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

by Bhaskar Sunkara

Marxism provided a framework for understanding why reforms won within capitalism were so hard to sustain and why there was so much suffering in societies filled with abundance.

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.

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.

It’s easy to understand this concept on production lines. If you’re bottling a hundred curry pasta sauce jars an hour, sixty of those might be necessary to pay your wages and other overheads, but every jar after that is surplus. Some goes directly into a capitalist’s pockets, but much of it is reinvested into production to keep firms competitive. Socialists call this phenomenon “exploitation.”

“society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”

come. It was also Marx who never lost sight of the human cost of progress. His moral outrage made him a socialist, but he spent far more of his life examining capitalism than envisioning an alternative to it.

Capitalism is crisis-prone, is built on domination and exploitation, and for all its micro-rationality has produced macro-irrationalities in the form of social and environmental destruction.

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.

Finland, Lenin finished a book he titled The State and Revolution. His argument with reformists was premised on a simple point: “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” Like Marx and Engels, he saw the state as a tool of class oppression.

“We are not Utopians,” Lenin writes. “We do not ‘dream’ of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination.”

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.

The “single greatest event in human history,” as socialists called it for decades afterward, was anticlimactic. On October 24, Bolshevik units occupied rail stations, telephone exchanges, and the state bank. The following day they surrounded the Winter Palace and arrested Kerensky’s cabinet ministers. One-sixth of the world had been conquered in the name of the proletariat with barely a drop of blood spilled.

“The rising of the masses of the people requires no justification,” Trotsky lectured his former comrade bitingly from the floor. “No, here no compromise is possible. To those who have left and to those who tell us to do this we must say: You are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out. Go where you ought to go: into the dustbin of history!” Here is Trotsky epitomized—rhetorically masterful but tragically overconfident in the ordination of history.

A young Bolshevik confronted him on the way out, upset that a great champion of the working class would abandon its revolution. Martov stopped before the exit and turned to him: “One day you will understand the crime in which you are taking part.”12 Almost exactly twenty years to the day, that worker, Ivan Akulov, was murdered in a Stalinist purge.

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. Having seen over ten million killed in a capitalist war, and living in an era of upheaval, the Bolsheviks can be forgiven for trying to chart a course to a better world.

The mature Soviet system was a form of authoritarian collectivism in a world still largely dominated by capitalist production. But over the course of the twentieth century many of those capitalist societies would see themselves transformed by attempts to deliver doses of socialism within capitalism. In fact, a few hundred miles to the west of Moscow, democratic socialism came close to becoming a reality.

TO M. N. ROY, the Communist International’s Second Congress was a revelation. “For the first time,” he remarked, “brown and yellow men met with white men who were not overbearing imperialists but friends and comrades.”1

Even after being subjected to three years of attacks from both the Right and corporate Democrats, Bernie Sanders is among the most popular politicians in the United States. His central demands—a universal jobs program and single-payer health insurance—both enjoy substantial support among voters. Polls show that 52 percent want a jobs guarantee nationwide, with even higher favorability in poor states like Mississippi (72 percent). Medicare for All could be just as popular a platform plank: in April 2018 support for the measure crept above 50 percent.

In the United States, the Right is very effective at seizing and wielding power as a minority, through its institutions, gerrymandering, and the court system. Yet the Left has always depended on mass mobilization, not only to win elections, but to enact change.

“The aim of the Right is always to restrict the scope of class conflict—to bring it down to as low a level as possible. The smaller and more local the political unit, the easier it is to run it oligarchically.”15

A world where half the Fortune 500 CEOs are women and fewer of them are white would be better than our world today, but still doesn’t mean much if there are just as many poor kids experiencing the same oppression they are now. Without the bedrock of a class politics, identity politics has become an agenda of inclusionary neoliberalism in which individual qualms can be addressed but structural inequalities cannot.

As Martin Luther King Jr. put it in 1967, “We aren’t merely struggling to integrate a lunch counter now. We’re struggling to get some money to be able to buy a hamburger or a steak when we get to the counter.”

Socialists don’t reject fights against oppression but instead try to bring them into a broader workers’ movement. We should strive for the elimination of bigotry, chauvinism, and any form of prejudice within our organizations. That means taking equality seriously, not as a goal for the distant future but as a practice in the here and now. But it also entails avoiding a narrow “call-out culture” along with the kind of identity politics that, taken to its extreme, will lead us down the path to a hyper-individualized and antisolidaristic politics. Hyperbole and the politics of personal shaming are a recipe for demoralization, paranoia, and defeat.

directions. The influential German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf was right when he wrote that Francis Fukuyama’s proclamation of “liberal democracy as the final form of human government” was “a caricature of a serious argument,” but he agreed with its core premise: “socialism is dead, and none of its variants can be revived for a world awakening from the double nightmare of Stalinism and Brezhnevism.” From the Left, Andre Gorz echoed that sentiment: “As a system, socialism is dead. As a movement and an organized political force, it is on its last legs. All the goals it once proclaimed are out of date.”1

Yet another answer, which I have only alluded to, is the climate crisis and the real possibility that capitalism could destroy civilization as we know it. We’re on pace for over 3 degrees Celsius of warming above preindustrial levels, even if existing international climate pledges are upheld. We likely need to keep that number below 1.5 degrees to prevent deep economic recession, massive crop failure, and the irreversible decline of ice sheets. That suggests we are fated to undergo the catastrophe so many now predict.

The intensification of the climate crisis will be the test by which future generations judge us, much as we look back to the action (or lack thereof) taken against fascism in the 1920s and ’30s. As global warming intensifies, we’ll likely see massive refugee flows, economic destabilization, and the elevation of vicious new right-wing movements. Far from trying to push beyond capitalism to a new stage of civilization, we might find ourselves looking back with nostalgia at our far from ideal present.

The final answer to “Why socialism?” is simple: it would be the best guarantor of peace. If you were alive a few hundred years ago, a lord might have summoned you and other peasants, given you pikes, and told you that you had to go to war with people in a neighboring village. You rallied under a blue banner with a griffin or some such creature on it; they rallied under a green banner with a dragon on it. In battle, you piked some poor soul or got piked yourself. One day, people will look upon the division of this tiny world into rival nations and armies with the same dismay that characterizes our reactions to premodern history. The flags of countries might not be replaced by red ones overnight, and we might not all one day sing “The Internationale” in Esperanto, but the internationalist appeal of socialism will be a far more potent challenge to nationalism than liberal cosmopolitanism.