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edustoryramos24's review
3.0
Interesting and thought-provoking take on the state of contemporary socialism, if thinner on concrete proposals than, say, Thomas Picketty. And I must express my reservations at the claim that future socialism will have to be national. It was tried once, they called it national socialism, and it didn´t go well.
randyrasa's review
3.0
A well-researched and detailed look at the emerging socialist movement. Is this something to be frightened of, or simply the next evolutionary step in capitalism? This is a very good history, providing context and commentary to help in understanding this important topic.
jakeyjake's review
4.0
In the 2016 Presidential primaries, Bernie Sanders got more votes from 18- to 29-year-olds than Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump combined and YouGov polling showed that 'identification as a socialist actually increased as millennials entered their thirties' suggesting that these numbers are not something the youth are 'growing out of.'
This is a short book that describes the history of socialism in the US and the UK, especially focused on the 'Democratic Socialism' that has gained so much appeal and traction. As a millennial who aligns in many ways with democratic socialist goals and policy, I found this an enlightening and thoughtful primer on how we got to where we are and where things might go.
I liked this quote from Bernie, said back when I was still wearing diapers, 'To me, socialism doesn't mean state ownership of everything, by any means. It means creating a nation and a world in which all humans beings have a decent standard of living.'
Economist Joseph Stiglitz: 'The new breed of American democratic socialists—or call them what you will—is simply advocating a model that embraces government's important role in social protection and inclusion, environmental protection, and public investment in infrastructure, technology, and education. They recognize the public's regulatory role in preventing corporations from exploiting customers or workers in a multitude of ways.'
--BEWARE OF NOTES--
Socialism has different meanings for different groups. Your orthodox Marxist socialist might spring first to mind, but even before the German philosopher there was anti-factory Utopian socialism and your Sermon-on-the-mount variety Ethical/Christian socialism. Then there was Stalin's Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet era (Lenin's idea of the "cadre" that knew the interests of the working class better than the working class itself did).
What gets closer to approximating socialism today (at least the sort of socialism that millennials in the U.S. seem to find more palatable (as best represented by Bernie Sanders and AOC) is a democratic socialism carved out in the late 1800s by Eduard Bernstein. His 'great contribution was to attempt to ground socialist politics in the realities of capitalism—to recognize that the development of capitalism was not leading inexorably to a class struggle between a blue-collar proletariat and a white-collar bourgeoisie.'
Here are some of the attributes of this new democratic socialism form of socialism
1. Socialism within capitalism - just as capitalism developed within feudalism. Socialism programs and institutions can be developed within capitalism that shift economic and social power from capital ("The rich and powerful") toward labor ("working people"). For example: a stiff wealth tax!, granting workers' representatives equal power on corporate boards, creating regulatory agencies to rope in bad corporate behavior, public ownership of essential industries like healthcare, education, transportation, and energy production.
2. Socialism as a Just system (outside of just the workplace) - Marx's socialism was about workers and the economy. 'The new socialists don't limit their effort to obtain justice tot he workplace... They want to overcome domination across the board, in society as well as the economy.' That includes racial, gender, and sexual equality.
3. The primacy of politics - This was an interesting point. In the past some socialists have argued that socialism is the INEVITABLE outcome of society as it evolves from capitalism, but Judis reminds us that in the 1930s FDR's New Deal (which he saw as a kind of proto-socialism) and Hitler's Nazism were both reactions to economic collapse. Both offered extensive social protections, but obviously Hitler's authoritarian fascism took a different form than the policies of the New Deal. It may seem obvious, but this is just to say, 'what happens will depend on politics, not on inexorable historical laws.'
4. We may call it 'Socialism', but we don't have to - Bernie and Warren were very similar on policy. Bernie didn't shy so much from the term 'socialist', while Warren claimed she was 'a capitalist to the bone.' Socialism doesn't carry as strong of a connotation for millennials as it did for cold war era kids. We'll see if these policies of social protections for all will need a rebrand or not.
5. Populist politics - New socialists reject the orthodox Marxist idea that the industrial working class is the vanguard of a socialist revolution. It is no longer an appeal to the uniting of just 'the working class', but appeals to 'the people' vs 'the establishment' or 'the elite.' The group of workers included in this united group is much more diverse than the orthodox Marxist criteria.
Judis profiles Eugene Debs, Victor Berman, and then Bernie Sanders as three modern U.S.-based socialists, but also emphasizes socialist policy implemented by those who don’t explicitly identify with the branding, including many democrats (things like municipal water systems and minimum wage).
Early on Sanders styled himself a 'Swedish-style socialist.' In 1990, he said, 'To me, socialism doesn't mean state ownership of everything, by any means. It means creating a nation and a world in which all humans beings have a decent standard of living.' In 1991, he said, 'At this point in American history, I would be very delighted if we could move in a conservative manner in the direction of a country like Sweden, which has a national healthcare system which guarantees free healthcare, which has free education for all its kids.'
The US has a history of radicalism beginning with Tom Paine and continuing through Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, the Populists, the Progressive Party, Roosevelt's Second New Deal and his Second Bill if Rights in 1944. https://bit.ly/2Ktc5yA Watch FDR talk about it here: https://bit.ly/37iyuqn
There were socialist policies enacted during certain eras of the 20th century. 'The period from 1932 to 1972 saw the erection of extensive social protections against corporate capitalism.' Then in 1980, with Reagan and Thatcher at the helm, the US and Great Britain both entered a period where 'market fundamentalism' held sway and in this recent period socialist institutions within capitalism were dismantled or gutted. Judis posits that in the wake of the Great Recession and the depression caused by the pandemic, the US and Europe appear to be entering a new period in which it is likely that forces favoring social protection will hold sway.
So what now? One of Judis' main throughlines in this book is his exhortations to liberal progressives (those of us who would support socialist policies) to favor a vision of viable, feasible socialism. Here, I think he's saying, 'don't scare people away talking about making everything completely free, a big UBI system, and government ownership of all the tech companies, etc.' He also argues—and I found this a bit harder to swallow—for avoiding 'potentially divisive extreme sociocultural appeals that go beyond the ideas that informed socialism. These would include, for instance, contemporary opposition not simply to discrimination based on adopted genders, but any distinctions based upon gender, or support not simply for comprehensive immigration reform, but for no limits at all on immigration.' I understand Judis' apprehension and political savvy, but I personally am still making up my mind whether it's best to shoot for the moon or water down your social protections in the hopes of wooing a larger group of supporters.
Judis looks across the pond at Jeremy Corbyn and the democratic socialists of the UK's Labour party. He points to their waffling on Nationalist policy as a reason for their recent foundering. 'Strange as it seems, a viable socialism must be nationalist.' He chides liberal progressives in the US and the UK for treating all nationalist policy as if it is only informed by racist and bigoted incentives. I think I better appreciate where he is coming from after reading this section—certainly I can admit that some in the US and the UK have fared worse than others as a result of policy changes towards globalization and immigration. Policies that give jobs to the lowest bidders coupled with lax regulation on corporations hell-bent on minimizing costs does result in a chaotic and churn-filled jobs market that will leave a lot of people without a good standard of living. That said, and despite the obvious natural tendency to focus on our closest-proximity concentric circles (self, family, community, state, country, region, world, for example), I'm still not convinced that limiting our attention to the needs of those inside our rather arbitrary borders is humane or morally defensible. So my mind is still evolving when it comes to the topic of the merits of some sort of nationalism as a key pillar of a feasible socialism.
This is a short book that describes the history of socialism in the US and the UK, especially focused on the 'Democratic Socialism' that has gained so much appeal and traction. As a millennial who aligns in many ways with democratic socialist goals and policy, I found this an enlightening and thoughtful primer on how we got to where we are and where things might go.
I liked this quote from Bernie, said back when I was still wearing diapers, 'To me, socialism doesn't mean state ownership of everything, by any means. It means creating a nation and a world in which all humans beings have a decent standard of living.'
Economist Joseph Stiglitz: 'The new breed of American democratic socialists—or call them what you will—is simply advocating a model that embraces government's important role in social protection and inclusion, environmental protection, and public investment in infrastructure, technology, and education. They recognize the public's regulatory role in preventing corporations from exploiting customers or workers in a multitude of ways.'
--BEWARE OF NOTES--
Socialism has different meanings for different groups. Your orthodox Marxist socialist might spring first to mind, but even before the German philosopher there was anti-factory Utopian socialism and your Sermon-on-the-mount variety Ethical/Christian socialism. Then there was Stalin's Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet era (Lenin's idea of the "cadre" that knew the interests of the working class better than the working class itself did).
What gets closer to approximating socialism today (at least the sort of socialism that millennials in the U.S. seem to find more palatable (as best represented by Bernie Sanders and AOC) is a democratic socialism carved out in the late 1800s by Eduard Bernstein. His 'great contribution was to attempt to ground socialist politics in the realities of capitalism—to recognize that the development of capitalism was not leading inexorably to a class struggle between a blue-collar proletariat and a white-collar bourgeoisie.'
Here are some of the attributes of this new democratic socialism form of socialism
1. Socialism within capitalism - just as capitalism developed within feudalism. Socialism programs and institutions can be developed within capitalism that shift economic and social power from capital ("The rich and powerful") toward labor ("working people"). For example: a stiff wealth tax!, granting workers' representatives equal power on corporate boards, creating regulatory agencies to rope in bad corporate behavior, public ownership of essential industries like healthcare, education, transportation, and energy production.
2. Socialism as a Just system (outside of just the workplace) - Marx's socialism was about workers and the economy. 'The new socialists don't limit their effort to obtain justice tot he workplace... They want to overcome domination across the board, in society as well as the economy.' That includes racial, gender, and sexual equality.
3. The primacy of politics - This was an interesting point. In the past some socialists have argued that socialism is the INEVITABLE outcome of society as it evolves from capitalism, but Judis reminds us that in the 1930s FDR's New Deal (which he saw as a kind of proto-socialism) and Hitler's Nazism were both reactions to economic collapse. Both offered extensive social protections, but obviously Hitler's authoritarian fascism took a different form than the policies of the New Deal. It may seem obvious, but this is just to say, 'what happens will depend on politics, not on inexorable historical laws.'
4. We may call it 'Socialism', but we don't have to - Bernie and Warren were very similar on policy. Bernie didn't shy so much from the term 'socialist', while Warren claimed she was 'a capitalist to the bone.' Socialism doesn't carry as strong of a connotation for millennials as it did for cold war era kids. We'll see if these policies of social protections for all will need a rebrand or not.
5. Populist politics - New socialists reject the orthodox Marxist idea that the industrial working class is the vanguard of a socialist revolution. It is no longer an appeal to the uniting of just 'the working class', but appeals to 'the people' vs 'the establishment' or 'the elite.' The group of workers included in this united group is much more diverse than the orthodox Marxist criteria.
Judis profiles Eugene Debs, Victor Berman, and then Bernie Sanders as three modern U.S.-based socialists, but also emphasizes socialist policy implemented by those who don’t explicitly identify with the branding, including many democrats (things like municipal water systems and minimum wage).
Early on Sanders styled himself a 'Swedish-style socialist.' In 1990, he said, 'To me, socialism doesn't mean state ownership of everything, by any means. It means creating a nation and a world in which all humans beings have a decent standard of living.' In 1991, he said, 'At this point in American history, I would be very delighted if we could move in a conservative manner in the direction of a country like Sweden, which has a national healthcare system which guarantees free healthcare, which has free education for all its kids.'
The US has a history of radicalism beginning with Tom Paine and continuing through Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, the Populists, the Progressive Party, Roosevelt's Second New Deal and his Second Bill if Rights in 1944. https://bit.ly/2Ktc5yA Watch FDR talk about it here: https://bit.ly/37iyuqn
There were socialist policies enacted during certain eras of the 20th century. 'The period from 1932 to 1972 saw the erection of extensive social protections against corporate capitalism.' Then in 1980, with Reagan and Thatcher at the helm, the US and Great Britain both entered a period where 'market fundamentalism' held sway and in this recent period socialist institutions within capitalism were dismantled or gutted. Judis posits that in the wake of the Great Recession and the depression caused by the pandemic, the US and Europe appear to be entering a new period in which it is likely that forces favoring social protection will hold sway.
So what now? One of Judis' main throughlines in this book is his exhortations to liberal progressives (those of us who would support socialist policies) to favor a vision of viable, feasible socialism. Here, I think he's saying, 'don't scare people away talking about making everything completely free, a big UBI system, and government ownership of all the tech companies, etc.' He also argues—and I found this a bit harder to swallow—for avoiding 'potentially divisive extreme sociocultural appeals that go beyond the ideas that informed socialism. These would include, for instance, contemporary opposition not simply to discrimination based on adopted genders, but any distinctions based upon gender, or support not simply for comprehensive immigration reform, but for no limits at all on immigration.' I understand Judis' apprehension and political savvy, but I personally am still making up my mind whether it's best to shoot for the moon or water down your social protections in the hopes of wooing a larger group of supporters.
Judis looks across the pond at Jeremy Corbyn and the democratic socialists of the UK's Labour party. He points to their waffling on Nationalist policy as a reason for their recent foundering. 'Strange as it seems, a viable socialism must be nationalist.' He chides liberal progressives in the US and the UK for treating all nationalist policy as if it is only informed by racist and bigoted incentives. I think I better appreciate where he is coming from after reading this section—certainly I can admit that some in the US and the UK have fared worse than others as a result of policy changes towards globalization and immigration. Policies that give jobs to the lowest bidders coupled with lax regulation on corporations hell-bent on minimizing costs does result in a chaotic and churn-filled jobs market that will leave a lot of people without a good standard of living. That said, and despite the obvious natural tendency to focus on our closest-proximity concentric circles (self, family, community, state, country, region, world, for example), I'm still not convinced that limiting our attention to the needs of those inside our rather arbitrary borders is humane or morally defensible. So my mind is still evolving when it comes to the topic of the merits of some sort of nationalism as a key pillar of a feasible socialism.
cfc's review
4.0
Good one-day read. I find that many Americans attack socialism without knowing much about it. They should read this. It's pretty measured. That said. I was expecting that DSA affiliated reviewers would not like it since, while he gives DSA credit for putting socialism on the map, his criticisms of DSA's uncompromising (and in his view conflicting) position on some issues -- which he thinks will undermine its abilty to attract a larger following, I found myself surprised to be wrong. Here's a DSA review. https://www.dsausa.org/democratic-left/is-there-a-socialist-re-awakening/
erictlee's review
4.0
In 2002, John Judis wrote a book predicting a new Democratic majority. It was his riposte to Kevin Phillips' The Emerging Republican Majority (1969) which correctly predicted a quarter century of conservative Republican dominance of American politics. Judis argued then that demographic trends indicated that the Democrats were on the cusp of locking in a majority that would sustain them for decades to come. And then, in the 2004 Presidential election, the Democratic candidate went down to defeat at the hands of an unimpressive and unsuccessful Republican President.
In his newest book, Judis argues that after many decades in hibernation, the socialist ideals espoused by Eugene V. Debs have undergone a resurgence of sorts in the United States. This is undoubtedly true. He points not only to the Bernie Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020, but also to the spectacular rise of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the successor organisation to Debs' Socialist Party. Judis is scathingly critical of some people in the DSA leadership who come from sectarian Trotskyist backgrounds. Those people reject the very strategy (known as realignment) that was first embraced by DSA founder Michael Harrington in the 1960s and that stood behind Bernie Sanders' campaigns. Instead of trying to create yet another failed third party, democratic socialists need to engage with the Democratic Party, which is where their natural audience (trade unionists, feminists, environmentalists, people of colour) are to be found. I think Judis is right about that.
Where his book goes astray is in lengthy discussions of various academic disputes about the relevance of this or that strand of socialist thinking, with Judis coming down firmly in the camp that rejects "orthodox Marxism". He does, however, seem to have a warm spot for "social democracy" which is good thing. It would be useful in these kinds of discussions to get beyond the tired Scandinavian examples that are always cited and to look at some more radical socialist experiments that managed to remain democratic, including both the kibbutz movement in Israel and the short-lived Georgian Democratic Republic of 1918-21, which was led by the Mensheviks.
Judis inserts a chapter about Corbynism which is largely correct and adequate. But he completely misses the significance of the debate about the rise of anti-Semitism on the British Left. He notes in passing that "Corbyn was plagued by accusations of anti-Semitism" and concedes that "some of which were justified". Judis' book was written long before Corbyn was suspended by his own party -- an event unprecedented in British political history. This had everything to do with the "accusations" of anti-Semitism. The book would have been a better one, I think, had it stayed more focussed on U.S. politics, which Judis understands very well.
In his newest book, Judis argues that after many decades in hibernation, the socialist ideals espoused by Eugene V. Debs have undergone a resurgence of sorts in the United States. This is undoubtedly true. He points not only to the Bernie Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020, but also to the spectacular rise of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the successor organisation to Debs' Socialist Party. Judis is scathingly critical of some people in the DSA leadership who come from sectarian Trotskyist backgrounds. Those people reject the very strategy (known as realignment) that was first embraced by DSA founder Michael Harrington in the 1960s and that stood behind Bernie Sanders' campaigns. Instead of trying to create yet another failed third party, democratic socialists need to engage with the Democratic Party, which is where their natural audience (trade unionists, feminists, environmentalists, people of colour) are to be found. I think Judis is right about that.
Where his book goes astray is in lengthy discussions of various academic disputes about the relevance of this or that strand of socialist thinking, with Judis coming down firmly in the camp that rejects "orthodox Marxism". He does, however, seem to have a warm spot for "social democracy" which is good thing. It would be useful in these kinds of discussions to get beyond the tired Scandinavian examples that are always cited and to look at some more radical socialist experiments that managed to remain democratic, including both the kibbutz movement in Israel and the short-lived Georgian Democratic Republic of 1918-21, which was led by the Mensheviks.
Judis inserts a chapter about Corbynism which is largely correct and adequate. But he completely misses the significance of the debate about the rise of anti-Semitism on the British Left. He notes in passing that "Corbyn was plagued by accusations of anti-Semitism" and concedes that "some of which were justified". Judis' book was written long before Corbyn was suspended by his own party -- an event unprecedented in British political history. This had everything to do with the "accusations" of anti-Semitism. The book would have been a better one, I think, had it stayed more focussed on U.S. politics, which Judis understands very well.
selkis's review against another edition
3.0
A short interesting overview of the origins and history of socialism and also Sanders, Trump, and the current situation. It's very informative and helped me understand the current political situation. However, sometimes it was a bit dry and just felt like a long list of facts.
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