian Revolution more humane and democratic alternatives within the socialist tradition were fought for, and only defeated through force.

But as socialism triumphed, the need for a repressive apparatus would dissipate and the state would wither away. Many have portrayed The State and Revolution as a false flag—a libertarian socialist document from the father of socialist authoritarianism. But it was a sincere work. It did, however, indicate how simple Lenin appeared to believe constructing a socialist state (and having that state wither away) would be. In power, the Bolsheviks would learn otherwise and horrifically transform themselves in the process.

They won support through their straightforward call for “peace, land, and bread.” The Mensheviks demanded patience from the long-suffering masses; the Bolsheviks made concrete promises.

Here is Trotsky epitomized—rhetorically masterful but tragically overconfident in the ordination of history.

Thirteen thousand American troops along with British, Canadian, French, Greek, Italian, and Japanese forces joined the Whites to aid their brutal domestic opposition. Facing long odds, Trotsky oversaw the creation of a Red Army and managed to triumph in a five-year civil war that claimed nine million lives.

These horrifying acts were carried out amid history’s most destructive civil war and a White Terror that murdered more than a hundred thousand, many of them Jews and other minorities.

Collective punishment, state terror, and intimidation—all these were “exceptional” measures that became the norm during Stalin’s reign.

The Bolsheviks focused on seizing power, not exercising it. Aside from vague sketches, they hadn’t thought much about politics after revolution.

Despite the state’s energetic efforts at repression and banning of private trade, it was largely thanks to the black market that Soviet cities survived the civil war.16

Trotsky pushed for party democracy and other antibureaucratic measures, faster industrialization and collectivization at home, and aggressive revolutionary exhortations abroad. Bukharin was more cautious, seeking to continue slowly “riding into socialism on a peasant nag.” Stalin triangulated between the two positions, displaying a political savvy few knew the Georgian possessed.

Trotsky was removed from the Central Committee by Stalin in late 1927 and sent into exile shortly after. Until his murder in Mexico thirteen years later, he remained Stalinism’s greatest critic. Yet he couldn’t admit that any part of the system he so despised had its genesis in the repression that he had helped engineer during the civil war.

Under Stalin, the worldwide Communist movement became a tool of Russian national interests rather than one of working-class emancipation.

Back in the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville had argued that the most dangerous time for a bad government was when it tried to mend its ways. Mikhail Gorbachev’s years in office revealed the truth of the claim. His attempts to renovate the system only undermined the coercion that held it together.

Would this hold true for AMERICAN capitalism?

With hindsight we can see that both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks were wrong in 1917. The Mensheviks’ faith in Russian liberals to carry out sweeping democratic transformations was misplaced, as were the Bolsheviks’ hopes for world revolution and a leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.

The 1929–1931 British Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald was the most extreme example of interwar futility. Labour had long been more moderate than many of its European counterparts; the party eschewed Marxism and from the beginning operated within a liberal-constitutional framework. It was a party driven by trade unions’ interests, and it never had the same radical ideological influences as the German SPD.

It was the economist John Maynard Keynes, a liberal who believed socialists were well-intentioned idiots, who presented the best approach of the time to taming capitalism.

Keynes advocated a countercyclical fiscal response: deficit spending, tax cuts, and other measures to stimulate aggregate demand during a recession, and tax increases and spending cuts when times were good.

The Popular Front government of French socialist leader Léon Blum (1936–1937) was more determined than MacDonald’s to deliver change. French socialists

Rebuilding the party’s infrastructure throughout the 1920s, Blum grappled with the question of why and under what conditions a socialist would enter government. He distinguished between the “exercise of power” (taking office to prepare the groundwork for socialism) and the “conquest of power” (the actual dismantling of capitalism). In the end, Blum settled for “the occupation of power,” to keep it out of the grasp of fascists.

BLUM MIGHT HAVE been selling his reforms and radical vision short. But unable to protect its policies, the Popular Front in France was little more successful, in the end, than the first two British Labour Party governments. It was only in Sweden that interwar socialists were able to mount a serious challenge to fiscal orthodoxy.

Accounts of the rise of social democracy in Sweden often focus on the country’s exceptional features. Its civic culture, limited state repression, and even racial homogeneity are commonly invoked. But on the whole, the country’s Left faced similar challenges to its counterparts elsewhere; it just managed to find ways to overcome them. One relevant difference was that the nation underwent industrialization relatively late, in the 1870s. It was another decade later before the first trade unions were formed, meaning that advocates of industrial unionism who would go on to form the Swedish Trade Union Confederation in 1898 didn’t have to contend with powerful, more conservative craft unions.

The late start meant that Swedish unionism developed under the ideological influence of socialism—

1902 New York Times article describing battles between workers and capitalists and fears of the “dreaded red flag” flying in a Sweden that was only rivaled by Russia as “the most feudal and oligarchical country in Europe.” Sweden was described similarly in SAP literature as an “armed poorhouse.”

Despite some reformist inclinations, from early on the Swedish movement was built on socialist ideological grounds: it advocated for policies that bridged gaps between craft and industrial workers, and it put emphasis on uplifting the most poorly paid. Social Democrats consistently prioritized universal programs—of benefit to both the poor and farmers—and not just the narrow interests of workers. Instead of pursuing shortcuts in their early years in opposition, Sweden’s socialists began to build a hegemony more durable than that of other Second International parties.

The SAP had campaigned on an expansion of public works and more state intervention in the economy, and after taking power began to implement some of the countercyclical policies forsaken by socialists elsewhere.