The Downside of Utopianism: Book Review of Victor Wallis’ “Socialist Practice”
Utopian thinking, even with the best of intentions, has done the left a great deal of harm, ever since Marx polemicized against it a century and a half ago. Too often the left has been guided by a wish list of grandiose schemes rather than a realistic reading of where things are at. The following is my review of Victor Wallis’ “Socialist Practice,” a book which tackles a number of knotty and polemical issues.
Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 252 pages, $59.99, paperback.
The
left has long debated whether socialism will be achieved in advanced capitalist
nations on “one big day,” à la storming of the Winter Palace, or through a
series of advances and small revolutionary breaks over time leading at some point to a systemic change. Leftists differ
along similar lines in their view of how socialism will come about at the
global level. After the triumph of the Russian Revolution and in the wake of
the disaster of the First World War, V. I. Lenin and the other Bolsheviks
assumed that revolution would instantly spread throughout Europe, the result
being world revolution. This fast-moving chain of events contrasted with Europe’s
transformation from feudalism to capitalism over a period of centuries during
which time the antifeudal cause faced numerous reverses and setbacks.
Similarly, in Socialist Practice, a collection of essays on
leftist theory and experiences, Victor Wallis adheres to the view that the
achievement of socialism is a drawn out, nonlinear process consisting of
episodes that in many cases have a mixed impact on the revolutionary cause.
Wallis analyzes several, ranging from the seven decades of Soviet rule to the
New Left of the 1960s. His main thesis is that over the last century pure
socialism has never existed and that on all fronts socialist movements and
governments have contained elements of the old—namely, capitalism. He notes
that up until 1917, Karl Marx and his followers never contemplated this
“coexistence and interpenetration of capitalism and socialism on a world scale.”
The coexistence, according to Wallis, not only persists between nations but
also within nations, consisting of different modes of thinking and variations
in the relations of production. Given the complexity and “extraordinary
difficulty of any genuinely revolutionary transformation,” one may assume that
the achievement of socialism will resemble the protracted transition from
feudalism to capitalism more than a war of maneuver—Antonio Gramsci’s
term to describe the Soviet revolution of 1917.[1]
The
centerpiece of Wallis’s analysis of the transition from capitalism to socialism
is the theory of dialectics according to Marx and Frederick Engels. Indeed,
Marxist dialectics lends itself to a recognition of “the richness and variety
of human experience” and contains elements that run counter to the linear view
of history devoid of ambiguities and complexities.[2] In the
first place, in Marx’s words, the new society “‘will be stamped with the
birth-marks of the old’” since the antithesis does not fall from the sky
but rather emerges from the thesis. Referring to dialectics, Wallis writes:
“Individuals who comprise the new leadership [of the revolutionary movement]
will inescapably embody, to varying degrees, perceived aspirations as well as
ways of dealing with people…that reflect pre-revolutionary habit.” Elsewhere, he
states that “material ambitions” derived from the culture of capitalism
pervades the entire society under socialism and not just the leadership. In the
second place, the antithesis itself is subject to internal contradictions and
is eventually transformed (the “negation of the negation”).[3]
In
Wallis’s critique of market socialism in his chapter on the topic, he points to
the need to recognize that the socialist road is bumpy and that many of its
features resemble the old system, which socialists are supposedly attempting to
liquidate. Wallis agrees with Bertell Ollman in opposing market socialism while
acknowledging that “post-revolutionary society will contain de facto market
elements.” This view fits in with Wallis’s overall vision of the transition to
socialism impregnated with contradictions and tension. Wallis concludes that
among Marxists who write on market socialism “the real debate is over different
ways of approaching and navigating a universally recognized conflict” as
opposed to what he considers to be the erroneous contention (the promarket
socialism view) that the “principles of ‘market’ and ‘socialism’ do not clash.”[4]
Wallis’s
interpretation of Marxist dialectics guides his analysis of Soviet rule. His
objective is to demonstrate “those ways in which the new society is both
generated and conditioned by the old.” Wallis points out that from the very outset, remnants
of the old system were ever present, tolerated, and even promoted not only in
the form of the New Economic Policy but also industry managers who Lenin
insisted be allowed to run enterprises. As a result, “draconian capitalist
methods” as well as aspects of Taylorism prevailed at the workplace. In the
process, workers’ self-management – a topic to which Wallis devotes a chapter in
order to demonstrate the system’s feasibility and viability throughout the
twentieth century – was sacrificed and even considered by Lenin “premature and
counterproductive.” In addition, technology “in its capitalist guise” created material
expectations that induced Soviet leaders and those of other socialist countries
to “modify their priorities” and increased “their willingness to give private
foreign capital a major role in their economies.” As eco-Marxists would be the
first to point out, the need to transcend the logic of “infinite growth”
inherent in capitalism has been made urgent as a result of environmental
imperatives. In the case of the USSR, according to Wallis, the contradictions
continued until the last years of Soviet rule with the liberalization strategy
referred to as glasnost.[5]
Wallis presents a “mixed” assessment of the Soviet
experience. He rejects the notion that “socialism would be better off now” had
1917 never occurred. Wallis maintains that the USSR as a “counterweight created
the space necessary for healthier revolutionary processes in other parts of the
world.” Most important, he argues that the downsides of Soviet rule, including the atrocities committed during
the Joseph Stalin period and widespread institutionalized corruption after his
death in 1953, were not defects of socialism but rather were attributable to
capitalist beachheads and influences within the Soviet economy and society.
This thesis is a far cry from that of some Maoist and Trotskyist parties, among
others, that posit that the USSR at some point ceased to be socialist. Wallis concludes that the “willingness
to look at the negative aspects of the Soviet regime” in the context of “the
larger process of transition” at the world level and to attribute those defects
to capitalism, not socialism, helps avoid the type of disillusionment brought
on by the collapse of the USSR.[6]
Wallis
applies his broad focus influenced by dialectics, with its emphasis on directionality
and long-term impacts, to his chapter “The US Left of the 1960s and its
Legacy.” In doing so, he sets out to refute the thesis that the
"radicalism of the 1960s had an impact which on balance constituted a
setback for the Left” and that it was a “movement of the privileged.” Wallis
notes that the political environment of the previous decade marked
by McCarthyism “set the parameters for subsequent Left activity.” In
countering those who belittle the New Left’s accomplishments, Wallis argues
that as a result of the “chilling setting within which to contemplate any form
of progressive activity,” members of the new generation of activists were “starting
largely from scratch.” Indeed, the Students for a Democratic Society must be
given credit for breaking with the anticommunist fervor of the previous decade by
flatly rejecting the insistence of its parent organization, the League for
Industrial Democracy, to explicitly disassociate itself from the Communist
Party.[7]
A
look at the facts substantiates Wallis’s statement that although the New Left
originated in elite universities, it “grew far broader over time.” In the first
place, in the latter part of the decade, Students for a Democratic Society
expanded to a large number of working-class colleges. Second, the debate within
the antiwar movement pitted the old left, and specifically the Socialist
Workers Party, which played a major role in organizing protests and which favored
a “single-issue approach,” against the New Left, which generally defended a
multi-issue approach including issues of gender and race. Finally, Wallis
points to the impact of the New Left on social movements, such as the Teamsters
for a Democratic Union, which he calls “an authentic outgrowth of the 1960s
Left.” Similarly, the New Left and the civil rights movement were intricately
connected: “It was precisely the experience of working closely with back civil
rights activists that energized and inspired some of the most creative leaders
of…[the] white-led Left and antiwar movements.”[8]
Wallis broaches, but fails to fully
explore, the issue of agency with regard to people’s power and the achievement of
authentic change. In arguing for the more radical, bottom-up policies that the
left in power should have pursued in the Soviet Union of Lenin and Salvador Allende's
Chile, Wallis acknowledges that it is unclear whether such a strategy was even
feasible. Thus, in his discussion of Lenin’s capitulations to the logic of
capitalism and other concessions (such as the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk), Wallis
recognizes the Soviet leader’s success in meeting the number one priority of
defeating the counterrevolution, but adds that “whether his approach was the
only one possible is something that we may never know.” He reaches a similar conclusion
regarding the uncertainty of agency in his discussion of Allende’s presidency.
Wallis expresses sympathy for the workplace occupations and rank-and-file
politization within the Armed Forces promoted by the Movement of the
Revolutionary Left and the left-wing of the Socialist Party, but adds that “the
available alternatives” to the Allende government’s more cautious approach
“will never be fully known.” Elsewhere, Wallis states that not so much theory
but practice will show revolutionary governments the way for developing a
“synthesis” between plant takeovers based on rank-and-file resistance to the
bourgeoisie and a political strategy exercised from above.[9]
Of course, the
availability of realistic options for radicalization depends on circumstances. Elsewhere,
I have pointed to missed opportunities in situations in which the left in power
has the upper hand (to deepen the process of change, promote bottom-up input in
decision-making, wage an all-out war on corruption, deliver blows to an
opposition engaged in illegal activity, and implement unpopular but necessary
economic measures). Conversely, in moments when the left in power is on the
defensive – due, in the case of Venezuela, to U.S.-imposed sanctions and
military threats – options are limited.[10] While it may be easy to determine those situations in
which the left is “on the defensive,” identifying propitious situations conducive to a
leftist offensive is more problematic. There is a second issue regarding how leftist governments act on
the basis of their reading of favorable and unfavorable factors. At what point have
contextual factors (such as military threats or economic warfare), which
Wallis correctly places at the center of his analysis, served as justifications
for excesses by leftists in power, errors they committed, or antidemocratic
behavior?
Wallis is correct in pointing out that no scientific method can
determine with precision when the moment is right to act decisively. In my
opinion, Wallis is on the right track in pointing to factors that favor a
bolder approach at the same time that he eschews sectarianism, not to say arrogance,
by acknowledging that there are no definitive blueprints nor guarantees for
success (some Bolshevik leaders in 1917 thought that Lenin’s plan to seize
power was premature and irresponsible). The left needs to guard against utopianism in the form of a wish list of
changes that the revolution will allegedly bring. Some suggest that dialectics
in its idealistic form encourages this tendency when the focus is on
extrapolating into the future rather than analyzing the present.[11]
Wallis avoids such wishful thinking in this fascinating study of leftist theory
and practice from Marx to the present.
[1] Victor
Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2020), 40–41.
[2] Wallis, Socialist Practice, 41, 56; Bertell Ollman, “The Eight Steps in Marx’s Dialectical Method,” in The
Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx, ed. Matt Vidal, Tony Smith, Tomás Rotta, and
Paul Prew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 98–99.
[3] Wallis, Socialist Practice, 17, 40, 87; Andrew
Cole, “The Nature of Dialectical Materialism in Hegel and Marx,” in Subject
Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism, ed. Russell Sbriglia
and Slavoj Žižek (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020), 86–88, 95.
[4] Wallis, Socialist Practice, 87–88.
[5] Wallis, Socialist Practice, 14, 43–44, 104.
[6] Wallis, Socialist Practice, 18, 47–48.
[7] Wallis, Socialist Practice, 140, 142–43, 145; Daniel
Geary, “The New Left and Liberalism Reconsidered: The Committee of
Correspondence and the Port Huron Statement,” in The Port Huron Statement:
Sources and Legacies of the New Left’s Founding Manifesto, ed. Richard
Flacks and Nelson Lichtenstein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2015), 83.
[8]
One study reported that Students for a Democratic Society grew to between 350
to 400 chapters “as the organization continued to expand from its initial base
at large state universities and Ivy League campuses to regional state colleges,
junior colleges, community colleges, and high schools.” Bruce Dancis, Resister:
A Story of Protest and Prison during the Vietnam War (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2014), 197. Indeed, many works on the New Left that focus on
the Students for a Democratic Society’s fatal national convention of the summer
of 1969 and two factions that played a key role at the event—those of the
Progressive Labor Party and the to-be Weather Underground—unwittingly present a
distorted view of the period. Simon Hall, Peace and Freedom: The Civil
Rights and Antiwar Movements in the 1960s (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 141–48; Wallis,
Socialist Practice, 144, 146, 165.
[9] Wallis, Socialist Practice, 105, 115, 117.
[10] Steve
Ellner, “Latin America’s Pink Tide Governments: Challenges, Breakthroughs, and
Setbacks,” in Latin America’s Pink Tide: Breakthroughs and Shortcomings,
ed. Ellner (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), 12–14. One example of a missed opportunity
under the government of Nicolás Maduro was in mid–2014 after the governing
United Socialist Party won municipal elections by a wide margin and then
defeated the four months of street protests known as the guarimba,
designed to achieve regime change.
[11] Louis Althusser,
for example, argued that the essence of Marxism could not be found in the
writings of the early Marx, which were heavily influenced by the idealism and
dialectics of G. W. F. Hegel, as opposed to the scientific method that guided
Marx’s subsequent works. Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Verso, 2005). Marxist philosopher
Robert Ware argues that Marx never viewed dialectics as a tool to predict the
future but rather as “ways of thinking for approaching phenomena rather
than laws or rules that determine phenomena.” Robert Ware, Marx on
Emancipation & Socialist Goals: Retrieving Marx for the Future (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 55.
Steve Ellner is a retired professor of the Universidad de Oriente in
Venezuela and currently an associate managing editor of Latin American
Perspectives. He is the editor of Latin America’s Pink Tide:
Breakthroughs and Shortcomings (2020) and Latin American Extractivism:
Dependency, Resource Nationalism and Resistance in Broad Perspective
(2021). He is a regular contributor to NACLA: Report on the Americas.
posted by Steve Ellner @ 10:05 AM
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