A contribution to Bergen seminar “200 Years of Socialism: Revisiting the Old Dilemmas”, GRIP Annual Lecture 2023, based on a revision of the “Coments” submitted to the seminar.
Three among the many old dilemmas and debates that can serve to elaborate new answers to the present crisis of subaltern workers’ movements, are discussed here: the relation between socialism and democracy, the consequences of bureaucracy, and the phenomenon of umbrella organizations.Footnote 1
Socialism and democracy: Bifurcations and mergers
Over the last two centuries, the multifaceted resistance of subaltern workers to capitalism paralleled and contributed mightily to the development of a broad democratic movement that advocated universal suffrage, secrecy of the vote, equality for women, education for all, free speech, free press, free assembly, majority rule, and national self-determination.Footnote 2 But even the most radical democrats, those willing to prohibit inheritance, provide extensive public services and suspend property rights during emergencies, adamantly defended private property and the proprietary’s right to extend his possession, as essential to that person’s dignity, ability to dissent and freedom. Socialists generally agreed with the first set of demands, but wondered about the social dynamics of the second, centered on private ownership. Most of them did not oppose privately owned personal belongings provided that they remained marginal in society as a whole, but warned that only the abolition of commodity production as a dominant system, that is the elimination of the ceaseless and massive purchase and sale of private property typical of capitalist society, could end alienation and allow true individual freedom. As a result, they sometimes downplayed the importance of struggles for a democratic republic preferring to concentrate on issues that directly pitted workers against capitalism. The broader organizations of subaltern workers, although they did not always grasp the full philosophical implications of their choices, tended to navigate between economic actions against their capitalist exploiters and struggles to end various forms of tyranny in society as a whole.
Let us examine examples of shifts between these two poles, as well as attempts at synthesis over the last 250 years.
1750s–1830s
Before the first international division of labor, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, both democrats and socialists directed their fire at owners of large, often inherited, landed estates, aristocracy and tyranny, the most powerful enemy of subaltern workers at the time, differing only in their view of the new situation which could remedy those ills. Observers distinguished the two schools of thought by how much they emphasized either democracy or common ownership. Thus, Abbé Jean Meslier, known for his communal leanings and considered a socialist, urged village inhabitants to hold all wealth in common but gave less attention to ending the monarchyFootnote 3. On the other hand, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, later identified as a promoter of republican democracy, dwelt far more extensively on the formation of the collective will of the people. When he turned to the future organization of the overall wealth of society, he thought it should be based on the general good and therefore inclined toward division of a large share of existing resources into small parcels, and allocation of an equal title to each person in full ownership. Readers often summarized his ideal polity as a community of petty and equal property holders, each having an equal voice in a nation small enough for each citizen to be heard. He urged the future inhabitants of this egalitarian republic to practice sobriety, avoid luxury, and focus on public affairs.Footnote 4
By the time of the French Revolution then, before extensive industrialization, “socialism” tended to designate sentiments in favor of common ownership of wealth and equal access to it by all members of society, combined with less explicit digressions about the need for a democratic republican government, whereas “radical democracy” was applied to arguments that the state (expressing the common will) should guarantee individual private property and intervene to prevent excessive profit by merchants, bankers, and industrialists; supply small independent producers with raw materials; transport and credit; and alleviate bouts of poverty.
Only in small circles or in brief episodes of revolution were differences such as the possibility of infringing on individual property rights in times of famine, fully debated. Did the sovereign (be it the King of Naples or the Republic of Venice), in exchange for his right to rule, have a duty to protect the subsistence of his subjects in case of hunger and malnutrition, and seize from the legitimate owners of granaries, a portion or all their possessions to feed the hungry masses? Various Physiocrats, notably Abbé Roubaud, opposed such intervention and urged the state to respect merchants’ property and allow the market to operate freely, an argument dubbed “revocation of the right to subsistence” by one student of the dispute.Footnote 5 On the other side, Ferdinando Galiani argued that the sovereign had the right and duty to seize grain from rich merchants for redistribution. His argument sprang from respect for custom and humanist philosophy. Although Galiani was more or less forgotten, his standpoint was briefly enshrined into law during the French Revolution, under pressure of radical democrats such as the Enragés, in article 21 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1793, which stated “Public relief is a sacred debt. Society owes maintenance to unfortunate citizens, either by procuring work for them or by providing the means of existence for those who are unable to labor.”Footnote 6 This constitutional right was later suspended and abrogated by the Thermidorians. But it continued to be defended between 1794 and the 1820s by movements such as the Conspiracy of the Equals of Gracchus Babeuf, the carbonari around leaders like Buonarroti, and English Jacobins like Thomas Spence. Several strains of early nineteenth-century French popular radicalism, usually organized in clubs for political discussion and action rather than trade unions or cooperatives, came out of this tradition.
1840s–1950s
By the 1840s, the growth of capital and instances of repression of labor by parliamentary or republican governments tended to clarify the difference between “socialists” or “communists” and “radical democrats.” The possibility that small, “hard-earned,” individually owned capital could grow into large-scale commercial and industrial wealth was now obvious. In Britain, the Chartist movement had been repressed and undermined by successive concessions gradually extending the right to vote. In France, the bloody assault on workers protests in June 1848 had been organized by the relatively democratic Second Republic. This was the context in which subaltern workers discussed and sometimes supported Karl Marx’s attempt at a synthesis of the radical democratic aspirations of the republicans and workers struggles against capitalism.Footnote 7 In times of alliance with radical democrats, Marx emphasized their common goals and actions (support for Irish self-determination, for the abolition of slavery in the United States, for women’s suffrage, for the electoral system of the Paris Commune). In times of competition, he stressed the need for collective ownership of the means of production. His followers and other socialists then liked to cite earlier protests around people like Thomas Müntzer and Thomas More (sixteenth century), the Levellers and Diggers of the English Revolution (seventeenth century), or utopian thinkers of the Enlightenment (eighteenth century) like Thomas Spence and Morelly.Footnote 8 The recurrence of proposals to pool all the wealth demonstrated that the socialist goal was not the dream of a brilliant theoretician, but had sprung forth repeatedly on the scene of history from the inner workings of society.
Between the 1880s and 1917, social-democratic and socialist parties, labor confederations and broad anarchist organizations were founded, grew and organized large strikes and protests mainly in the North Atlantic region on the basis of this synthesis of socialism and democracy. Of course, there were dissidents on the right and left: many subaltern workers organizations continued to follow liberals and radicals, while others sneered at efforts to obtain a broader suffrage and elect labor representatives and subscribed to the more anti-parliamentary strains of anarchism.
Two bifurcations occurred in the aftermath of the Russian revolution. The first consisted in moderate socialists rejecting the provisional coercive measures that the Soviet government took against the organized resistance of the Tsarist regime and Allies. In condemning these actions, critics merely reiterated the accusations that their precursors had levelled at the Paris Commune when it fought the onslaught of the armies of Versailles in 1871. This first schism did not overlap neatly the old radical democrat/socialist boundary, since some radical democrats recognized in the Russian events the inevitable emergence of counterrevolutionary violence and revolutionary self-defense that had characterized the French revolution, to which they remained attached, while, on the other hand, a few socialists with a strong utopian vision, could not reconcile these emergency measures with their idealistic outlook.
The second bifurcation was far newer and developed a bit later as the Soviet government began repressing all forms of dissent in society at large, the soviets and the party. As it became clear that this government, which still claimed the mantle of socialism before world public opinion, had in fact replaced the goal of creating a genuine egalitarian democracy with the consolidation of a new elite in the Soviet Union, many socialists protested and denounced the Communist Parties taking their orders from Moscow. Similar departures from democratic ideals took place after the Second World War in other seemingly anti-capitalist regime changes (Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, China, and others). One of the great moments of this bifurcation occurred when Nikita Khruschev denounced the crimes of Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. James P. Cannon, an American revolutionary socialist responded with the formula “socialism and democracy are twins.”Footnote 9 Because of its intrinsic ties to democracy, he wrote, socialism cannot coexist with Stalinist dictatorship, a one-party state or the cult of personality.
1960s–today
The most recent offshoot of the complicated coupling of socialism and democracy emerged when welfare states gave birth to new expectations about democratic control of public services and a new desire to extend collective assets. Initially, welfare states originated in the convergence of two sets of interests: on the one hand, big corporations’ need for a regular supply of educated and healthy workers as well as large infrastructures beyond the scope of a single enterprise; on the other, the aspiration of trade unions, socialist and labor parties and providers of assistance (to the poor, old, sick, and others) to find common grounds with democrats, to satisfy at least some demands of subaltern workers, short of a socialization of the means of production, a goal which they considered either not on the immediate agenda, very distant or even unattainable. The idea of democracy was central to the socialist defense of the welfare state: how could a person be an enlightened and active citizen and participate in a democracy if she or he was not free from ignorance, disease, fear of poverty in old age, and arbitrary orders at work, unable to affect his or her environment? This welfare state coalition yielded the creation and extension of institutions like free secular schools, pension systems, health care for all, public transportation, water, electricity and gas networks, social housing, workers right to organize and have a voice in their workplace. In the last eighty years, socialists and trade unionists were often closely associated with these advances, and socialism became strongly identified with defense and extension of the welfare state.
But these national systems had loopholes which became more visible as they served more people and matured; many residents (sometimes non-citizens) were either not entitled to their benefits, or unable to obtain them in practice. The internal administration of social security systems could be corrupt and lack transparency and democratic input from rank-and-file users. In their eighty years of existence, efforts to coordinate such systems in neighboring or kindred nations have remained quite embryonic, and proposals to extend their benefits internationally, marginal. In addition, in the countries where the greatest advances were initially achieved, with the introduction of elements of democracy in workplaces and other social and economic arenas (self-management, representation of beneficiaries, oversight of the environment), the neoliberal counteroffensive, including more unemployment, self-employment and nonpermanent jobs, undermined considerably their efficacy. One of the neoliberal privatization techniques was to deprive public services of adequate funding, so that their ability to deliver what they promised, declined to the point that users who could afford to change providers, began to seek private complements, or even switched entirely to private services.
But neoliberal privatizations often caused dysfunctions which kindled a nostalgic reaction. As more and more services and goods were turned into commodities, the memory of times when they were available to all free of charge, re-emerged and gave rise to a panel of alternative proposals: restore and extend public services, find more democratic and efficient forms of management, preserve the remaining “commons,” and extend them to new sectors. The recent revival of the concept of “commons” includes many variants. Some take digital commons, that is free and open-source software as the model of what can be created outside the market and state. Others point out that public ownership need not mean state ownership: municipalities, regions, and cooperatives can also be the framework for collective ownership. A few start from the democratic idea that people linked by an activity, should have the right to control that activity, and apply the principle to the wider interconnected activity of humans on the planet Earth. They conclude that humanity should decide what share of our common resource, the Earth, should be allocated to individual usage, collective endeavors or the renewal of the resource. There is an underlying link to the early radical democrats’ idea that the state being an emanation of the collective will of the people, should provide transport and credit and other public services. Such movements are led to challenge the appropriation of vast expanses of land, sea, ocean-floor, and space by private corporations, thereby linking the “commoners” and ecology movement. Thus, the construction and partial destruction of welfare states has irreversibly implicated substantial currents of the socialist, labor, and other social movements in the extension of democracy beyond its narrow, strictly political definition (suffrage, representative assemblies).
Finally, on the link between socialism and democracy, we should note that there are instances of social organization on a democratic basis outside the European or Western tradition, such as various forms of tribal democracy, republican-style city councils in the ancient and medieval Middle East and India, forms of equality between men and women in Chinese protest movements. Non-European socialist movements have sometimes tried to draw inspiration from these early experiences and traditions of their own region.
Our quick overview shows that the socialist and radical democratic movements have been intertwined in many ways for quite a long time, sometimes coming so close that they merged in common organizations, sometimes bifurcating when tensions over economism or authoritarian measures became too acute.
Bureaucracy
After two hundred years of trade unions, socialist and labor political parties, cooperatives and other associations for social change, and at least seventy years of major states describing themselves as “really existing socialism,” a balance sheet of socialism cannot avoid the issue of bureaucracy in social movements. On two occasions, recognition of the tendency to bureaucratization and proposals for combating it could be considered as major bifurcation points (1914–1921 for labor movements, 1934–1939 for “really existing socialism”). Another more recent issue should perhaps be included in this discussion, the relation of movements of subaltern workers to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Let us try to focus on some key points of analysis.
The specific forms of trade union and party bureaucracy have been studied for a long time. Although they share some aspects with the bureaucracies of bourgeois states (national as well as regional and local), of large business organizations (IBM, for example) as well as of religious, military and cultural institutions, they need to be examined separately. Some of the first systematic analyses looked at the successful German social-democratic party and trade unions in the 1890–1914 period. Rosa Luxemburg and Robert Michels, for instance, analyzed the rise of a “layer” of party, trade union, newspaper, and other mass organization officials who developed a stake in the perpetuation of routine operations in which they could be leaders, and feared mass confrontations that might jeopardize their position (however small and symbolic the privilege at stake).Footnote 10 Later, events like civil war, fascism, military occupation, authoritarian turns of the ruling classes, showed that these labor bureaucracies were also threatened by excessive passivity and unpreparedness for repression. Hence, the dual outlook of these layers, caught between fear of being bypassed by revolutionary advances, and fear of being suppressed by right-wing governments. A good example is German trade-unionist Theodor Leipart, the head of the ADGB, who was detained and subjected to torture by the Nazis after their raid on unions May 2, 1933, despite his conciliatory policy.
Having diagnosed the tendency to bureaucratization, an anti-bureaucratic wing of the movement began to propose measures designed to prevent the crystallization of such a layer: openness to mass action beyond party and union structures, local autonomy, regular internal congresses and elections, collegial leadership, free discussion, the possibility of tendencies and factions, democratically elected bodies to oversee the finances of the organization, quota systems, rank-and-file networks, separate youth organizations, systematic political education. Such recommendations came from inside and outside the social-democratic parties, strengthening anarchist critiques of parliamentary socialism, and giving rise to later currents such as councilism, revolutionary syndicalism and autonomism. The great bifurcation of 1914–1921 over support for the war and the Russian revolution included a revolt of the rank-and-file against elected officials and crusty trade union bureaucrats. Since then, awareness of the dangers of bureaucratization and proposals to minimize its effect, have remained a concern of many strains of the subaltern workers movement.
The second major aspect of the analysis of bureaucracies linked to the socialist movement emerged when Leon Trotsky and others transposed Luxemburg’s insights on mass trade unions to the layer that governed the Soviet Union (described diversely as experts, apparatus men, a caste, a class or by other terms).Footnote 11 This approach was subsequently extended to similar states established by popular insurrections and/or military links to the Soviet Union (Yugoslavia, China, Czechoslovakia, etc.), leading to debates about the label “Stalinism” or Stalinist-like evolutions. Governments of these noncapitalist states often sought the support of socialist, labor, pacifist, or third-worldist organizations in the capitalist world to bolster their ideology, system and diplomatic assets. At the same time, though, they faced popular discontent and protest against their power inside the country they ruled. Subaltern workers outside these states were therefore torn between appeals to defend governments of this “really existing socialism” against imperialist attacks, and their sympathy for the demands of subaltern workers in revolt against these “really existing socialist” governments. The most dramatic such bifurcations occurred around the Hungarian revolution of 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968, and the Solidarnosc movement in Poland in 1981. The events which led to the collapse of the USSR in 1991 showed that a majority of these contested bureaucratic elites tried to convert their various privileged managerial positions into shares of privatized public enterprises, resulting in an explosion of market relations, the full restoration of capitalism and integration into world trade. While subaltern workers’ attitude to such “really existing socialist states” and their elites has now become, to a large extent, a matter of history, the bifurcations that took place still remain open wounds, a source of disillusionment and intense topics of discussion.
Another field in which the analysis of social movement bureaucracy could be applied, concerns the « third pillar ». Marcel van der Linden’s book, Workers of the World. Essays Toward Global Labor History, contains several chapters on varieties of mutual aid societies and cooperatives which point to the dangers threatening these networks: corruption, fraud, theft, exclusion of certain categories considered unfit to be members, bureaucratic administration. The same applies to other forms of organization that are neither trade unions, political parties, cooperatives or mutual aid societies, but single-issue associations, political rights defense networks and other leagues that promote specific ideas that are part of the platform for the emancipation of subaltern workers. Their bureaucratic mode of operation has been the object of fewer studies by socialist scholars than trade unions and political parties.
Among them are NGOs of national and international scope. Historians of movements of the broad subaltern working class need more analysis of their rapid development in recent years. Examples are Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, and countless smaller “start-up” operations. With the contraction of various socialist parties and the decline of trade unions, many activists who would otherwise have been organizers of these movements, have instead become activists of NGOs. Young people get diplomas to become NGO volunteers as a career plan. NGOs usually have a founder who is often the main funder, fundraisers, and a staff of volunteers recruited and paid by the chief administrative officer. Many NGOs operate like a business around issues that labor and socialist movements have neglected (poverty, refugees, climate, women, human rights, discrimination, environmental certification). Some boast a limited form of democracy among their volunteers, but with the final decision usually taken by the founder-funder individual or a small coterie around him or her, and simply forwarded to the network as instructions.
Recent advances in methods of communication (Internet, social networks, digital advertising, network training) have transformed the conditions of collective decision-making and democratic functioning; they generally, increase the weight of the center and the funder, at the expense of intermediate cadre and organized militants. Their form of organization, specific fields of intervention, relations with government and banks, communication methods, and arguments against the ineffectiveness or irrelevance of democratic organization, need to be analyzed in greater detail by social historians. Their effect is powerful in NGOs but also in new populist parties.
Indeed, somewhere between the first pillar of the political party and the diversified officially “apolitical” or “non-partisan”« third pillar », we find populist electoral formations organized on the model of NGOs. They are national organizations that openly accept the goal of supporting candidates in elections, but explicitly reject formal democratic structures and a precise program. For instance, there is a debate today in France around the functioning of the left populist organization “La France Insoumise” (LFI). LFI has gone through phases of praising “gaseous” structures, interrupted by brief interludes when mild gestures in favor of internal democracy were taken. Overall, the functioning resembles that of an NGO and produces similar bureaucratic behavior.Footnote 12
Finally, in the broad constellation of groups identified with the socialist and labor movement that display a tendency toward bureaucratization, we cannot omit a balance sheet of small party-like socialist organizations that have become or are becoming sects. They usually have a guru (founder), a set of sacred texts, a centralized form of organization requiring extreme loyalty from their members. When I arrived in the United States in 1965, I was surprised to discover the continued existence of a Socialist Labor Party founded by Daniel De Leon in 1890, based on advocacy of industrial unionism. The group still read the writings of De Leon, had ballot status in some states, met regularly, and was impervious to world events such as the Russian revolution, rise of the African-American civil rights movement, or movement against the Vietnam war. More generally, some organizations of Maoist, Trotskyist, anarchist, or Stalinist origins have outlived the specific world-shaking events that justified their creation and become fossilized sect-like formations. Under certain circumstances, a kind of mini-bureaucracy developed in these groups. Military and underground circumstances sometimes facilitated the acceptance of these features. Their existence also must be taken into account in explaining the state of the labor and socialist movement today.
Umbrella organizations, components, and allies
The final issue discussed in this paper is one that has repeatedly confronted the movement of subaltern workers: on the one hand, how to develop alliances with other classes, and on the other hand, how to build internal structures that promote the unity of diverse components within its own ranks. The term “umbrella” structure (and variants such as federal or confederal arrangements, “big tent,” “common house”) can be applied to both types of regroupment.
Even if we adopt Marcel van der Linden’s approach of broadening the definition of the working class to include many nonwage earning sectors, there remain alongside these subaltern workers, other social classes including some that have an interest in struggling against infringements on their economic and social position due to capitalist development. The proportion of these independent social classes in the total population has varied with the ebbs and flows of the economy. But we should note that the tendency toward a disappearance of the petty-bourgeoisie as a result of proletarianization (of peasants and artisans for example) has been compensated by the creation of new relatively independent middle-class layers.
Socialists and labor movements have proposed alliances with sections of these petty property-owning classes for a long time. When a big percentage of the population of Western countries was composed of « peasants », that is independent small property-owning farmers, the slogan put forward was « for a worker-peasant alliance » or variations on the theme. Social-Democratic, Labor and, after 1920, Communist parties, campaigned in rural villages with a socialist program for farmers, to win their votes. As the number of these farmers declined in many countries, their weight in society and on the political scene, was filled by new independent owner-operators of relatively small means of production (such as trucks and other industrial equipment, professional offices and service platforms, franchise store managers), alongside the continuing and evolving professional middle classes of self-employed lawyers, medical doctors, accountants, consultants, cultural and media operators, and private and public managers with very high salaries and/or independent revenues that made them capable of becoming independent owner-operators, or being both independent professionals and partners in small businesses.
Over the years, socialist and labor movements were confronted with organizations and movements that encompassed both members of the class of subaltern workers and members of the middle class of small-property owners, the border between the two classes often fluctuating, overlapping and unclear. Such movements could contest the conditions of bank loans, taxation policies, exclusion of women from the right to vote or certain professions, too slow construction of public schools, failure to prohibit toxic substances, the drive toward war, or environmental encroachments. Inside these movements, struggles could take place over the formulation of demands, pitting pro-capitalist currents against more clearly working-class ones. For instance, some working-class women could feel closer to feminist leaders whose status was bourgeois and overall program pro-capitalist, than to trade-union leaders who ignored their needs. The same observation of cross-class agreement can be applied, in the more recent past, to movements of people concerned with environmental issues such as radioactive and chemical pollution. Giving more weight to the interests of subaltern workers within these multi-class movements was one of the tasks of the more enlightened wing of the socialist and labor movement, and posed the question of organizing the unity of various components of the class of subaltern workers in “umbrella” structures.
Attempts to build umbrella structures tending to unite all sectors of the subaltern working class have occurred at several moments in history. Following are three examples: (1) After the Civil War in the United States, from the late 1860s to the mid-1880s, the American Labor Union and the Knights of Labor often convened city-wide, regional or national assemblies where representatives of various trade unions, political parties, agrarian leagues, cooperatives convened to create a force for social change. In the end, a majority of the most-well-organized sector, the trade unions, split and formed the American Federation of Labor, with a program of self-reliance and avoidance of utopian dreamers. (2) The foundation and early evolution of the British Labour Party between 1900 and 1918 involved many negotiations between trade unions, socialist societies, cooperatives, women’s leagues, as well as the creation and place of territorial “constituency labor parties” within the national party. (3) The Brazilian Workers Party, founded in 1980, explicitly appealed to workers whether they were organized in unions and workplaces, the informal sector or elsewhere, in poor neighborhoods, or in rural leagues of poor and landless farmers. It opened its doors to social movements active on environmental, race, and gender issues. The Brazilian PT served as a model in 2005 for the foundation of a South Korean Democratic Party of Labor that allocated specific seats on its national committee to movements of workers, peasants, urban poor, small businessmen, women, students and progressive intellectuals.
The understanding of the working class as the broad class of all subaltern workers, whether employed full-time, part-time, intermittently, or never, has only rarely been formalized in a common program, a common struggle and a common umbrella federation. Even more broadly, history has shown that the dynamic of alliances with other non-strictly working-class forces can lead in many directions (popular fronts, broad united front type coalitions, electoral blocs). The decline of existing socialist and labor movements makes a discussion of these earlier attempts at umbrella structures of the first and second types more urgent.
In this contribution, we have tried to sketch the long view on three crucial issues for the future of emancipation rooted in existing social movements. On the question of the struggle against existing social evils and anticipation of a better future, we have pointed out or suggested the close links between movements for socialism and radical democracy on issues such as limitations on individual wealth, labor standards, human rights, and respect for the environment. Clarity on interdependence of these aspirations seems essential for the next stage. Turning to the internal workings of various movements of emancipation, we have suggested the permanent threat of bureaucratization and identified three arenas where countermeasures have been or could be made explicit: left parties, labor unions, and the new NGOs. Finally, on the manifold structure and close alliances of subaltern workers organizations, we briefly suggested the importance of pluralist and federal structures recognizing the diverse components of the broad working class, as well as of a strategy to reach out to movements of lower middle classes whose livelihood is not primarily wages but small property or its equivalent. On all three questions, a historical balance sheet of what has been tried and obtained will be essential to preparing new advances.
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