إظهار الرسائل ذات التسميات اليسار الأوروبي. إظهار كافة الرسائل
إظهار الرسائل ذات التسميات اليسار الأوروبي. إظهار كافة الرسائل
الأحد، 26 أغسطس 2012
Badiou: The Rebirth of History — Times of Riots and Uprisings
Alain Badiou’s introduction to his just-released manifesto on communism and the riots, uprisings, and occupations of this last year.
Introduction
What is going on? Of what are we the half-fascinated, half-devastated witnesses? The continuation, at all costs, of a weary world? A salutary crisis of that world, racked by its victorious expansion? The end of that world? The advent of a different world? What is happening to us in the early years of the century – something that would appear not to have any clear name in any accepted language?
Let us consult our masters: discreet bankers; media stars; hesitant representatives of major commissions ; spokesmen of the ‘ international community ‘ ; busy presidents; new philosophers; factory and estate owners; stock market men and boards of directors; chattering opposition politicos; urban and provincial notables; economists of growth; sociologists of citizenship; experts on all sorts of crises; prophets of the ‘clash of civilizations’; heads of the police, justice and ‘penitentiary’ systems; profit assessors; productivity calculators; the prim editorialists of serious newspapers; human resources directors; people who in their own view are of some account; people one would do well not to take for nobodies . What have they got to say about it, all these rulers, all these opinion-formers, all these leaders, all these thimble-rigging tyrants?
They all say that the world is changing at a dizzy¬ ing pace and that, if we are not to risk ruin or death (for them it comes to the same thing), we must adapt to this change or, in the world as it is, be but a mere shadow of ourselves. That we should energetically engage in incessant ‘modernization’ , accepting the inevitable costs without a murmur. Given the harsh competitive world that daily confronts us with challenges, we must climb the steep slopes of productivity, budget reduction, technological innovation, the good health of our banks, and job flexibility. All competition is sportive in its essence. In short, we must form part of the final breakaway alongside the champions of the moment (a German ace, a Thai outsider, a British veteran, a Chinese newcomer, not to mention the ever vigorous Yankee, and so on), and never crawl at the back of the pack. To that end everyone must pedal: modernize, reform, change! What politician on the campaign trail can dispense with proposing reform, change, novelty? The argument between government and opposition always takes the following form : What the others are saying isn’t real change. It’s a thinly resprayed conservatism. I represent real change! You’ve only to look at me to know it. I reform and modernize; new laws rain down every week – bravo! Let’s break with routine ! Out with the old !
So let us change.
But change what, in fact? If change is to be permanent, its direction, so it would seem, must be constant. All the measures dictated to us by the economic situation are to be implemented as a matter of urgency. This is so that the rich can continue to get rich while paying fewer taxes; so that the workforce of firms can be reduced with numerous redundancies and extensive restructuring; so that everything which is public can be privatized, and thereby ultimately contribute not to the public good (a particularly ‘anti-economic’ category) , but to the wealth of the rich and the maintenance (costly, alas) of the middle classes, who form the reserve army of the rich; so that schools, hospitals, housing, transport and communications – those five pillars of a satisfactory life for all – can initially be regionalized (that is a step forward), then exposed to competition (that is crucial) , and finally handed over to the market (that is decisive) , in order that the places and resources where and with which the rich and semi-rich are educated, treated, housed and transported cannot be confused with those where the poor and their like struggle to get by; so that workers of foreign origin, who have often lived and worked here for decades, can have their rights reduced to nothing, their children targeted, their statutory papers rescinded, and have to endure the furious campaigns of ‘civilization’ and ‘our values’ against them; so that, in particular, young girls can only go out on the streets with their heads uncovered, and the rest too, mindful as they must be of affirming their ‘secularity’ ; so that the mentally ill can be imprisoned for life; so that the countless social ‘privileges’ on which the lower classes are getting fat can be hunted down; so that bloody military expeditions can be mounted the world over, especially in Africa, to enforce respect for ‘human rights’ – i.e. the rights of the powerful to carve up states, to put in power (through a combination of violent occupation and phantom ‘ elections’) corrupt valets, who will hand over the totality of the country’s resources to the aforesaid powerful for nothing. Those who, for whatever reason, and even if they were serviceable for ‘modernization’ in the past, even If they were obliging valets, are suddenly opposed to the carve-up of their country, to its pillaging by the powerful and the ‘human rights’ that go with it, will be brought before the tribunals of modernization, and hanged if possible. Such is the invariant truth of ‘change’, the actuality of ‘reform’ , the concrete dimension of ‘modernization’. Such, for our masters, is the law of the world.
This short book aims to oppose to this view of things a rather different one, which can be summarized here in three points.
1. Under the interchangeable rubrics of ‘modernization’ , ‘reform,’ ‘democracy,’ ‘the West,’ ‘ the international community,’ ‘human rights,’ ‘secularism,’ ‘globalization’ and various others, we find nothing but an historical attempt at an unprecedented regression, intent upon creating a situation in which the development of globalized capitalism, and the action of its political servants, conforms to the norms of their birth: a dyed-in¬ the-wool liberalism of mid-nineteenth-century vintage, the unlimited power of a financial and imperial oligarchy, and a window-dressing of parliamentary government composed (as Marx put it) of ‘Capital’s executives’. To that end, every¬ thing which the existence of the organized forms of the workers’ movement, communism and genuine socialism had invented between 1860 and 1980, and imposed on a world scale, thereby putting liberal capitalism on the defensive, must be ruthlessly destroyed, and the value system of imperialism – the celebrated ‘values’ – recreated. Such is the sole content of the ‘modernization’ underway.
2. The present moment is in fact that of the first stirrings of a global popular uprising against this regression. As yet blind, naive, scattered and lacking a powerful concept or durable organization, it naturally resembles the first working-class insurrections of the nineteenth century. I there¬ fore propose to say that we find ourselves in a time if riots wherein a rebirth of History, as opposed to the pure and simple repetition of the worst, is signaled and takes shape. Our masters know this better than us: they are secretly trembling and building up their weaponry, in the form both of their judicial arsenal and the armed taskforces charged with planetary order. There is an urgent need to reconstruct or create our own.
3. Lest this moment flounder in glorious but defeated mass mobilizations, or in the interminable opportunism of ‘representative’ organizations, whether corrupt trade unions or parliamentary parties , the rebirth of History must also be a rebirth of the Idea. The sole Idea capable of challenging the corrupt, lifeless version of ‘democracy’ , which has become the banner of the legionaries of Capital, as well as the racial and national prophecies of a petty fascism given its opportunity locally by the crisis, is the idea of Communism, revisited and nourished by what the spirited diversity of these riots, however fragile, teaches us.
الأحد، 6 مايو 2012
Au peuple
Journal Officiel de la Commune de Paris, 20 mars 1871, p. 4-5
Citoyens.
Le peuple de Paris a secoué le joug qu’on essayait de lui imposer.
Calme, impassible dans sa force, il a attendu, sans crainte comme sans provocation, les fous éhontés qui voulaient toucher à la République.
Cette fois, nos frères de l’armée n’ont pas voulu porter la main sur l’arche sainte de nos libertés.
Merci à tous, et que Paris et la France jettent ensemble les bases d’une République acclamée avec toutes ses conséquences, le seul Gouvernement qui fermera pour toujours l’ère des invasions et des guerres civiles.
L’état de siège est levé.
Le peuple Paris (sic) est convoqué dans ses sections pour faire ses élections communales.
La sûreté de tous les citoyens est assurée par le concours de la garde nationale.
Hôtel-de-Ville, Paris, ce 19 mars 1871.
Le comité central de la garde nationale
الاثنين، 6 سبتمبر 2010
German Left Party discussion: Capitalism and the State
German Linke discussion: Capitalism and the State
September 2, 2010
by Michael Heinrich
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/heinrich020910.html
DIE LINKE (the Left Party) has initiated a debate on its
draft party program, which it wishes to officially adopt
in Autumn 2011. Neues Deutschland is joining this
debate with a series of articles. In the Neues
Deutschland article published on 9 August 2010, Michael
Heinrich tackles the issue of the relationship between
capital and the state and asks whether the "system
change" proclaimed in the draft program is meant
seriously. -- Ed.
In the last century, the development of leftist parties that
once wished to transcend capitalism was one big tragedy.
Either they increasingly moved away from their original
critique, like the Social Democratic parties, becoming
simply managers of the political apparatuses and endeavoring
to secure a frictionless accumulation of capital, or like
most Communist parties they retained their critique of
capitalism while committing themselves completely to the
defense of an authoritarian and extremely repressive model
of socialism, which could not be subject to even the most
rudimentary criticism. But those parties that held onto a
radical critique of capitalism as well as of "really
existing socialism" usually withered into political
irrelevance, if they ever managed to escape that state of
irrelevance to begin with.
Given this history, there are good reasons for the
skepticism about and detachment from left parties exhibited
these days by trade union and social movement activists.
So, it is anything but insignificant that in its draft
program DIE LINKE on the one hand rejects all authoritarian
socialisms while on the other hand clearly declaring: "we
struggle for a system change, because capitalism . . . is
based upon inequality, exploitation, expansion, and
competition" (page 3 -- all page references according to the
supplement to the 27-28 March 2010 issue of Neues
Deutschland).
Against Which Capitalism?
However, the rest of the program is not so unambiguous. The
last passage of the draft is only directed against
"unbridled capitalism" (18), while in between it is
primarily "financial market capitalism" (7) which comes up
for criticism. At the beginning of the section "Democratic
Socialism in the 21st Century," the program states that
"capitalism is not the end of history" (8), but shortly
after that it states that DIE LINKE seeks an economic system
in which various forms of property have their place, "state
and municipal, social and private, cooperative and so on"
(9).
But DIE LINKE does not have to strive for this mix of
property forms as a distant goal: it has already been found
in really existing capitalism for quite some time. And the
fundamental anti-capitalist orientation is outright
repudiated with this sentence: "the private pursuit of
profit can promote productivity and technological renewal,
as long as no firm is strong enough to dictate price and the
extent of supply" (10). Has the criticism of capitalism
formulated at the beginning of the draft program already
found its fulfillment in a tightening of anti-trust
legislation? The idea that the small capitalism of
productive competition will save us from the large
capitalism of unproductive monopolies has long been part of
the credo of liberalism and neoliberalism.
The same is the case with the fourth section under the
heading "Left Reform Projects": "social inequalities of
income and wealth are only justified if they are based upon
differences in performance or are necessary as an incentive
for the accomplishment of societal tasks" (12), which any
neoliberal would agree with from the bottom of his heart.
DIE LINKE probably wants to implement different criteria for
performance than neoliberal ones, but not much remains of
Marx's insight that wages and profits have little to do with
performance and much to do with the reproduction of the
wage-dependent class (also necessary for capital) on the one
hand and with the exploitation of precisely those wage-
laborers on the other hand.
So as to avoid any misunderstanding: the point is not any
doctrinal purity, but rather simply the question of what DIE
LINKE regards as the central object of criticism: capitalism
as an economic and social system or merely a few outgrowths
of this system. The criticism of "predatory capitalism" and
the banks' "unbridled pursuit of profit" already belongs to
the standard repertoire of conservative presidents in the
Federal Republic of Germany.
Maybe this vacillation is not just the result of political
indecisiveness, but rather of an analytical deficit. An
analysis of the systemic logic of capitalism remains
considerably underdeveloped in the entire draft program.
Capitalism appears to be primarily a problem of too great an
influence exerted by owners of capital and large
corporations.
Right at the beginning, the program emphasizes that DIE
LINKE does not wish to submit to the "wishes of the
economically powerful" (3); more than once the "extortionate
power of large corporations" (4) is pointed out, as well as
the "aggressive claims of owners of capital" (6). That
capitalism is based upon a systemic imperative, the
maximization of profit, is not so clearly stated. This
principle of profit maximization does not arise from the
greed of individual capitalists, but is rather imposed upon
them by competition: only those who participate in the
struggle for the highest profits have a sufficient
foundation for the investments necessary to remain in the
next round of competition at the national and international
level.
With Which State?
This personalized conception of capitalism is contrasted
with the state, which according to the draft program should
be the representative of all that is good and noble, but
which unfortunately isn't, due to the power of capitalists
and the reluctance of the ruling politicians. "The
possibility of democratic influence and participation
disappears to the extent that the power of the corporations
and finance moguls increases" (7), states the program under
the heading "The Erosion of Democracy."
One would naturally like to know in what Golden Age
democracy was less eroded: in the 1960s, before "financial
market capitalism" really took off and the extra-
parliamentary opposition protested against the German
Emergency Acts as well as the state's support of the Vietnam
War and the Shah regime in Iran? Or under the repressive
anti-Communism of the Adenauer era? The difficulties of
locating this Golden Age in which democracy was not yet
eroded suggests that the actual relationship between the
state and capital might look a bit different than the
picture sketched out in the draft program.
Apparently, the draft program imagines the power of
"corporations and finance moguls" as being inverse to the
power of the state: if the power of one side increases, the
power of the other side decreases. Consequentially, the
demand is raised to push back the power of corporations,
which is to be realized inter alia through the
nationalization of private banks (11) and structurally
decisive large enterprises (9). However, during the
financial crisis, the state-owned Landesbanken did not cut a
better figure than the private banks. In a few passages of
the program, it is mentioned that public property is not a
"guarantee" (10) for a different economic order, but it is
still assumed to be a precondition.
However, the program remains vague as to what measures have
to be introduced so that enterprises can start to conduct
economic activity differently. Using various inflections,
the program constantly stresses that the influence of
capitalists has to be pushed back and that of the public
hand extended. But when the issue is what to do with this
increased influence, the program only offers the same magic
formula of "democratic control." Everything should be
subject to democratic control: the European Central Bank,
energy companies, public services, and finally even the
regulation of markets and the media.
What should all that look like? Should the parliaments take
a vote on changes concerning the utility companies or of key
interest rates? Should the elected government exercise
influence on the personnel and content of the media (as the
conservative former minister-president of Hesse Roland Koch
did with regard to the public television channel ZDF)? One
gets the impression that, whenever it isn't so clear what
should be done, the catchphrase "democratic control" is
pulled out of a hat like the proverbial rabbit. If
"democratic control" is not to become merely an empty
phrase, one has to at least suggest who should exercise
control in what way and according to which criteria.
If an attempt were made to argue more concretely, it might
become clearer that the relationship between the state and
capital cannot be reduced to the influence of various groups
of people (capitalists upon the state, politicians upon the
economy). The state and capital exist in a structurally
rooted relationship of mutual dependency, which also exists
even without any personal exertion of influence. Capitalist
production in many respects has the state as its necessary
precondition: as a guarantor of property and adherence to
contracts, but also as an instance that furnishes those
material prerequisites that capital either cannot produce
itself or can do so only insufficiently, such as for example
various infrastructures, but also the educational system
that supplies properly educated forces of labor, a health
care system that makes damaged forces of labor once again
fit for valorization, etc.
The state for its part is dependent upon a functioning
accumulation of capital, since only then can sufficient tax
receipts be generated and social expenditures held in check.
Even without a direct exertion of influence by "corporations
and finance moguls," every government is therefore forced to
take into consideration the systemic imperatives of capital
valorization in one way or another. For that reason it is
often the case that leftist parties, once they assume
governmental power, continue the policies of their
predecessors in essential respects.
This is not to deny that there are quite different forms of
capitalism and different possibilities for political
planning. The fact that the state as "ideal total
capitalist" (Engels) has to provide the formal
organizational framework as well as those material
prerequisites of capital accumulation that capital itself
cannot provide does not at all mean that the best way of
accomplishing these tasks is obvious in every situation.
That in recent times the political personnel, up to and
including the German president, have started to warn against
unbridled capitalism and excessive power on the part of
banks underscores the fact that at the moment it is not at
all clear how much regulation is necessary or what weight
the banking sector should have in relation to industrial
capital. But these debates revolve around a recalibration
of the general political framework of capitalism and are in
no way the beginning of its end.
A Keynesian Wish List
If DIE LINKE enters into such debates, it should at least
render an account of their character and think about its own
goals: making an ailing capitalism once again fully
functional, or using this weakness in order to gain
concessions for the subaltern classes, which makes life
easier for them in the short term as well as improves the
conditions for future struggles.
The latter necessarily presupposes a willingness to engage
in fundamental conflicts. But in many passages the draft
program reads like a Keynesian wish list addressed to Santa
Claus: as if by means of sufficient regulation as well as a
nationalized financial sector (under "democratic control,"
of course) a capitalism can be created that reconciles all
contradictions. Whoever succumbs to this illusion will no
longer be able to perceive the differences in purpose behind
political intervention. And whoever does so will be sure to
misunderstand the significance of extra-parliamentary
movements: the draft program mentions that left politics has
to be supported by extra-parliamentary pressure from trade
unions and social movements (18), but these appear as merely
the auxiliary forces for parliamentary politics.
If the goal is really the "system change" announced at the
beginning of the draft program, then extra-parliamentary
movements critical of capitalism are not mere auxiliary
forces, but rather the main actors upon which a left party
is dependent, like it or not. That these movements hardly
play a role in the draft program, that the question of how a
movement for the desired system change can be permanently
mobilized and supported is not even posed, throws doubt upon
how seriously this system change is actually meant.
However, the draft program is supposed to be subject to
debate for a while longer.
[Michael Heinrich is editor of PROKLA, journal of critical
social science. Heinrich is also a collaborator on the
MEGA-edition (Marx-Engels- Gesamtausgabe). His Kritik der
politischen ??konomie. Eine Einf??hrung (Critique of
Political Economy: An Introduction) is now in its 8th
printing, and an English translation has been recently been
completed.]
September 2, 2010
by Michael Heinrich
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/heinrich020910.html
DIE LINKE (the Left Party) has initiated a debate on its
draft party program, which it wishes to officially adopt
in Autumn 2011. Neues Deutschland is joining this
debate with a series of articles. In the Neues
Deutschland article published on 9 August 2010, Michael
Heinrich tackles the issue of the relationship between
capital and the state and asks whether the "system
change" proclaimed in the draft program is meant
seriously. -- Ed.
In the last century, the development of leftist parties that
once wished to transcend capitalism was one big tragedy.
Either they increasingly moved away from their original
critique, like the Social Democratic parties, becoming
simply managers of the political apparatuses and endeavoring
to secure a frictionless accumulation of capital, or like
most Communist parties they retained their critique of
capitalism while committing themselves completely to the
defense of an authoritarian and extremely repressive model
of socialism, which could not be subject to even the most
rudimentary criticism. But those parties that held onto a
radical critique of capitalism as well as of "really
existing socialism" usually withered into political
irrelevance, if they ever managed to escape that state of
irrelevance to begin with.
Given this history, there are good reasons for the
skepticism about and detachment from left parties exhibited
these days by trade union and social movement activists.
So, it is anything but insignificant that in its draft
program DIE LINKE on the one hand rejects all authoritarian
socialisms while on the other hand clearly declaring: "we
struggle for a system change, because capitalism . . . is
based upon inequality, exploitation, expansion, and
competition" (page 3 -- all page references according to the
supplement to the 27-28 March 2010 issue of Neues
Deutschland).
Against Which Capitalism?
However, the rest of the program is not so unambiguous. The
last passage of the draft is only directed against
"unbridled capitalism" (18), while in between it is
primarily "financial market capitalism" (7) which comes up
for criticism. At the beginning of the section "Democratic
Socialism in the 21st Century," the program states that
"capitalism is not the end of history" (8), but shortly
after that it states that DIE LINKE seeks an economic system
in which various forms of property have their place, "state
and municipal, social and private, cooperative and so on"
(9).
But DIE LINKE does not have to strive for this mix of
property forms as a distant goal: it has already been found
in really existing capitalism for quite some time. And the
fundamental anti-capitalist orientation is outright
repudiated with this sentence: "the private pursuit of
profit can promote productivity and technological renewal,
as long as no firm is strong enough to dictate price and the
extent of supply" (10). Has the criticism of capitalism
formulated at the beginning of the draft program already
found its fulfillment in a tightening of anti-trust
legislation? The idea that the small capitalism of
productive competition will save us from the large
capitalism of unproductive monopolies has long been part of
the credo of liberalism and neoliberalism.
The same is the case with the fourth section under the
heading "Left Reform Projects": "social inequalities of
income and wealth are only justified if they are based upon
differences in performance or are necessary as an incentive
for the accomplishment of societal tasks" (12), which any
neoliberal would agree with from the bottom of his heart.
DIE LINKE probably wants to implement different criteria for
performance than neoliberal ones, but not much remains of
Marx's insight that wages and profits have little to do with
performance and much to do with the reproduction of the
wage-dependent class (also necessary for capital) on the one
hand and with the exploitation of precisely those wage-
laborers on the other hand.
So as to avoid any misunderstanding: the point is not any
doctrinal purity, but rather simply the question of what DIE
LINKE regards as the central object of criticism: capitalism
as an economic and social system or merely a few outgrowths
of this system. The criticism of "predatory capitalism" and
the banks' "unbridled pursuit of profit" already belongs to
the standard repertoire of conservative presidents in the
Federal Republic of Germany.
Maybe this vacillation is not just the result of political
indecisiveness, but rather of an analytical deficit. An
analysis of the systemic logic of capitalism remains
considerably underdeveloped in the entire draft program.
Capitalism appears to be primarily a problem of too great an
influence exerted by owners of capital and large
corporations.
Right at the beginning, the program emphasizes that DIE
LINKE does not wish to submit to the "wishes of the
economically powerful" (3); more than once the "extortionate
power of large corporations" (4) is pointed out, as well as
the "aggressive claims of owners of capital" (6). That
capitalism is based upon a systemic imperative, the
maximization of profit, is not so clearly stated. This
principle of profit maximization does not arise from the
greed of individual capitalists, but is rather imposed upon
them by competition: only those who participate in the
struggle for the highest profits have a sufficient
foundation for the investments necessary to remain in the
next round of competition at the national and international
level.
With Which State?
This personalized conception of capitalism is contrasted
with the state, which according to the draft program should
be the representative of all that is good and noble, but
which unfortunately isn't, due to the power of capitalists
and the reluctance of the ruling politicians. "The
possibility of democratic influence and participation
disappears to the extent that the power of the corporations
and finance moguls increases" (7), states the program under
the heading "The Erosion of Democracy."
One would naturally like to know in what Golden Age
democracy was less eroded: in the 1960s, before "financial
market capitalism" really took off and the extra-
parliamentary opposition protested against the German
Emergency Acts as well as the state's support of the Vietnam
War and the Shah regime in Iran? Or under the repressive
anti-Communism of the Adenauer era? The difficulties of
locating this Golden Age in which democracy was not yet
eroded suggests that the actual relationship between the
state and capital might look a bit different than the
picture sketched out in the draft program.
Apparently, the draft program imagines the power of
"corporations and finance moguls" as being inverse to the
power of the state: if the power of one side increases, the
power of the other side decreases. Consequentially, the
demand is raised to push back the power of corporations,
which is to be realized inter alia through the
nationalization of private banks (11) and structurally
decisive large enterprises (9). However, during the
financial crisis, the state-owned Landesbanken did not cut a
better figure than the private banks. In a few passages of
the program, it is mentioned that public property is not a
"guarantee" (10) for a different economic order, but it is
still assumed to be a precondition.
However, the program remains vague as to what measures have
to be introduced so that enterprises can start to conduct
economic activity differently. Using various inflections,
the program constantly stresses that the influence of
capitalists has to be pushed back and that of the public
hand extended. But when the issue is what to do with this
increased influence, the program only offers the same magic
formula of "democratic control." Everything should be
subject to democratic control: the European Central Bank,
energy companies, public services, and finally even the
regulation of markets and the media.
What should all that look like? Should the parliaments take
a vote on changes concerning the utility companies or of key
interest rates? Should the elected government exercise
influence on the personnel and content of the media (as the
conservative former minister-president of Hesse Roland Koch
did with regard to the public television channel ZDF)? One
gets the impression that, whenever it isn't so clear what
should be done, the catchphrase "democratic control" is
pulled out of a hat like the proverbial rabbit. If
"democratic control" is not to become merely an empty
phrase, one has to at least suggest who should exercise
control in what way and according to which criteria.
If an attempt were made to argue more concretely, it might
become clearer that the relationship between the state and
capital cannot be reduced to the influence of various groups
of people (capitalists upon the state, politicians upon the
economy). The state and capital exist in a structurally
rooted relationship of mutual dependency, which also exists
even without any personal exertion of influence. Capitalist
production in many respects has the state as its necessary
precondition: as a guarantor of property and adherence to
contracts, but also as an instance that furnishes those
material prerequisites that capital either cannot produce
itself or can do so only insufficiently, such as for example
various infrastructures, but also the educational system
that supplies properly educated forces of labor, a health
care system that makes damaged forces of labor once again
fit for valorization, etc.
The state for its part is dependent upon a functioning
accumulation of capital, since only then can sufficient tax
receipts be generated and social expenditures held in check.
Even without a direct exertion of influence by "corporations
and finance moguls," every government is therefore forced to
take into consideration the systemic imperatives of capital
valorization in one way or another. For that reason it is
often the case that leftist parties, once they assume
governmental power, continue the policies of their
predecessors in essential respects.
This is not to deny that there are quite different forms of
capitalism and different possibilities for political
planning. The fact that the state as "ideal total
capitalist" (Engels) has to provide the formal
organizational framework as well as those material
prerequisites of capital accumulation that capital itself
cannot provide does not at all mean that the best way of
accomplishing these tasks is obvious in every situation.
That in recent times the political personnel, up to and
including the German president, have started to warn against
unbridled capitalism and excessive power on the part of
banks underscores the fact that at the moment it is not at
all clear how much regulation is necessary or what weight
the banking sector should have in relation to industrial
capital. But these debates revolve around a recalibration
of the general political framework of capitalism and are in
no way the beginning of its end.
A Keynesian Wish List
If DIE LINKE enters into such debates, it should at least
render an account of their character and think about its own
goals: making an ailing capitalism once again fully
functional, or using this weakness in order to gain
concessions for the subaltern classes, which makes life
easier for them in the short term as well as improves the
conditions for future struggles.
The latter necessarily presupposes a willingness to engage
in fundamental conflicts. But in many passages the draft
program reads like a Keynesian wish list addressed to Santa
Claus: as if by means of sufficient regulation as well as a
nationalized financial sector (under "democratic control,"
of course) a capitalism can be created that reconciles all
contradictions. Whoever succumbs to this illusion will no
longer be able to perceive the differences in purpose behind
political intervention. And whoever does so will be sure to
misunderstand the significance of extra-parliamentary
movements: the draft program mentions that left politics has
to be supported by extra-parliamentary pressure from trade
unions and social movements (18), but these appear as merely
the auxiliary forces for parliamentary politics.
If the goal is really the "system change" announced at the
beginning of the draft program, then extra-parliamentary
movements critical of capitalism are not mere auxiliary
forces, but rather the main actors upon which a left party
is dependent, like it or not. That these movements hardly
play a role in the draft program, that the question of how a
movement for the desired system change can be permanently
mobilized and supported is not even posed, throws doubt upon
how seriously this system change is actually meant.
However, the draft program is supposed to be subject to
debate for a while longer.
[Michael Heinrich is editor of PROKLA, journal of critical
social science. Heinrich is also a collaborator on the
MEGA-edition (Marx-Engels- Gesamtausgabe). His Kritik der
politischen ??konomie. Eine Einf??hrung (Critique of
Political Economy: An Introduction) is now in its 8th
printing, and an English translation has been recently been
completed.]
السبت، 3 أبريل 2010
Europe: The Crisis Of The Left
By Roberto Savio Inter Press Service
[IPS news agency]
March 29, 2010
http://other-news.info/index.php?p=3335
ROME, Mar (IPS) The victory of the right in January's
elections in Chile has stirred reflections on the crisis of
the left. Of the 15 countries in Europe that had leftist
governments in 1992, only five do today, and of these three
-Portugal, Spain, and Greece-presently find themselves in
grave financial and social difficulty. For people under
fifty, it is hard to grasp how deep the roots of this crisis
go. The solution does not seem to be a quick one.
It should be remembered that since the end of the Second
World War and the creation of the UN, we have seen an
extraordinary process of political modernisation built on
constitutional foundations: social justice and democratic
participation. Economic expansion was accompanied by a major
process of reform, in particular agrarian, and the expansion
of labour rights and health and employment protections.
At the global level, the UN General Assembly adopted in the
1970s a declaration on the New International Economic Order
which postulated "global social justice" and recognised the
Third World's right to participate equitably in the world
economy. In this period, the values of human development
were the basis of political debate. A North-South dialogue
was inaugurated involving 22 heads of state, with a first
summit held in Paris and a second in Cancun in 1980,
attended by the newly-elected Ronald Reagan - a man
uninterested in international justice but very interested in
trade.
Reagan introduced the famous slogan, "Trade, not aid". And
with his allies, like British prime minister Margaret
Thatcher, he began to change the course of history. In the
1980s the World Trade Organisation was created outside of
the UN system, which was targeted by a campaign to
delegitimise it as a forum for international decision-
making.
Then came the replacement of the New Information Order and
the New Economic Order with the so-called Washington
Consensus, which imposed a single neoliberal orthodoxy as
the basis of international economic relations. At the same
time, Reagan and Thatcher undertook a focused assault on the
power of labour unions, beginning a liquidation of state
social services that continues to this day.
In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. The claim was made that what
had been defeated was not an enemy -the Soviet Union- but
rather the entire opposition to capitalism. Neoliberal
author Francis Fukuyama argued that the world had reached
"the end of history", because from that point on there would
only be capitalism and continuous growth, unrestrained by
noxious regulation.
After the death of communism, the death of ideology was
proclaimed. The new orthodoxy eliminated all differing
opinion. The market was exalted as the best regulator of the
economy, society, and culture.
In the face of this colossal lie, the left, in Europe
especially, sought to be as unobtrusive and ahistorical as
possible, remaking itself according to the styles and the
collective imagination of the moment. In general, it split
into two groups: "widows" and "virgins".
The widows of the left, except in ex-socialist countries,
withdrew from politics. The virgins, in contrast, began to
speak of the end of ideology and to espouse pragmatism. "You
have to be pragmatic," was the slogan of the 90s.
Many words were dropped from the political lexicon, which
did not help the virgins: social justice, solidarity,
transparency, participation, progressive imposition, etc.
But pragmatism has a major flaw: without a conceptual
framework, it becomes a mechanism that undertakes only that
which is possible, and therefore what is useful. Which means
it is not pragmatism but utilitarianism.
Politics then focuses its energies only in administrative
goals, without a larger social vision and without a defined
set of values. It is a left without an identity, locked into
a chronic polemic with the right over personal and
administrative questions.
At the same time as this transformation was taking place, a
more significant economic change was occurring. After the
abolition of banking regulation decreed by Bill Clinton in
1989 and during the neoliberal binge of the G.W. Bush
administration, there was an explosive creation of new
unprecedentedly high-risk financial instruments. The real
economy of goods and services became subservient to the
financial sector, which grew twenty times faster. The
relation between politics and economics underwent a drastic
change. Production ceased to be the primary economic
referent. And with finance completely globalised and
unregulated, the national arena and its laws and
institutions began to grow inconsistent.
In the current debate, the old terms have been captured to
use in a new Cold War. Republicans are attacking Barack
Obama as a socialist. Similarly, Italian premier Silvio
Berlusconi denounces the opposition as communists.
And the left?
The left finds itself without the terminology to identify
itself with the people. It can no longer speak of social
justice, solidarity, equality, or redistribution without
being accused of communist nostalgia. In Italy, the
situation is so extreme that the Labour Ministry is now
referred as the Ministry of Welfare, without a peep of
objection from the left, which doesn't want to appear too
leftist.
The list of concessions made by the left in the countries of
Europe would fill volumes. In the United States, after the
exceptional election of a black man as president in a
massive popular vote, we now see that Obama was accompanied
into office by the old economic team that was responsible
for the current crisis. This blocks any possibility for
reform of the bankrupt financial system, which has created
hundreds of millions of new poor and will probably suffer
another collapse in the not-so-distant future if reform is
not forthcoming.
Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz has said that the winners
when the Berlin Wall fell are the losers today as the other
wall (Wall Street) falls. How can a young European who has
not lived through this stretch of history grasp the paradox
Stiglitz points to and believe that a left without any
identity could be the road to a society different from that
of today? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)
[Roberto Savio is founder and president emeritus of the
Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency.]
[IPS news agency]
March 29, 2010
http://other-news.info/index.php?p=3335
ROME, Mar (IPS) The victory of the right in January's
elections in Chile has stirred reflections on the crisis of
the left. Of the 15 countries in Europe that had leftist
governments in 1992, only five do today, and of these three
-Portugal, Spain, and Greece-presently find themselves in
grave financial and social difficulty. For people under
fifty, it is hard to grasp how deep the roots of this crisis
go. The solution does not seem to be a quick one.
It should be remembered that since the end of the Second
World War and the creation of the UN, we have seen an
extraordinary process of political modernisation built on
constitutional foundations: social justice and democratic
participation. Economic expansion was accompanied by a major
process of reform, in particular agrarian, and the expansion
of labour rights and health and employment protections.
At the global level, the UN General Assembly adopted in the
1970s a declaration on the New International Economic Order
which postulated "global social justice" and recognised the
Third World's right to participate equitably in the world
economy. In this period, the values of human development
were the basis of political debate. A North-South dialogue
was inaugurated involving 22 heads of state, with a first
summit held in Paris and a second in Cancun in 1980,
attended by the newly-elected Ronald Reagan - a man
uninterested in international justice but very interested in
trade.
Reagan introduced the famous slogan, "Trade, not aid". And
with his allies, like British prime minister Margaret
Thatcher, he began to change the course of history. In the
1980s the World Trade Organisation was created outside of
the UN system, which was targeted by a campaign to
delegitimise it as a forum for international decision-
making.
Then came the replacement of the New Information Order and
the New Economic Order with the so-called Washington
Consensus, which imposed a single neoliberal orthodoxy as
the basis of international economic relations. At the same
time, Reagan and Thatcher undertook a focused assault on the
power of labour unions, beginning a liquidation of state
social services that continues to this day.
In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. The claim was made that what
had been defeated was not an enemy -the Soviet Union- but
rather the entire opposition to capitalism. Neoliberal
author Francis Fukuyama argued that the world had reached
"the end of history", because from that point on there would
only be capitalism and continuous growth, unrestrained by
noxious regulation.
After the death of communism, the death of ideology was
proclaimed. The new orthodoxy eliminated all differing
opinion. The market was exalted as the best regulator of the
economy, society, and culture.
In the face of this colossal lie, the left, in Europe
especially, sought to be as unobtrusive and ahistorical as
possible, remaking itself according to the styles and the
collective imagination of the moment. In general, it split
into two groups: "widows" and "virgins".
The widows of the left, except in ex-socialist countries,
withdrew from politics. The virgins, in contrast, began to
speak of the end of ideology and to espouse pragmatism. "You
have to be pragmatic," was the slogan of the 90s.
Many words were dropped from the political lexicon, which
did not help the virgins: social justice, solidarity,
transparency, participation, progressive imposition, etc.
But pragmatism has a major flaw: without a conceptual
framework, it becomes a mechanism that undertakes only that
which is possible, and therefore what is useful. Which means
it is not pragmatism but utilitarianism.
Politics then focuses its energies only in administrative
goals, without a larger social vision and without a defined
set of values. It is a left without an identity, locked into
a chronic polemic with the right over personal and
administrative questions.
At the same time as this transformation was taking place, a
more significant economic change was occurring. After the
abolition of banking regulation decreed by Bill Clinton in
1989 and during the neoliberal binge of the G.W. Bush
administration, there was an explosive creation of new
unprecedentedly high-risk financial instruments. The real
economy of goods and services became subservient to the
financial sector, which grew twenty times faster. The
relation between politics and economics underwent a drastic
change. Production ceased to be the primary economic
referent. And with finance completely globalised and
unregulated, the national arena and its laws and
institutions began to grow inconsistent.
In the current debate, the old terms have been captured to
use in a new Cold War. Republicans are attacking Barack
Obama as a socialist. Similarly, Italian premier Silvio
Berlusconi denounces the opposition as communists.
And the left?
The left finds itself without the terminology to identify
itself with the people. It can no longer speak of social
justice, solidarity, equality, or redistribution without
being accused of communist nostalgia. In Italy, the
situation is so extreme that the Labour Ministry is now
referred as the Ministry of Welfare, without a peep of
objection from the left, which doesn't want to appear too
leftist.
The list of concessions made by the left in the countries of
Europe would fill volumes. In the United States, after the
exceptional election of a black man as president in a
massive popular vote, we now see that Obama was accompanied
into office by the old economic team that was responsible
for the current crisis. This blocks any possibility for
reform of the bankrupt financial system, which has created
hundreds of millions of new poor and will probably suffer
another collapse in the not-so-distant future if reform is
not forthcoming.
Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz has said that the winners
when the Berlin Wall fell are the losers today as the other
wall (Wall Street) falls. How can a young European who has
not lived through this stretch of history grasp the paradox
Stiglitz points to and believe that a left without any
identity could be the road to a society different from that
of today? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)
[Roberto Savio is founder and president emeritus of the
Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency.]
السبت، 20 مارس 2010
The Euro in Crisis
GUY SORMAN
The Euro in Crisis
In Greece and elsewhere, statism proves riskier than free markets.
18 March 2010
The financial crisis of 2008, still far from over, has done severe damage to the reputation of the free market. The crisis, we are assured, was caused by the withdrawal of the state and an excess of deregulation. To get out of it will thus require a massive return to public spending and intervention, which is in fact what we see happening all over Europe and in the United States. However, what we might call the Greek affair should make us question the statist solution. We ought to consider the possibility that public management could prove even more dangerous than private—that state regulation is no less chancy than deregulation.
The duplicity and corruption of Greek public accounting was more than an error of bookkeeping. The concealment of the country’s real budget deficit necessarily involved a gigantic network of complicity that included the whole political class, the state bureaucracy, and the banks. This network was not confined to Greece: it included Greece’s European partners, Europe’s political leaders, the governors of the Eurozone, the directors of the European Central Bank, and the European Commission. It’s hard to believe that the European Commission’s Directorate General for Economic and Financial Affairs was ignorant of what was really happening in Greece; and it will come as a surprise to some but not others that Eurostat, the statistical institute of the European Commission, has for years been publishing deliberately false numbers that make the phony accounting of the ratings agencies implicated in the 2008 financial crisis pale in comparison.
What was the motive for all this deception? Obviously, to give credibility to the euro, a common currency supposed to rival the American dollar. Recall that the theoretical virtue of the euro is to bring down interest rates in Europe: the more solid the money, the lower the rates, which encourages economic development (or, in the case of Spain and Portugal, real-estate speculation). It was therefore much to Europe’s advantage to cover for Greece and protect the euro.
What’s telling is that the people who brought the hoax to light were neither the Greek nor the European authorities but private speculators. The Greek state, to its great dismay, suddenly discovered that it could no longer sell treasury bonds on financial markets at the same rate as the Germans did. The open market had decided that euros owned by Greeks were not the same as euros owned by Germans. Should we blame these private actors for exposing the truth? On the contrary: it was their professional duty to generate profits for their clients, often for their retirement accounts. The public actors, for their part, were duty-bound in principle to manage the euro through predictable and transparent rules. It is therefore inappropriate for French president Nicolas Sarkozy and Greek prime minister George Papandreou to accuse private speculators of “attacking” the euro. If the euro—at least in Greek hands—had been above suspicion, it would not have been attacked.
Beyond the Greek affair, moreover, it’s suddenly evident that the Eurozone as a whole suffers from awful public management. Not a single government in the Eurozone (Germany remaining the most virtuous, to be sure) respects the two requirements that the euro theoretically imposes on states using it: a public deficit that’s less than 3 percent of GDP and a public debt that’s less than 60 percent of the same. After Greece, the states with the largest debts are Ireland, Spain, and Italy, followed by a second group that includes France and Portugal.
How did the Eurozone become so badly managed and, in the end, so unpredictable? Adverse local traditions—the spendthrift state in France, the lying state in Greece—endured, and a Keynesian catastrophe compounded them. In the name of crisis management, Keynesian ideology led to a sort of renationalization of the European economy. Perhaps the return of statism helped prevent a deeper depression; we’ll never know for sure, because the Great Crisis never happened. But what has been proven, at least to a high degree of probability, is that the renewed energies of statism have left behind a fragile euro and unmanageable public debt. The United States should take no comfort in the euro’s problems, by the way. The leading credit-ratings agencies have just warned that they may downgrade American debt—unsurprisingly, since all Western countries that follow the Keynesian road flirt with bankruptcy. We are all Greeks now.
Economics can be a cruel science because it offers a choice between imperfect solutions. On the one hand, markets are unpredictable—and vulnerable to speculative crises and private failures—but they lead, on the whole, to general development, as history has amply demonstrated. On the other hand, public intervention offers short-term security but generates risks more serious than those of market uncertainty—namely public debt, inflation, and stagnation. The usual choice in economics is not between good and evil but between more evil and less. The path is narrow but known.
Guy Sorman, a City Journal contributing editor, is the author of numerous books, including Economics Does Not Lie.
The Euro in Crisis
In Greece and elsewhere, statism proves riskier than free markets.
18 March 2010
The financial crisis of 2008, still far from over, has done severe damage to the reputation of the free market. The crisis, we are assured, was caused by the withdrawal of the state and an excess of deregulation. To get out of it will thus require a massive return to public spending and intervention, which is in fact what we see happening all over Europe and in the United States. However, what we might call the Greek affair should make us question the statist solution. We ought to consider the possibility that public management could prove even more dangerous than private—that state regulation is no less chancy than deregulation.
The duplicity and corruption of Greek public accounting was more than an error of bookkeeping. The concealment of the country’s real budget deficit necessarily involved a gigantic network of complicity that included the whole political class, the state bureaucracy, and the banks. This network was not confined to Greece: it included Greece’s European partners, Europe’s political leaders, the governors of the Eurozone, the directors of the European Central Bank, and the European Commission. It’s hard to believe that the European Commission’s Directorate General for Economic and Financial Affairs was ignorant of what was really happening in Greece; and it will come as a surprise to some but not others that Eurostat, the statistical institute of the European Commission, has for years been publishing deliberately false numbers that make the phony accounting of the ratings agencies implicated in the 2008 financial crisis pale in comparison.
What was the motive for all this deception? Obviously, to give credibility to the euro, a common currency supposed to rival the American dollar. Recall that the theoretical virtue of the euro is to bring down interest rates in Europe: the more solid the money, the lower the rates, which encourages economic development (or, in the case of Spain and Portugal, real-estate speculation). It was therefore much to Europe’s advantage to cover for Greece and protect the euro.
What’s telling is that the people who brought the hoax to light were neither the Greek nor the European authorities but private speculators. The Greek state, to its great dismay, suddenly discovered that it could no longer sell treasury bonds on financial markets at the same rate as the Germans did. The open market had decided that euros owned by Greeks were not the same as euros owned by Germans. Should we blame these private actors for exposing the truth? On the contrary: it was their professional duty to generate profits for their clients, often for their retirement accounts. The public actors, for their part, were duty-bound in principle to manage the euro through predictable and transparent rules. It is therefore inappropriate for French president Nicolas Sarkozy and Greek prime minister George Papandreou to accuse private speculators of “attacking” the euro. If the euro—at least in Greek hands—had been above suspicion, it would not have been attacked.
Beyond the Greek affair, moreover, it’s suddenly evident that the Eurozone as a whole suffers from awful public management. Not a single government in the Eurozone (Germany remaining the most virtuous, to be sure) respects the two requirements that the euro theoretically imposes on states using it: a public deficit that’s less than 3 percent of GDP and a public debt that’s less than 60 percent of the same. After Greece, the states with the largest debts are Ireland, Spain, and Italy, followed by a second group that includes France and Portugal.
How did the Eurozone become so badly managed and, in the end, so unpredictable? Adverse local traditions—the spendthrift state in France, the lying state in Greece—endured, and a Keynesian catastrophe compounded them. In the name of crisis management, Keynesian ideology led to a sort of renationalization of the European economy. Perhaps the return of statism helped prevent a deeper depression; we’ll never know for sure, because the Great Crisis never happened. But what has been proven, at least to a high degree of probability, is that the renewed energies of statism have left behind a fragile euro and unmanageable public debt. The United States should take no comfort in the euro’s problems, by the way. The leading credit-ratings agencies have just warned that they may downgrade American debt—unsurprisingly, since all Western countries that follow the Keynesian road flirt with bankruptcy. We are all Greeks now.
Economics can be a cruel science because it offers a choice between imperfect solutions. On the one hand, markets are unpredictable—and vulnerable to speculative crises and private failures—but they lead, on the whole, to general development, as history has amply demonstrated. On the other hand, public intervention offers short-term security but generates risks more serious than those of market uncertainty—namely public debt, inflation, and stagnation. The usual choice in economics is not between good and evil but between more evil and less. The path is narrow but known.
Guy Sorman, a City Journal contributing editor, is the author of numerous books, including Economics Does Not Lie.
1919: Betrayal and the Birth of Modern Liberalism
FRED SIEGEL
1919: Betrayal and the Birth of Modern Liberalism
Disillusionment with Woodrow Wilson changed the American Left forever.
Today’s state-oriented liberalism, we are often told, was the inevitable extension of the pre–World War I tradition of progressivism. The progressives, led by President Woodrow Wilson, placed their faith in reason and the better nature of the American people. Expanded government would serve as an engine of popular goodwill to soften the harsh rigors of industrial capitalism. Describing the condition of his fellow intellectuals prior to World War I, Lewis Mumford exclaimed that “there was scarcely one who did not assume that mankind either was permanently good or might sooner or later reach such a state of universal beatitude.” After the unfortunate Republican interregnum of the 1920s, so the story goes, this progressivism, faced with the Great Depression, matured into the full-blown liberalism of the New Deal.
But a central strand of modern liberalism was born of a sense of betrayal, of a rejection of progressivism, of a shift in sensibility so profound that it still resonates today. More precisely, the cultural tone of modern liberalism was, in significant measure, set by a political love affair gone wrong between Wilson and a liberal Left unable to grapple with the realities of Prussian power. Initially embraced by many leftists as a thaumaturgical leader of near-messianic promise, Wilson came to be seen—in the wake of a cataclysmic war, a failed peace, repression at home, revolution abroad, and a country wracked by a “Red Scare”—as a Judas. His numinous rhetoric, it was concluded, was mere mummery.
One strand of progressives grew contemptuous not only of Wilson but of American society. For the once-ardent progressive Frederick Howe, formerly Wilson’s Commissioner of Immigration, the prewar promise of a benign state built on reasoned reform had turned to ashes. “I hated,” he wrote, “the new state that had arisen” from the war. “I hated its brutalities, its ignorance, its unpatriotic patriotism, that made profit from our sacrifices and used it to suppress criticism of its acts. . . . I wanted to protest against the destruction of my government, my democracy, my America.”
Making a decisive break with Wilson and their optimism about America, the disenchanted progressives renamed themselves “liberals.” The progressives had been inspired by a faith in democratic reforms as a salve for the wounds of both industrial civilization and power politics; the new liberals saw the American democratic ethos as a danger to freedom both at home and abroad.
Wilson, a devout Presbyterian and former college professor, was the first and probably the only president to have studied socialism systematically. In 1887, as a young man, he responded to the growth of vast industrial monopolies that threatened individual freedom by arguing that “in fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals.” In the 1912 presidential race, he said that “when you do socialism justice, it is hardly different from the heart of Christianity itself.” Four years later, he brushed aside intense opposition to appoint two pro-labor-union justices to the Supreme Court and backed railroad workers in their fight for an eight-hour day. The president imposed a surtax on the wealthy and won the support of such prominent socialists as Upton Sinclair and Helen Keller.
For many on the left, Wilson’s 1916 campaign slogan, “He kept us out of war,” opened the way for the emergence of a more vibrant American culture. The war in Europe seemed far away, and progressives were for the moment imbued with an impregnable optimism. The administration’s critique of European power politics and talk of the need for international law gave pacifist Jane Addams “unlimited faith in the president.” When Meyer London, the antiwar socialist congressman from New York’s Lower East Side, and Socialist Party leader Morris Hilquit visited the White House to talk about the prospects for peace in Europe, they came away concluding that Wilson’s “sympathies are entirely with us.” Similarly, as Thomas Knock recounts in his book To End All Wars, after visiting the White House, the leaders of the American Union Against Militarism felt that “the President had taken us into his bosom.” Wilson, they noted, “always referred to the Union Against Militarism as though he were a member of it” and talked about the need to create “a family of nations.”
The courtship between Wilson and the leftists was nurtured by the hard fought 1916 presidential election. Wilson faced a Republican Party that had recovered from a 1912 split between Teddy Roosevelt’s breakaway Bull Moose progressives and anti-reform regulars to coalesce around Supreme Court Justice Charles Evan Hughes. As war raged in Europe, the incumbent narrowly won by bringing sizable numbers of Bull Moosers (who admired Germany’s proto-welfare state) and Eugene Debs’s Socialists into his “peace camp.”
Even after the U.S. entered the war in April 1917, pushed by Germany’s declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare and the public revelation of the Kaiser’s plans for an alliance with Mexico to reconquer the Southwest, Wilson maintained his strong ties with the largely antiwar Left. The very speech in which he asked for a congressional declaration of war also welcomed the Russian revolution that had overthrown the czar and put the socialist Alexander Kerensky (temporarily) in power. Wilson effusively, if inaccurately, described the revolution as the fulfillment of the Russian people’s long struggle for democracy, and Secretary of State Robert Lansing declared that it “had removed the one objection to affirming that the European War was a war between Democracy and Absolutism.” Some progressives even backed America’s entry. The progressive animus toward corrupt and overmighty party bosses and autocratic monarchists was “readily transferred to an overbearing Kaiser and a hegemonic war machine,” notes historian Morton Keller.
Wilson insisted on referring to the United States not as an ally of England and France but as an “associated power,” and he made a point of keeping U.S. forces strictly under American command, rankling the British and French, whom he regarded as imperialists. Eight months later, shortly after Lenin had taken power in Russia, Wilson expressed ambivalence about Bolshevism: “My heart is with them, but my mind has a contempt for them.” Yet Wilson’s “Fourteen Points, his message of good luck to the ‘republic of labor unions’ in Russia . . . his warning to the Allied powers that their treatment of Bolshevik Russia would be the ‘acid test’ of their ‘good will . . . intelligence and unselfish sympathy’: these moves were immensely impressive to us,” explained magazine editor Max Eastman, speaking for many leftists and progressives. Indeed, when Russian War Commissar Leon Trotsky coined the now famous concept of the “fellow traveler,” he was referring to Wilson. Trotsky sensed that the American president shared the Bolsheviks’ hatred of European imperialism, and he thought that Soviet Russia and a reformed America would travel on parallel tracks into a brighter future.
While Wilson increasingly spoke of international comity, relations between ethnic groups within the United States were breaking down. The Kaiser’s aggression in Eastern Europe prompted pitched battles between Germans and Slavs in the streets of Chicago. At the same time, nearly half a million Germans in America returned home to fight for the fatherland. Charles John Hexamer, president of the National German-American Alliance, financed in part by the German government, insisted that Germans needed to maintain their separate identity and not “descend to the level of an inferior culture.” Germans even began attacking that inferior culture. The most important instance of German domestic sabotage was the spectacular explosion on Black Tom Island in the summer of 1916, which shook a sizable swath of New York City and New Jersey. The man-made peninsula in New York Harbor was a key storage and shipping point for munitions sold to the British and French. The bombing sank the peninsula into the sea, killed seven, and damaged the Statue of Liberty. Wilson denounced Germany’s supporters in America: “Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out.”
The government responded with repression, as journalist Ann Hagedorn chronicles in Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America. Under the Sedition Act of 1918, people were sentenced to 10 years in prison for saying that they preferred the Kaiser to Wilson; others were jailed for mocking salesmen of Liberty Bonds, which supported the war effort. Most famously, socialist leader Debs was jailed for criticizing conscription.
Wilson placed George Creel, a journalist, socialist, and strong supporter of child labor laws and women’s suffrage, in charge of ensuring home-front morale through the Committee for Public Information. But the Committee, which Creel described as “the world’s greatest adventure in advertising,” wildly overshot its mark, encouraging the banning of everything German, from Beethoven to sauerkraut to teaching the German language. The Justice Department and the attorney general, Thomas Gregory, encouraged local vigilantism against Germans, giving the American Protective League, a quarter-of-a-million-strong nativist organization, semi-official status to spy on those suspected of disloyalty. The League went out of its way to break up labor strikes as well, while branding its critics Reds.
Responding to the League’s excesses, Wilson declared that he’d “rather the blamed place should be blown up than persecute innocent people.” But in the next breath he said, “Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way.” Despite his misgivings, Wilson deferred to Gregory’s judgment and refrained from taking action against extremists. Only after the armistice ended the war in November 1918 did Wilson, heeding the advice of incoming attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer, move to end government cooperation with the League. But by now, the disparity between Wilson’s call for extending liberty abroad and the suppression of liberty at home had become a running sore for disenchanted progressives.
The armistice largely ended the fighting in Europe, but it opened a new chapter in hostilities at home: the Red Scare. Back in March, the Bolsheviks’ effectively unconditional surrender to the Germans at Brest-Litovsk had created a cat’s cradle of anticommunist fear intertwined with hostility to the Huns. Germany got control of the Baltic states, Poland, Belarus, and the Ukraine, with their attendant coal and oil resources—freeing the Kaiser’s army to focus on the Western front, to deadly effect. Lenin’s return to Russia in April 1917 by way of a sealed railroad car supplied by Berlin was now seen as proof, and not only by conspiratorialists, that the Bolshevik leader was a German agent.
Progressives and leftists, counseled by Raymond Robbins, who had worked for Wilson in 1912 and served as an unofficial ambassador to the Bolsheviks, adopted a counter-conspiracy ethos that persists even today. Smitten by Bolshevism, Robbins wrote to Lenin that “it has been my eager desire . . . to be of some use in interpreting this new democracy to the people of America.” Robbins also mistakenly blamed the U.S. for forcing Lenin to agree to Germany’s harsh terms at Brest-Litovsk. Over the next several years, explains historian Peter Filene, Robbins’s efforts helped shape the views of many American progressives. They became enraged when Wilson gave in to pressure from France and England, both suffering enormous casualties on the western front, and provided half-hearted American military support to a campaign that tried to force the Bolsheviks back into the war. Filene points out that for progressives, the “betrayal” of which most Americans accused the Bolsheviks was actually an American perfidy.
Here too, Wilson, juggling principle and practicality, proved strikingly inconstant. In the words of German scholar George Schild, “the Wilson who agreed to the Allied intervention [against the Soviets] in the summer of 1918” and the Wilson who just one year later in Paris helped save the Soviet Union by insisting that the Germans relinquish their conquests on the eastern front “almost seem like two different people.” Faced with the Soviet challenge and bearing the new ideology of universal democracy, Wilson floated the idea that the Bolsheviks should be invited to the peace conference. (Churchill blocked the suggestion.) Wilson the progressive argued that “war won’t defeat Bolshevism, food will.” Capitalism, Wilson argued, had to reform itself to stave off Bolshevik barbarism.
Wilson’s efforts to reconstruct Europe would largely fail, not only because the U.S. refused to join the League of Nations, but because the task at hand was undoable; what the war had sundered could not be put back together. Many former Wilson supporters were angry and disillusioned with the meager fruits of a war that had failed to make the world safe for democracy. But those feelings were shared widely across the political spectrum. Those who were soon to call themselves liberals were particularly provoked by wartime conscription, the repression of civil liberties, and the wildly overwrought fears of Bolshevism at home.
Already in 1918, when the war was still raging, labor unions, emboldened by a surge in membership and squeezed by an inflation-triggered decline in living standards, had engaged in a wave of strikes, some of them repressed by the American Protective League, local police forces, and agents of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Walkouts led by the Industrial Workers of the World, known for work sabotage, seemed particularly ominous. IWW members, known as Wobblies, sometimes described themselves as Lenin’s advance guard. At the end of the year, in the wake of the armistice, New York mayor John Hylan banned the socialist red flag at public gatherings, and shortly thereafter a socialist rally at Madison Square Garden was broken up by 500 soldiers and sailors. The bad blood endured. On the first anniversary of the war’s end, American Legionnaires and Wobblies clashed in Centralia, Washington. Six Wobblies were killed.
Every strike, confrontation, and racial incident was taken, on both left and right, as a manifestation of Bolshevism. Every challenge to the existing social order, no matter how justified, wound up attributed to the red menace. African-Americans’ so-called “uppityness”—insufficient deference to whites—was blamed on homegrown Bolshevism and met with lynchings and a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. White attacks on blacks set off black riots in Chicago and Washington that federal troops were called in to suppress.
The Red Scare intensified in June 1919, when Attorney General Palmer was nearly killed by a terrorist bomb planted in his Georgetown home. Bombs went off in seven other cities the same night. The bombers were probably from the Galleanisti group of Italian anarchists, which included the as-yet unknown Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, notes Beverley Gage in The Day Wall Street Exploded. But the Russian Bolsheviki were seen as responsible, reigniting the intense, hysterical nationalism of the war years. Palmer, who subsequently claimed to have a list of 60,000 subversives, engaged in a series of warrantless raids aimed at capturing the mostly immigrant red radicals, some of whom were jailed or shipped back to Russia. With no reproach from Wilson, Palmer trampled on civil liberties and harassed the innocent as well as the likely guilty. Then came the famed Wall Street bombing of September 1920, which claimed the lives of 38 New Yorkers and injured 400; like the Palmer attack, it was probably perpetrated by the Galleanisti anarchists, but the Bolsheviks again took the blame.
An aggressive nationalism and an accelerated Americanization became political twins. Both demanded something that, with the partial exception of the Civil War North, had never before existed in America—a coherent, irrefragable governmental power. In Europe, war had become bound up with revolution; in the U.S., the war, together with the Bolshevik challenge, called up the seemingly un-American concept of a General Will—a 100 percent Americanism that brooked no opposition. Progressives’ disenchantment with America intensified.
Even Prohibition contributed to progressives’ growing sense of estrangement from the country. Before the war, progressives had broadly supported Prohibition as a means to protect working-class families from the economic depredations of drink. But after the war, the emerging liberals were disturbed by what they saw as cultural continuation of wartime repression. “Like most sensible people,” shouted liberal Harold Stearns, “I regard prohibition as an outrage and a direct invitation to revolution.”
The silver lining of the wartime-spawned repression was that it laid the groundwork for the modern interpretation of the First Amendment that would eventually extend free-speech rights to individuals harassed not only by the federal government but by states and localities as well. The strongest section of Hagedorn’s Savage Peace deals with the key case in advancing this new understanding. Jacob Abrams, a Russian Jewish immigrant who worked as a bookbinder, had printed anarchist leaflets in English and Yiddish and dropped them from buildings on New York’s Lower East Side. The pamphlets bitterly denounced Wilson’s cooperating with England and France in trying to force Russia’s government back into the war against Germany. Zealous prosecutors saw the leaflets as violations of the Espionage Act, which made it a crime to undermine American wartime policy. Abrams, sentenced to 20 years in jail, would eventually be deported.
In 1919, the Supreme Court upheld Abrams’s conviction. But in his dissent, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, while agreeing that “speech that produces or is intended to produce a clear and imminent danger” can be prosecuted, maintained that he saw no such danger in Abrams’s leaflets, which he described as “silly” writings by an “unknown man.” Holmes’s underlying reasoning would prove extraordinarily influential. Like John Stuart Mill, Holmes found that a maximum of free speech was essential for a successful society. America, he argued, had an interest in discovering truth available only through “the marketplace of ideas,” where competing viewpoints are compelled to make their best case.
Palmer had hoped to ride the Red Scare into the White House. But within a year the amiable, if ineffectual, Warren G. Harding of Ohio was ensconced in Washington, along with his card-playing cronies. The crusade that had ended abroad was brought to a close at home. Harding released Debs from prison and returned America to what he dubbed “normalcy.”
For intellectuals and writers who had anticipated utopia in 1916, however, the postwar years brought anger and intensified alienation. The war, said writer Floyd Dell, had produced a generation of young minds “trained in disillusion.” They felt betrayed by Wilson, who had not only suppressed civil liberties but had tried to force Russia back into the war and made compromises with European imperialism at Versailles. They disdained a society that had supported both the Red Scare and Prohibition. In the words of an influential young liberal, “we crushed German militarism only to find that we ourselves had adopted many of its worst features.”
Literary critic Malcolm Cowley spoke for many intellectuals in the wake of the war: “We believed that we had fought for an empty cause, that the Germans were no worse than the Allies, no better, that the world consisted of fools and scoundrels.” Critic Harold Stearns, in his seminal 1919 book Liberalism in America, asserted bitterly that “in Soviet countries there is no fact of freedom of the press and no pretense that there is. In America today there is in fact no freedom of the press and we only make the matter worse by pretending that there is.” The state, said the soured progressive Frederick Howe, “seemed to want to hurt people; it showed no concern for innocence. . . . It was not my America, it was something else.”
What followed was not so much protest as simmering scorn. In 1919, the Germanophile H. L. Mencken, writing in The New Republic, called sarcastically for honoring the civilian heroes who had suppressed Beethoven by bedizening them with bronze badges and golden crosses. Mencken ridiculed the mass of Americans who had backed “Wilson’s War,” branding them a “timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob”; a great admirer of Kaiser Wilhelm, he denigrated American democracy as “the worship of jackals by jackasses.” Taking its cues from Mencken, the liberalism that emerged from 1919 was contemptuous of American culture and politics. For liberals, the war years had shown that American society and democracy were themselves agents of repression. These sentiments deepened during the 1920s and have been an ongoing current in liberalism ever since.
The new liberal ethos was not without its virtues. In picking their fights with Prohibition and their former hero Wilson, liberals encouraged the sense of tolerance and appreciation of differences that would, over time, mature into what came to be called pluralism. “The root of liberalism,” wrote Stearns, “is hatred of compulsion, for liberalism has the respect for the individual and his conscience and reason which the employment of coercion necessarily destroys.” Though not always observed by liberals themselves, the call for an urbane temper would come to mark liberalism at its best.The underside of this new sensibility was an inverted moralism and a quasi-aristocratic hauteur that has dogged political liberalism down to the present day. “Something oppressed” the liberals, wrote Cowley in 1934; “some force was preventing them from doing their best work.” At the time, that “something” was “the stupidity of the crowd, it was hurry and haste, it was Mass Production, Babbittry, Our Business Civilization; or perhaps it was the Machine.” As this current carried into the 1950s, what oppressed the liberals became affluence, suburbia, two-car garages, and backyard barbecues.
Most recently, the liberal plaint has been taken up by the aging but affluent “68ers,” who supported Barack Obama’s presidential campaign because they saw themselves as victims of American society. If they had lived to see it, their progenitors of 1919 would have smiled in recognition.
Fred Siegel is a contributing editor to City Journal and a visiting professor at St. Francis College in Brooklyn
1919: Betrayal and the Birth of Modern Liberalism
Disillusionment with Woodrow Wilson changed the American Left forever.
Today’s state-oriented liberalism, we are often told, was the inevitable extension of the pre–World War I tradition of progressivism. The progressives, led by President Woodrow Wilson, placed their faith in reason and the better nature of the American people. Expanded government would serve as an engine of popular goodwill to soften the harsh rigors of industrial capitalism. Describing the condition of his fellow intellectuals prior to World War I, Lewis Mumford exclaimed that “there was scarcely one who did not assume that mankind either was permanently good or might sooner or later reach such a state of universal beatitude.” After the unfortunate Republican interregnum of the 1920s, so the story goes, this progressivism, faced with the Great Depression, matured into the full-blown liberalism of the New Deal.
But a central strand of modern liberalism was born of a sense of betrayal, of a rejection of progressivism, of a shift in sensibility so profound that it still resonates today. More precisely, the cultural tone of modern liberalism was, in significant measure, set by a political love affair gone wrong between Wilson and a liberal Left unable to grapple with the realities of Prussian power. Initially embraced by many leftists as a thaumaturgical leader of near-messianic promise, Wilson came to be seen—in the wake of a cataclysmic war, a failed peace, repression at home, revolution abroad, and a country wracked by a “Red Scare”—as a Judas. His numinous rhetoric, it was concluded, was mere mummery.
One strand of progressives grew contemptuous not only of Wilson but of American society. For the once-ardent progressive Frederick Howe, formerly Wilson’s Commissioner of Immigration, the prewar promise of a benign state built on reasoned reform had turned to ashes. “I hated,” he wrote, “the new state that had arisen” from the war. “I hated its brutalities, its ignorance, its unpatriotic patriotism, that made profit from our sacrifices and used it to suppress criticism of its acts. . . . I wanted to protest against the destruction of my government, my democracy, my America.”
Making a decisive break with Wilson and their optimism about America, the disenchanted progressives renamed themselves “liberals.” The progressives had been inspired by a faith in democratic reforms as a salve for the wounds of both industrial civilization and power politics; the new liberals saw the American democratic ethos as a danger to freedom both at home and abroad.
Wilson, a devout Presbyterian and former college professor, was the first and probably the only president to have studied socialism systematically. In 1887, as a young man, he responded to the growth of vast industrial monopolies that threatened individual freedom by arguing that “in fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals.” In the 1912 presidential race, he said that “when you do socialism justice, it is hardly different from the heart of Christianity itself.” Four years later, he brushed aside intense opposition to appoint two pro-labor-union justices to the Supreme Court and backed railroad workers in their fight for an eight-hour day. The president imposed a surtax on the wealthy and won the support of such prominent socialists as Upton Sinclair and Helen Keller.
For many on the left, Wilson’s 1916 campaign slogan, “He kept us out of war,” opened the way for the emergence of a more vibrant American culture. The war in Europe seemed far away, and progressives were for the moment imbued with an impregnable optimism. The administration’s critique of European power politics and talk of the need for international law gave pacifist Jane Addams “unlimited faith in the president.” When Meyer London, the antiwar socialist congressman from New York’s Lower East Side, and Socialist Party leader Morris Hilquit visited the White House to talk about the prospects for peace in Europe, they came away concluding that Wilson’s “sympathies are entirely with us.” Similarly, as Thomas Knock recounts in his book To End All Wars, after visiting the White House, the leaders of the American Union Against Militarism felt that “the President had taken us into his bosom.” Wilson, they noted, “always referred to the Union Against Militarism as though he were a member of it” and talked about the need to create “a family of nations.”
The courtship between Wilson and the leftists was nurtured by the hard fought 1916 presidential election. Wilson faced a Republican Party that had recovered from a 1912 split between Teddy Roosevelt’s breakaway Bull Moose progressives and anti-reform regulars to coalesce around Supreme Court Justice Charles Evan Hughes. As war raged in Europe, the incumbent narrowly won by bringing sizable numbers of Bull Moosers (who admired Germany’s proto-welfare state) and Eugene Debs’s Socialists into his “peace camp.”
Even after the U.S. entered the war in April 1917, pushed by Germany’s declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare and the public revelation of the Kaiser’s plans for an alliance with Mexico to reconquer the Southwest, Wilson maintained his strong ties with the largely antiwar Left. The very speech in which he asked for a congressional declaration of war also welcomed the Russian revolution that had overthrown the czar and put the socialist Alexander Kerensky (temporarily) in power. Wilson effusively, if inaccurately, described the revolution as the fulfillment of the Russian people’s long struggle for democracy, and Secretary of State Robert Lansing declared that it “had removed the one objection to affirming that the European War was a war between Democracy and Absolutism.” Some progressives even backed America’s entry. The progressive animus toward corrupt and overmighty party bosses and autocratic monarchists was “readily transferred to an overbearing Kaiser and a hegemonic war machine,” notes historian Morton Keller.
Wilson insisted on referring to the United States not as an ally of England and France but as an “associated power,” and he made a point of keeping U.S. forces strictly under American command, rankling the British and French, whom he regarded as imperialists. Eight months later, shortly after Lenin had taken power in Russia, Wilson expressed ambivalence about Bolshevism: “My heart is with them, but my mind has a contempt for them.” Yet Wilson’s “Fourteen Points, his message of good luck to the ‘republic of labor unions’ in Russia . . . his warning to the Allied powers that their treatment of Bolshevik Russia would be the ‘acid test’ of their ‘good will . . . intelligence and unselfish sympathy’: these moves were immensely impressive to us,” explained magazine editor Max Eastman, speaking for many leftists and progressives. Indeed, when Russian War Commissar Leon Trotsky coined the now famous concept of the “fellow traveler,” he was referring to Wilson. Trotsky sensed that the American president shared the Bolsheviks’ hatred of European imperialism, and he thought that Soviet Russia and a reformed America would travel on parallel tracks into a brighter future.
While Wilson increasingly spoke of international comity, relations between ethnic groups within the United States were breaking down. The Kaiser’s aggression in Eastern Europe prompted pitched battles between Germans and Slavs in the streets of Chicago. At the same time, nearly half a million Germans in America returned home to fight for the fatherland. Charles John Hexamer, president of the National German-American Alliance, financed in part by the German government, insisted that Germans needed to maintain their separate identity and not “descend to the level of an inferior culture.” Germans even began attacking that inferior culture. The most important instance of German domestic sabotage was the spectacular explosion on Black Tom Island in the summer of 1916, which shook a sizable swath of New York City and New Jersey. The man-made peninsula in New York Harbor was a key storage and shipping point for munitions sold to the British and French. The bombing sank the peninsula into the sea, killed seven, and damaged the Statue of Liberty. Wilson denounced Germany’s supporters in America: “Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out.”
The government responded with repression, as journalist Ann Hagedorn chronicles in Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America. Under the Sedition Act of 1918, people were sentenced to 10 years in prison for saying that they preferred the Kaiser to Wilson; others were jailed for mocking salesmen of Liberty Bonds, which supported the war effort. Most famously, socialist leader Debs was jailed for criticizing conscription.
Wilson placed George Creel, a journalist, socialist, and strong supporter of child labor laws and women’s suffrage, in charge of ensuring home-front morale through the Committee for Public Information. But the Committee, which Creel described as “the world’s greatest adventure in advertising,” wildly overshot its mark, encouraging the banning of everything German, from Beethoven to sauerkraut to teaching the German language. The Justice Department and the attorney general, Thomas Gregory, encouraged local vigilantism against Germans, giving the American Protective League, a quarter-of-a-million-strong nativist organization, semi-official status to spy on those suspected of disloyalty. The League went out of its way to break up labor strikes as well, while branding its critics Reds.
Responding to the League’s excesses, Wilson declared that he’d “rather the blamed place should be blown up than persecute innocent people.” But in the next breath he said, “Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way.” Despite his misgivings, Wilson deferred to Gregory’s judgment and refrained from taking action against extremists. Only after the armistice ended the war in November 1918 did Wilson, heeding the advice of incoming attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer, move to end government cooperation with the League. But by now, the disparity between Wilson’s call for extending liberty abroad and the suppression of liberty at home had become a running sore for disenchanted progressives.
The armistice largely ended the fighting in Europe, but it opened a new chapter in hostilities at home: the Red Scare. Back in March, the Bolsheviks’ effectively unconditional surrender to the Germans at Brest-Litovsk had created a cat’s cradle of anticommunist fear intertwined with hostility to the Huns. Germany got control of the Baltic states, Poland, Belarus, and the Ukraine, with their attendant coal and oil resources—freeing the Kaiser’s army to focus on the Western front, to deadly effect. Lenin’s return to Russia in April 1917 by way of a sealed railroad car supplied by Berlin was now seen as proof, and not only by conspiratorialists, that the Bolshevik leader was a German agent.
Progressives and leftists, counseled by Raymond Robbins, who had worked for Wilson in 1912 and served as an unofficial ambassador to the Bolsheviks, adopted a counter-conspiracy ethos that persists even today. Smitten by Bolshevism, Robbins wrote to Lenin that “it has been my eager desire . . . to be of some use in interpreting this new democracy to the people of America.” Robbins also mistakenly blamed the U.S. for forcing Lenin to agree to Germany’s harsh terms at Brest-Litovsk. Over the next several years, explains historian Peter Filene, Robbins’s efforts helped shape the views of many American progressives. They became enraged when Wilson gave in to pressure from France and England, both suffering enormous casualties on the western front, and provided half-hearted American military support to a campaign that tried to force the Bolsheviks back into the war. Filene points out that for progressives, the “betrayal” of which most Americans accused the Bolsheviks was actually an American perfidy.
Here too, Wilson, juggling principle and practicality, proved strikingly inconstant. In the words of German scholar George Schild, “the Wilson who agreed to the Allied intervention [against the Soviets] in the summer of 1918” and the Wilson who just one year later in Paris helped save the Soviet Union by insisting that the Germans relinquish their conquests on the eastern front “almost seem like two different people.” Faced with the Soviet challenge and bearing the new ideology of universal democracy, Wilson floated the idea that the Bolsheviks should be invited to the peace conference. (Churchill blocked the suggestion.) Wilson the progressive argued that “war won’t defeat Bolshevism, food will.” Capitalism, Wilson argued, had to reform itself to stave off Bolshevik barbarism.
Wilson’s efforts to reconstruct Europe would largely fail, not only because the U.S. refused to join the League of Nations, but because the task at hand was undoable; what the war had sundered could not be put back together. Many former Wilson supporters were angry and disillusioned with the meager fruits of a war that had failed to make the world safe for democracy. But those feelings were shared widely across the political spectrum. Those who were soon to call themselves liberals were particularly provoked by wartime conscription, the repression of civil liberties, and the wildly overwrought fears of Bolshevism at home.
Already in 1918, when the war was still raging, labor unions, emboldened by a surge in membership and squeezed by an inflation-triggered decline in living standards, had engaged in a wave of strikes, some of them repressed by the American Protective League, local police forces, and agents of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Walkouts led by the Industrial Workers of the World, known for work sabotage, seemed particularly ominous. IWW members, known as Wobblies, sometimes described themselves as Lenin’s advance guard. At the end of the year, in the wake of the armistice, New York mayor John Hylan banned the socialist red flag at public gatherings, and shortly thereafter a socialist rally at Madison Square Garden was broken up by 500 soldiers and sailors. The bad blood endured. On the first anniversary of the war’s end, American Legionnaires and Wobblies clashed in Centralia, Washington. Six Wobblies were killed.
Every strike, confrontation, and racial incident was taken, on both left and right, as a manifestation of Bolshevism. Every challenge to the existing social order, no matter how justified, wound up attributed to the red menace. African-Americans’ so-called “uppityness”—insufficient deference to whites—was blamed on homegrown Bolshevism and met with lynchings and a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. White attacks on blacks set off black riots in Chicago and Washington that federal troops were called in to suppress.
The Red Scare intensified in June 1919, when Attorney General Palmer was nearly killed by a terrorist bomb planted in his Georgetown home. Bombs went off in seven other cities the same night. The bombers were probably from the Galleanisti group of Italian anarchists, which included the as-yet unknown Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, notes Beverley Gage in The Day Wall Street Exploded. But the Russian Bolsheviki were seen as responsible, reigniting the intense, hysterical nationalism of the war years. Palmer, who subsequently claimed to have a list of 60,000 subversives, engaged in a series of warrantless raids aimed at capturing the mostly immigrant red radicals, some of whom were jailed or shipped back to Russia. With no reproach from Wilson, Palmer trampled on civil liberties and harassed the innocent as well as the likely guilty. Then came the famed Wall Street bombing of September 1920, which claimed the lives of 38 New Yorkers and injured 400; like the Palmer attack, it was probably perpetrated by the Galleanisti anarchists, but the Bolsheviks again took the blame.
An aggressive nationalism and an accelerated Americanization became political twins. Both demanded something that, with the partial exception of the Civil War North, had never before existed in America—a coherent, irrefragable governmental power. In Europe, war had become bound up with revolution; in the U.S., the war, together with the Bolshevik challenge, called up the seemingly un-American concept of a General Will—a 100 percent Americanism that brooked no opposition. Progressives’ disenchantment with America intensified.
Even Prohibition contributed to progressives’ growing sense of estrangement from the country. Before the war, progressives had broadly supported Prohibition as a means to protect working-class families from the economic depredations of drink. But after the war, the emerging liberals were disturbed by what they saw as cultural continuation of wartime repression. “Like most sensible people,” shouted liberal Harold Stearns, “I regard prohibition as an outrage and a direct invitation to revolution.”
The silver lining of the wartime-spawned repression was that it laid the groundwork for the modern interpretation of the First Amendment that would eventually extend free-speech rights to individuals harassed not only by the federal government but by states and localities as well. The strongest section of Hagedorn’s Savage Peace deals with the key case in advancing this new understanding. Jacob Abrams, a Russian Jewish immigrant who worked as a bookbinder, had printed anarchist leaflets in English and Yiddish and dropped them from buildings on New York’s Lower East Side. The pamphlets bitterly denounced Wilson’s cooperating with England and France in trying to force Russia’s government back into the war against Germany. Zealous prosecutors saw the leaflets as violations of the Espionage Act, which made it a crime to undermine American wartime policy. Abrams, sentenced to 20 years in jail, would eventually be deported.
In 1919, the Supreme Court upheld Abrams’s conviction. But in his dissent, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, while agreeing that “speech that produces or is intended to produce a clear and imminent danger” can be prosecuted, maintained that he saw no such danger in Abrams’s leaflets, which he described as “silly” writings by an “unknown man.” Holmes’s underlying reasoning would prove extraordinarily influential. Like John Stuart Mill, Holmes found that a maximum of free speech was essential for a successful society. America, he argued, had an interest in discovering truth available only through “the marketplace of ideas,” where competing viewpoints are compelled to make their best case.
Palmer had hoped to ride the Red Scare into the White House. But within a year the amiable, if ineffectual, Warren G. Harding of Ohio was ensconced in Washington, along with his card-playing cronies. The crusade that had ended abroad was brought to a close at home. Harding released Debs from prison and returned America to what he dubbed “normalcy.”
For intellectuals and writers who had anticipated utopia in 1916, however, the postwar years brought anger and intensified alienation. The war, said writer Floyd Dell, had produced a generation of young minds “trained in disillusion.” They felt betrayed by Wilson, who had not only suppressed civil liberties but had tried to force Russia back into the war and made compromises with European imperialism at Versailles. They disdained a society that had supported both the Red Scare and Prohibition. In the words of an influential young liberal, “we crushed German militarism only to find that we ourselves had adopted many of its worst features.”
Literary critic Malcolm Cowley spoke for many intellectuals in the wake of the war: “We believed that we had fought for an empty cause, that the Germans were no worse than the Allies, no better, that the world consisted of fools and scoundrels.” Critic Harold Stearns, in his seminal 1919 book Liberalism in America, asserted bitterly that “in Soviet countries there is no fact of freedom of the press and no pretense that there is. In America today there is in fact no freedom of the press and we only make the matter worse by pretending that there is.” The state, said the soured progressive Frederick Howe, “seemed to want to hurt people; it showed no concern for innocence. . . . It was not my America, it was something else.”
What followed was not so much protest as simmering scorn. In 1919, the Germanophile H. L. Mencken, writing in The New Republic, called sarcastically for honoring the civilian heroes who had suppressed Beethoven by bedizening them with bronze badges and golden crosses. Mencken ridiculed the mass of Americans who had backed “Wilson’s War,” branding them a “timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob”; a great admirer of Kaiser Wilhelm, he denigrated American democracy as “the worship of jackals by jackasses.” Taking its cues from Mencken, the liberalism that emerged from 1919 was contemptuous of American culture and politics. For liberals, the war years had shown that American society and democracy were themselves agents of repression. These sentiments deepened during the 1920s and have been an ongoing current in liberalism ever since.
The new liberal ethos was not without its virtues. In picking their fights with Prohibition and their former hero Wilson, liberals encouraged the sense of tolerance and appreciation of differences that would, over time, mature into what came to be called pluralism. “The root of liberalism,” wrote Stearns, “is hatred of compulsion, for liberalism has the respect for the individual and his conscience and reason which the employment of coercion necessarily destroys.” Though not always observed by liberals themselves, the call for an urbane temper would come to mark liberalism at its best.The underside of this new sensibility was an inverted moralism and a quasi-aristocratic hauteur that has dogged political liberalism down to the present day. “Something oppressed” the liberals, wrote Cowley in 1934; “some force was preventing them from doing their best work.” At the time, that “something” was “the stupidity of the crowd, it was hurry and haste, it was Mass Production, Babbittry, Our Business Civilization; or perhaps it was the Machine.” As this current carried into the 1950s, what oppressed the liberals became affluence, suburbia, two-car garages, and backyard barbecues.
Most recently, the liberal plaint has been taken up by the aging but affluent “68ers,” who supported Barack Obama’s presidential campaign because they saw themselves as victims of American society. If they had lived to see it, their progenitors of 1919 would have smiled in recognition.
Fred Siegel is a contributing editor to City Journal and a visiting professor at St. Francis College in Brooklyn
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