Let the smear tactics begin! Hopefully it will show the American people just what kind of scum conservatives and the GOP really are. Bernie Sanders, an independent and social democrat in the US Senate, has just announced his candidacy for president on May 1st (that's May Day-or international workers' day-for those of us old school lefties!) and will likely invigorate the debates on real instead of non-issues. He will doubtless raise the political discourse way above what its been for a long time. The American People, for the most part, agree with Sanders. They just don't realize it. Why? Because of years of cold war style red baiting and the unshakeable taboo against the "S" word.
Werner Sombart, a German economist and sociologist from the late nineteenth century famously asked, "Why is there no socialism in the United States?" in a book published in 1906 by the same title. His answer lay in the starkly contrasting histories and political cultures of the US and Europe. The US had no history of feudalism which, in Sombart's view, was the real cause of the oppression of workers rather than monopoly capitalism. American workers embraced capitalism as "freedom" while European workers associated their oppression with the persistence of a "feudal" aristocracy which failed to be replaced by a vibrant urban middle class with which early industrial capitalism was deeply associated. Of course, this is nonsense. Workers on both sides of the Atlantic rebelled against capitalist, not feudal exploitation!
Why is There No Socialism in the United States? The Intellectuals Debate!
But the important question remained for others to pick up. Over the course of the twentieth century, the American left debated this important question. Some scholars of the early socialist movement during the progressive era, such as Ira Kipnis, argued that socialist parties became corrupted and coopted by establishment politics and ceased to fight for their cause. Many eventually threw their support to FDR and the Democratic Party believing that they had actually more or less won their fight for a just society. Related to this view is the "consensus school" represented by Daniel Bell and others on the right. This view saw the US as entering an era of "the end of ideology" in which all classes were drawn together in a common mission believing that the vast improvements in the condition of US workers meant that socialist politics per se had outlived its usefulness. He also believed that socialist politicians were incompetent as politicians, being more ideological than practical, and more oriented toward political organizing and activism than the wheeling and dealing of mainstream politics. In the end a "post ideology" consensus suddenly rendered the American socialist movement politically irrelevant. He never considers cold war repression against the left in the 1950s or that the struggle for the civil rights of racial minorities, clearly neglected in the New Deal era, would make his "end of ideology" thesis historically invalid. Bell also saw the American socialists as attempting to impose their ethical and moral views of social justice on society; a real deal breaker for guys like Bell who see politics mostly as deal making. His narrow "art of the possible" view of politics never questions who exactly sets the parameters around what is possible and why!
James Weinstein refuted all these notions arguing that the socialist party continued to grow until the end of WWI and was finally torn down by political nativism; the native born majority simply rejected the recent immigrant attachment to the Russian Revolution which didn't inspire most Americans who only saw its "excesses" and irrelevance to American social and political conditions. Radical historians, like Eric Foner, seem to cop to a version of Bell's "end of ideology" but for exactly opposite reasons. Foner mentions in his essay, also entitled "Why is there no socialism in the United States" that "...mass politics, mass culture and mass consumption came to America before it did to Europe. American socialists were the first to face the dilemma of how to define socialist politics in a capitalist democracy. Perhaps in the dissipation of class ideologies, Europe is now catching up with an historical process already experienced in the United States."
It seems that for Foner, one of the problems was early post-WWII mass consumerism, "bread and circuses", distracted the previously ideological US working class into becoming a self satisfied political group coopted by materialist consumer culture. This was quite a popular new left mantra in the 1960s but one that is highly relevant to the discussion. Much of this comports with New Left American sociologist C. Wright Mills' theory of the US labor movement in a book he published in 1948 called The New Men of Power. Mills details how the labor movement leadership went from seeking clear political objectives to strictly dealing with workplace concerns such as wages, hours, terms of employment and working conditions. Shorn of its former socialist ideology, Mills claims that the American labor movement went from a political movement to a kind of rentier organization operating on a purely business model. This meant confining union concerns to securing the best deal for the rank and file workers through contract negotiations. Thus, the labor movement abandoned its former pursuit of socialism with the advent of the cold war in the early days of the Truman Administration. Thus, the one institution that had the capacity to pursue a socialist order had been coopted by a New Deal era capital/labor accord which traded class struggle for labor peace and political activism for compliance with the status quo.
Other theories exist as well. Some cite the "safety valve" option not available in Europe. Right up until the Great Depression of the 1930s, it was still possible to leave an industrial American city for the less crowded rural areas. Interestingly, the number of US farms continued to grow right up until the early 1930s when the total number of US farms peaked at nearly 7 million! Others blame the Red Scare of the 1950s which made the AFL-CIO a "red free" highly patriotic and anti-communist organization. Those who never lived through it can't really fathom the political impact it had in the late forties and early fifties. The search for an answer to this question will always brook controversy. The point is to find an opportunity to push for an acceptable socialist agenda in mainstream politics, legitimize and mainstream socialist discourse and make people understand that there has always been good socialism and bad socialism and that the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself!
What All This Means for the Sanders Campaign
The Sanders campaign is the first opportunity in a long time to once again show the American people that there is a stark difference between "good socialism" and "bad socialism" and that we, as a nation, needn't fear the "S" word. Sanders' platform is a traditional populist one whose tagline seems to be "Save Main Street, not Wall Street." The economy has to work for everyone, not just the one percenters. In a sense, Sanders has coopted some of the demands from the Occupy Movement of the post-crash period in the same way FDR coopted the demands of the American socialist movement and integrated them into a politically feasible agenda that became the famous New Deal legislation. Sanders, who raised $1.5 million within twenty four hours of announcing his candidacy (more than many GOP candidates raised) outlines the spirit of his "12 steps forward" agenda in his campaign website;
The American people must make a fundamental decision. Do we continue the 40-year decline of our middle class and the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else, or do we fight for a progressive economic agenda that creates jobs, raises wages, protects the environment and provides health care for all? Are we prepared to take on the enormous economic and political power of the billionaire class, or do we continue to slide into economic and political oligarchy? These are the most important questions of our time, and how we answer them will determine the future of our country.
The long-term deterioration of the middle class, accelerated by the Wall Street crash of 2008, has not been pretty. Today, we have more wealth and income inequality than any major country on earth. We have one of the highest childhood poverty rates and we are the only country in the industrialized world which does not guarantee health care for all. We once led the world in terms of the percentage of our people who graduated college, but we are now in 12th place. Our infrastructure, once the envy of the world, is collapsing.
Real unemployment today is not 5.8 percent, it is 11.5 percent if we include those who have given up looking for work or who are working part time when they want to work full time. Youth unemployment is 18.6 percent and African-American youth unemployment is 32.6 percent.
Today, millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the median male worker earned $783 less last year than he made 41 years ago. The median female worker made $1,337 less last year than she earned in 2007. Since 1999, the median middle-class family has seen its income go down by almost $5,000 after adjusting for inflation, now earning less than it did 25 years ago.
The American people must demand that Congress and the White House start protecting the interests of working families, not just wealthy campaign contributors. We need federal legislation to put the unemployed back to work, to raise wages and make certain that all Americans have the health care and education they need for healthy and productive lives.
The first task for Sanders is to rebuild America's crumbling infrastructure. In 2013, the
American Society of Civil Engineers famously gave the existing condition of America's infrastructure a D+ claiming that at least $3.6 trillion in repairs and expansion would be needed to have adequate infrastructure by the year 2020. Such spending, over time, would create millions of public and private sector jobs, both directly and indirectly, thus wiping out unemployment.
Sanders further wants to address the pressing issue of climate change. Again the creation of millions of "green jobs" in the process to weatherize commercial and residential structures for energy efficiency and build a cross country mass transit system would save energy, the economy and the environment together.
Tax reform is needed to make the system more progressive at the federal level and Sanders would introduce legislation to make it both illegal and cost ineffective to hide profits overseas. Currently, the US Treasury loses about one hundred billion annually due to the current tax code.
Sanders would also protect Social Security and acknowledge that health care is a right not a privilege. He would take steps to protect and strengthen the Affordable Care Act and ensure that all Americans had adequate access to good quality health care.
Financial regulation and making college affordable again are items that both require taking on the US financial system and Wall Street. Even more than regulations alone, restoring growing middle class incomes and effective demand to the US economy will give the bloated financial sector an incentive to reinvest in small business and consumer loans rather than funding derivatives and speculation.
One compelling analysis that the current endemic financial crises started with chronic stagnation and not Wall Street itself comes from John Bellamy Foster, the editor of the American socialist journal, the Monthly Review. In a book he coauthored with Fred Magdoff, (also on the editorial staff of the Monthly Review) The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequence, published in 2009, a year after the crash, he argues that chronic stagnation expanded the financial sector as people borrowed against the inflated value of their homes and stock portfolios in lieu of higher real income. In a recent article he asserts,
"In the U.S case, the rate of growth for the 1970s (which was slightly higher than that of the two subsequent decades) was 27 percent less than in the 1960s. In 2000–2011 the rate of growth was 63 percent below that of the 1960s.It was this underlying stagnation tendency...which was the reason the economy became so dependent on financialization — or a decades-long series of ever-larger speculative financial bubbles. In fact, a dangerous feedback loop between stagnation and financial bubbles has now emerged, reflecting the fact that stagnation and financialization are increasingly interdependent phenomena: a problem that we refer to in this book as the stagnation-financialization trap."
The answer seems to be a full employment policy at the federal level. Creating a middle class based economy, based on real rising median income, to replace the existing "casino economy", as Keynes referred to it, would restore the financial system to its former size and functions while reducing the tendency toward chronic financial crisis.
It is also imperative that free trade agreements be eliminated. They are purely corporate led agenda which do nothing to either create jobs or boost GDP growth. Since the late 1970s, over ten million net US manufacturing jobs were lost to outsourcing and imports. These were higher paying jobs most replaced by low skill, low wage jobs. It's no wonder that the US economy experiences chronic stagnation! Industrial efficiency is great but only when the savings are all or mostly reinvested to create growth that benefits all and not just the corporate rich. It makes no sense to put efficient domestic US corporations out of business to save miniscule unit/output costs at the expensive of millions of manufacturing jobs that get sent overseas to low wage places like China and Mexico.
Higher employment rates will also make pursuing the goals of pay equity for women and minorities as well as a higher minimum wage much easier. High unemployment may boost profits by squeezing wages but it is bad for workers and the economy. A higher minimum wage, which would have a knock on effect of raising wage levels overall, is needed. One reason is that the inflation adjusted value of the US minimum wage peaked almost five decades ago. According to a 2014 congressional study;
The peak value of the minimum wage in real terms was reached in 1968. To equal the purchasing power of the minimum wage in 1968 ($10.69), the current minimum wage’s real value ($7.25) would have to increase by $3.44 (or 47%). Although the nominal value of the minimum wage was increased by $5.65 (from $1.60 to $7.25) between 1968 and 2009, these legislated adjustments did not enable the minimum wage to keep pace with the increase in consumer prices, so the real minimum wage fell.
To this end, reinvigorating the American labor movement is essential. US union density (membership rates) have declined markedly over the past thirty years. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report;
In 2014, the union membership rate--the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions--was 11.1 percent, down 0.2 percentage point from 2013, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions, at 14.6 million, was little different from 2013. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent, and there were 17.7 million union workers.
In the 1970s, total union density averaged just below 24% according to the WSJ. According to a recent NPR report, US union density peaked in the 1960s at one third! From there on it declined. According to an EPI study, this is the main reason for the growing inequality seen in todays economy. They cite data that show that at least a third of the growth of income inequality over the course of the 1980s and '90s was due to the marked decline in union membership. This only makes sense since unions have always been the key institution in modern capitalism that holds middle class income at sufficiently high levels. It is no wonder that capital has gone on an all out offensive against labor since the 1980s. It has destroyed unions shifting a greater share of the national income to the top one percent than we've seen since the 1920s!
Good Socialism vs. Bad Socialism
And so we come full circle back to the original question of the US labor movement and its role in a socialist (or social democratic) agenda for the American middle class. The best approach is to get people to understand, as broadcast journalist Lawrence O'Donnell once said, "there's good socialism and there's bad socialism", the point being to chose the former not the latter. As we all know, the latter consists of the types of rigid central planning systems in eastern Europe long ago that failed to bring either freedom or prosperity. But with an agenda for full employment and the rebuilding of the middle class through various key reforms for which there is ample precedent, we can achieve good socialism. We already have such redistributive programs as Medicare, Social Security, progressive taxation and a social safety net in need of repair. Why not finish the job FDR started eighty years ago and create a real social democracy in the United States?
I believe this is the real meaning of the Sanders campaign and we now have a golden opportunity to use all the silly talk of socialism generated by the Republicans as a mere smear against their political opponents, to engage in a high level discussion about the real meaning of the term and America's future as a social democracy. The truth is most Americans are social democrats, they just don't realize it due to all the hysteria generated by the far right and media propaganda. As we look all around us at the decline of national societies everywhere and the rise of crime, violence, poverty and inequality in the world we can see the need for a program that will restore prosperity and a financially stable middle class as the only path to political stability. We must now face the fact that before us stands a clear choice, as posed by German socialist Rosa Luxemberg exactly one hundred years ago; either socialism or barbarism!