Learn about the actual left by reading Joseph Jamison's review of "The Socialist Manifesto" by Bhaskar Sunkara

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There frequently arises a great deal of confusion over the political spectrum on this forum, especially but not exclusively among Americans. In European and Asian countries, even highly developed capitalist ones, there are nonetheless fairly mainstream socialist and even communist parties, but this is not the case in America (yet). The effect of this artificial constriction of the political discussion is to encourage Americans to dismiss actual leftism as extreme and not worth paying any attention to. Accordingly, the American "left" is in turns described as consisting of the entire Democratic party, just the "progressive" Democrats, or just Bernie Sanders.

This year, Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara released a book called The Socialist Manifesto, whose title is of course a riff on The Manifesto of the Communist Party by Marx and Engels. I found a review of this book by Joseph Jamison, who writes for Marxism-Leninism Today, and it contains an excellent breakdown on the differences between social democracy, democratic socialism, and the Marxist idea of socialism.

The first distinction Jamison draws that identifies his approach as disctinctly Marxist is the primacy of class:

A confusion in the book – nearly all social democratic writing has it — is around the notion of democracy. Everywhere Sunkara proclaims a fervent commitment to democracy, but it is a democracy narrowed down to the formal processes of bourgeois elections and parliamentarism. That democracy is a class concept, that there is a working-class democracy or socialist democracy, far richer and more participatory than a restricted bourgeois democracy that fails to extend beyond formal political rights and fails to include social, economic, and cultural rights, largely escapes him.

This bolded point is one that you will scarcely find mentioned anywhere in American political discourse, or by anyone on this forum except me. It is absolutely foundational to the leftist program of political economics, in much the same way that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection makes sense of biological discoveries today. Talking about concepts like democracy, authority, state power, regulation, or law enforcement without explicit reference to the class character of each one is like trying to explain the webbed feet of a toad without invoking selective pressure. Class makes or breaks the application of otherwise abstract ideals.

As a second point Jamison begins to describe the landscape of ideologies that many will have some familiarity with:

A word about terminology: readers of this Marxist website are accustomed to understanding “socialism” as the next historical stage — after the transfer of class power in a socialist revolution – i.e., a qualitatively new, post-capitalist socioeconomic formation.

This is the Marxist conception of socialism; it is not regarded as an endpoint but a transitional state.

By contrast, social democratic definitions of “socialism” are elastic and subjective. Sunkara’s definitions, too, take some getting used to. He begins with this startling claim: “We have social democracy in the United States, but it’s exclusionary and funded by regressive property taxes…” Presumably he means the now-tattered remnants of the mid- and late-20th century New Deal and Great Society programs and the resulting “welfare state.” Further on, he contradicts this claim when he states… “of course we should be so lucky as to find ourselves living under social democracy today.”

Here, the usual definition of a "mixed economy" that people around here sometimes invoke rears its head. As a characterization of how society actually functions, it tends to be vague and muddled. Since every advanced society has some kind of welfare state, every major economy is a mixed economy by this definition.

The author calls himself a democratic socialist, not a social democrat. One of the clearer indications of what he means by “democratic socialism” is:

“Today there is much talk of democratic socialism… and indeed I see that term as synonymous with socialism. What separates social democracy from democratic socialism isn’t just whether one believes there’s a place for capitalist private property in a just society but how one goes about fighting for reforms. The best social democrats today might want to fight for macroeconomic policies from above to help workers. But while not rejecting all forms of technocratic expertise, the democratic socialist knows that it will take mass struggle from below and messy disruption to bring about a more durable and radical sort of change. In the second part of this book I discuss the world today and why there are new opportunities for a better sort of socialism to take root, as we’ll see. Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn and US Senator Bernie Sanders have pursued a “class struggle” social democracy, unleashing popular energy that has revitalized the left as a whole. I offer a tentative strategy for taking advantage of this unexpected second chance and explain why the working class can still be an agent of social transformation.”

Sunkara wants to emphasize that democratic socialism is fueled from below by popular movements, while social democracy is administrated paternalistically from above. In the end, this is a relatively minor distinction, as Jamison points out:

Like all political ideologies, social democracy (or social reformism, or for short, reformism) has class roots. Social democracy is an ideology intermediate between Marxism, the revolutionary ideology of the working class, and the ideology of the monopoly-capitalist ruling class. Social democracy expresses the class interests and the class outlook of the middle layers of monopoly-capitalist society. These layers include the “classical” petty bourgeoisie (peasants and shopkeepers, etc.) and the newer intermediate strata of monopoly capitalist society (independent urban professionals, unorganized white-collar workers, lower management, and the like). These layers are unstable and diverse.

Social democracy desires to replace class struggle with class collaboration. It accepts exclusively peaceful and gradual methods of political action. It adheres to the notion that the state stands above classes. When in office, social democrats strive to achieve some reforms, but the main levers of class power remain in the hands of big capital. It seeks a society of general prosperity within the bounds of bourgeois legality and bourgeois democracy.

This intermediate position of social democracy gives it a duality. Social democracy has a fundamental allegiance to the maintenance of capitalism—albeit a “reformed” capitalism made more humane. And it has a need to hold the allegiance of working people. This duality makes it vacillate in political practice.

I bolded the entire second paragraph of that quote because it's of critical importance for understanding why social democracy is a centrist position, not a leftist one. Reforms enacted in a social democratic way are, by definition, those that the capitalist class are willing to tolerate (consider the recent appearance of articles by mega-rich CEOs showing "patriotic" support for higher marginal tax rates). Jamison expounds on the failures of following this strategy by pointing to the social democracies of Europe, many of which are falling to austerity in the aftermath of 2008's crash, and some of which are now embracing far-right isolationism.

Is his “democratic socialism” a new system, as he appears to believe? Not at all. It is redistribution. He wants to “plot a way out of today’s extreme inequality.” He wants “a popular class movement for redistributive policies. “ Like Sweden, the exemplar of a more or less successful social democracy, capitalist ownership will remain mostly untouched. “Democratic socialism” will be a politics in the sphere of expanded public expenditure. He is aware of and decries but never fully confronts the impermanence of social democratic reform. So long as such reforms remain confined to the sphere of public expenditure and do not reach down into the economic base, to change the ownership of most of the economy, to change the class character of the state, to oust the financial oligarchy from its ruling positions, they can be swept away by the next right-wing government.

Whether social democratic theorists wish to acknowledge it or not, the state is not neutral. The vicious corporate state will resist reformist programs, be they mild or radical.

As mentioned before, having an opinion one way or another about "the state" without taking into account whose class interests are served by it is vacuous, which is one reason why American libertarianism is vacuous.

The conclusion of all this, for Americans at least, is that while Bernie Sanders represents the furthest "left" a major contender for President has gone, through the lens of class analysis he's just a reformist with a grassroots following, like Jeremy Corbyn (but unlike, say, Elizabeth Warren). This is why those of us on the left, which is hopefully a clearer political leaning to those of you reading this after doing so, regard Bernie as the only choice but also a compromise. There is a great swath of thinking about science that can only be unlocked by accepting Darwin's theory, and correspondingly, an entire realm of political thought that is unintelligible without understanding class struggle. America is starting to catch up, in the same way that some Christian faiths are starting to accommodate evolution, but it remains woefully lacking in consciousness about these things.