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(Utterly incoherent.)
NY Times Op-Ed, June 26 2017
Back to the Future via Finland Station
by Bhaskar Sunkara
One hundred years after Lenin’s sealed train arrived at Finland Station
and set into motion the events that led to Stalin’s gulags, the idea
that we should return to this history for inspiration might sound
absurd. But there was good reason that the Bolsheviks once called
themselves “social democrats.” They were part of a broad movement of
growing parties that aimed to fight for greater political democracy and,
using the wealth and the new working class created by capitalism, extend
democratic rights into the social and economic spheres, which no
capitalist would permit.
The early Communist movement never rejected this broad premise. It was
born out of a sense of betrayal by the more moderate left-wing parties
of the Second International, the alliance of socialist and labor parties
from 20 countries that formed in Paris in 1889. Across Europe, party
after party did the unthinkable, abandoned their pledges to
working-class solidarity for all nations, and backed their respective
governments in World War I. Those that remained loyal to the old ideas
called themselves Communists to distance themselves from the socialists
who had abetted a slaughter that claimed 16 million lives. (Amid the
carnage, the Second International itself fell apart in 1916.)
Of course, the Communists’ noble gambit to stop the war and blaze a
humane path to modernity in backward Russia ended up seemingly affirming
the Burkean notion that any attempt to upturn an unjust order would end
up only creating another.
Most socialists have been chastened by the lessons of 20th-century
Communism. Today, many who would have cheered on the October Revolution
have less confidence about the prospects for radically transforming the
world in a single generation. They put an emphasis instead on political
pluralism, dissent and diversity.
Still, the specter of socialism evokes fear of a new totalitarianism. A
recent Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation report worries that
young people are likely to view socialism favorably and that a “Bernie
Sanders bounce” may be contributing to a millennial turn against
capitalism. Last year, the president of the United States Chamber of
Commerce, Thomas J. Donohue, even found it necessary to remind readers
that “Socialism Is a Dangerous Path for America.”
The right still denounces socialism as an economic system that will lead
to misery and privation, but with less emphasis on the political
authoritarianism that often went hand in hand with socialism in power.
This may be because elites today do not have democratic rights at the
forefront of their minds — perhaps because they know that the societies
they run are hard to justify on those terms.
Capitalism is an economic system: a way of organizing production for the
market through private ownership and the profit motive. To the extent
that it has permitted democracy, it has been with extreme reluctance.
That’s why early workers’ movements like Britain’s Chartists in the
early 19th century organized, first and foremost, for democratic rights.
Capitalist and socialist leaders alike believed that the struggle for
universal suffrage would encourage workers to use their votes in the
political sphere to demand an economic order that put them in control.
It didn’t quite work out that way. Across the West, workers came to
accept a sort of class compromise. Private enterprise would be tamed,
not overcome, and a greater share of a growing pie would go to providing
universal benefits through generous welfare states. Political rights
would be enshrined, too, as capitalism evolved and adapted such that a
democratic civil society and an authoritarian economic system made an
unlikely, but seemingly successful, pairing.
In 2017, that arrangement is long dead. With working-class movements
dormant, capital has run amok, charting a destructive course without
even the promise of sustained growth. The anger that led to the election
of Donald Trump in the United States and the Brexit vote in Britain is
palpable. People feel as if they’re on a runaway train to an unknown
destination and, for good reason, want back to familiar miseries.
Amid this turmoil, some fear a return to Finland Station via the
avuncular shrugs of avowedly socialist leaders like Mr. Sanders and
Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France. But the threat to democracy today is
coming from the right, not the left. Politics seems to present two ways
forward, both decidedly non-Stalinist forms of authoritarian collectivism.
“Singapore Station” is the unacknowledged destination of the neoliberal
center’s train. It’s a place where people in all their creeds and colors
are respected — so long as they know their place. After all, people are
crass and irrational, incapable of governing. Leave running Singapore
Station to the experts.
This is a workable vision for elites who look at the rise of an erratic
right-wing populism with justified fear. Many of them argue the need for
austerity measures to maintain a fragile global economy, and worry that
voters won’t take their short-term pain to spare themselves long-term
dysfunction. The same goes for the looming threat of climate change: The
science is undisputed among scientists, but is still up for debate in
the public sphere.
The Singapore model is not the worst of all possible end points. It’s
one where experts are allowed to be experts, capitalists are allowed to
accumulate, and ordinary workers are allowed a semblance of stability.
But it leaves no room for the train’s passengers to yell “Stop!” and
pick a destination of their own choosing.
“Budapest Station,” named after the powerful right-wing parties that
dominate Hungary today, is the final stop for the populist right.
Budapest allows us to at least feel like we’re back in charge. We get
there by decoupling some of the cars hurtling us forward and slowly
reversing. We’re all in this together, unless you’re an outsider who
doesn’t have a ticket, and then tough luck.
The “Trump train” is headed this way. President Trump can’t offer
tangible gains for ordinary people by challenging elites, but he can
offer a surface-level valorization of “the worker” and stoke anger at
the alleged causes of national decline — migrants, bad trade deals,
cosmopolitan globalists. The press, academia and any other noncompliant
parts of civil society are under attack. Meanwhile, other than having to
adjust to more protectionism and restrictive immigration policies, it’s
business as usual for most corporations.
But there is a third alternative: back to “Finland Station,” with all
the lessons of the past. This time, people get to vote. Well, debate and
deliberate and then vote — and have faith that people can organize
together to chart new destinations for humanity.
Stripped down to its essence, and returned to its roots, socialism is an
ideology of radical democracy. In an era when liberties are under
attack, it seeks to empower civil society to allow participation in the
decisions that affect our lives. A huge state bureaucracy, of course,
can be just as alienating and undemocratic as corporate boardrooms, so
we need to think hard about the new forms that social ownership could take.
Some broad outlines should already be clear: Worker-owned cooperatives,
still competing in a regulated market; government services coordinated
with the aid of citizen planning; and the provision of the basics
necessary to live a good life (education, housing and health care)
guaranteed as social rights. In other words, a world where people have
the freedom to reach their potentials, whatever the circumstances of
their birth.
We can get to this Finland Station only with the support of a majority;
that’s one reason that socialists are such energetic advocates of
democracy and pluralism. But we can’t ignore socialism’s loss of
innocence over the past century. We may reject the version of Lenin and
the Bolsheviks as crazed demons and choose to see them as
well-intentioned people trying to build a better world out of a crisis,
but we must work out how to avoid their failures.
That project entails a return to social democracy. Not the social
democracy of François Hollande, but that of the early days of the Second
International. This social democracy would involve a commitment to a
free civil society, especially for oppositional voices; the need for
institutional checks and balances on power; and a vision of a transition
to socialism that does not require a “year zero” break with the present.
Our 21st-century Finland Station won’t be a paradise. You might feel
heartbreak and misery there. But it will be a place that allows so many
now crushed by inequity to participate in the creation of a new world.
Bhaskar Sunkara (@sunraysunray) is the editor of Jacobin magazine and a
vice chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America.
This is an essay in the series Red Century, about the history and legacy
of Communism 100 years after the Russian Revolution.
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