Peter Frase

Mixed in with the usual litany of concessions to billionaires and businesses, the Trump administration delights in a petty and banal sadism that at times seems to serve no significant purpose, if we take the purpose of right wing politics to be the accumulation of capital by the rich. Although nobody should be under any illusion about Trumpism, any idea that it is anything other than, as [Corey Robin](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/11/trump-corey-robin-reactionary-mind-interview) will happily tell us, a familiar iteration of conservatism, just a bit more crass and unmasked.

The latest and best in this cabinet of miniature horrors: a [revision](http://pix11.com/2018/02/12/white-house-wants-to-deliver-food-to-the-poor-blue-apron-style-in-place-of-nearly-half-of-cash-benefits/) of the food stamp program that seeks to replace food vouchers with "a box of food that the government describes as nutritious and 100 percent grown and produced in the U.S.", on the model of Blue Apron and other purveyors of pre-fabricated (and ecologically [terrible](https://www.buzzfeed.com/ellencushing/these-are-the-trashy-consequences-of-blue-apron-delivery)) meal kits.

This would, of course, be bad. And it hits the right venal notes of your workaday reactionary politician: if we must have a welfare state, how can we turn it into pork for my petit-bourgeois constituents?

But the food stamp program was already bad, and this merely intensifies its patronizing and paternalizing logic. Those of us who advocate things like the [Universal Basic Income](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/05/curious-utopias/) from a left perspective do so, in part, because we view the unconditional redistribution of money as something superior to--and more radical than--programs which require recipients to meet requirements and satisfy bureaucrats.

Food stamps are already like that. There are complex restrictions on what food you're allowed to acquire with your vouchers. Hot or toasted food, for example, is [considered](https://eligibility.com/food-stamps/what-kinds-of-products-cannot-be-purchased-with-snap-benefits) an unacceptable luxury. And don't even dream that poor people might deserve access to things like [diapers or tampons](http://meloukhia.net/2015/12/why_cant_you_get_diapers_and_tampons_on_government_assistance/). Hence the argument that instead of intensifying this logic with something like the Trump meal-kit proposal, we should go the opposite way, and just hand out cash.

For certain kinds of social-democratic traditionalists, such arguments are dangerous heresy. For people like [Daniel Zamora](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/foucault-interview), they are worse than useless--they are, in fact, concessions to neoliberalism, as packaged by such dangerous figures as Michel Foucault.

But without [Foucault](https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/01/23/postmodernism-not-take-place-jordan-petersons-12-rules-life/), or someone like him, how are we to understand something like this latest Trump atrocity? Yes, on one level it's simply a patronage handout to business. But we're also dealing here with "governmentality", and perhaps too "biopower", those terms concerning the way that states regulate and control the biological functions of their subjects. For it turns out that our political line can't simply turn on a distinction between reliance on "states" versus "markets", even though the right might like to pose the question that way. Capitalism is a state-dependent project all the way down, and the crucial question is *what* the state does, and to whom.

So here we come to a leftist perspective on the welfare state, which cannot just be a one-sided defense of welfare capitalism but also must be a dialectical *critique* of its authoritarian functions. That's where the Foucault comes in. As I've said [elsewhere](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/07/socialism-liberalism-left-frase), we seek to build the welfare state only so that we can break it. And the capitalist class, for all its showy gestures about tearing down the state, builds it too--but it builds it to break *us*.

And there we find our task, when confronted with conservative welfare governmentality in its absurd Trumpist iteration. We fight for social rights not simply to win benefits, but to get free--free of what Marx called the ["double freedom"](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch06.htm), where we are free to sell our labor, but also free from the means to do anything else.

Decommodify, [decommodify](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/06/de-commodification-in-everyday-life/)! That is [Moses and the prophets](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch24.htm)!

Or to put it another way, we are [Taking these](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqub4O3-NTY), if you don't please.

From August 3rd to 6th, 2017, the Democratic Socialists of America held our biannual convention in Chicago. It was the 35th anniversary of the organization, which was founded in 1982 in a merger of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee--which in turn traced its roots to the old Socialist Party--and the New American Movement, which had a more New Left character. Many good accounts have been [written](https://newrepublic.com/article/144229/democratic-socialists-america-real) already; this is just my own personal perspective.

Unlike past conventions, this one was the subject of a good deal of media attention. That's because, after plodding along for years at around 6-8000 members, DSA has suddenly, in the past year, exploded to 25,000 dues-payers, an all-time record.

The reasons for this are many, and speak to the nature of the period, but the two crucial catalysts are easy to identify: Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Bernie, though he was never really a part of DSA, activated a whole layer of previously demotivated young people, and popularized "democratic socialism" as a term for something to the left of mainstream Clintonite liberalism. And after Trump won, thousands of activists, seeking a political home to continue the struggle, found DSA.

All of this was rather shocking and odd for me. On the convention's opening night, I suddenly found myself an old-timer at 37, when I spoke on the "socialism across generations" panel. Some of the other panelists were from the true old school, DSA veterans since the 1980s who organized alongside celebrity figurehead Michael Harrington. But others were from the new school, the massive influx of members who have come to the organization in the past year or so. I was there representing the somewhat forlorn middle school of DSAers.

I joined DSA in 1998, when I arrived as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. I was already a committed Marxist, and my political sympathies tended more toward the legacy of the [New Communist Movement](https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/), perhaps mixed with a bit of anarchism. But I took to heart the notion that "an unorganized socialist is a contradiction in terms." So I identified DSA as the least sectarian and most politically relevant of the groups on offer; I duly walked up to their table at freshman orientation week and recruited myself.

Somehow I found myself running our campus chapter, and even becoming co-chair of the DSA youth section, the Young Democratic Socialists (now the Young Democratic Socialists of America). After college, I stayed involved intermittently, although nobody would have called me a particularly committed cadre. One of my contributions to DSA ended up being quite fortuitous for me, however: by contributing to YDS's blog, The Activist, I met its young editor, Bhaskar Sunkara. That's how I ended up on the [ground floor](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/01/hipsters-food-stamps-and-the-politics-of-resentment) of [Jacobin Magazine](https://jacobinmag.com/about).

Nevertheless, I had a sense that DSA was adrift, continuing on more by inertia than by any real sense of political purpose. Socialist organizations, I tend to think, have one generation to prove their relevance, before they have to give way to something else. I can hardly think of a better symbol of DSA's decrepitude, early in this century, than the increasing centrality of bequests from dead members in the organization's budgeting and fundraising.

And so it was, a decade or so ago, that I started to have the conversation with other comrades around my age: how do we let DSA die? That is, how do we acknowledge that this project has reached its terminus, without discarding the accumulated skill and knowledge of the comrades who do still have something to contribute to building 21st Century socialism?

Then the membership exploded, chapters popped up all over, and everything was uncertain. For the first time in years, I went to a DSA convention. And for the first time ever, I was an official voting delegate.

And I watched, on that August weekend in Chicago, as DSA finally *did* die, to thunderous applause. And I couldn't be happier about it.

Yes, the name and the organizational structure continue on, but what DSA is--and *who* it is--has been radically transformed in a matter of months. Of the 800 delegates in Chicago, the vast majority are newcomers to the organization. At the convention banquet, the MC asked us to stand sequentially according to the period when we had become involved in DSA or its predecessors: the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s, the early 2010s, or since the beginning of 2016. Until that very last call, almost everyone was seated.

With such an inexperienced and untested group, there was no way of knowing how anyone would react. Would they be angered or bewildered at having to debate resolutions through the arcane procedure of Robert's Rules of Order? Would some kind of wacky thing get passed as an official DSA position? Would we manage to agree on anything at all?

In the end, the assembled delegates acquitted themselves as well as I could possibly have hoped. People got the hang of the rules, votes mostly proceeded smoothly. And most importantly, the substantive decisions made were, from my point of view, almost all the right ones. And some of them would have been hard to imagine coming from the old DSA.

The two most significant--symbolically, if not necessarily in terms of DSA's practical work--were the votes to endorse Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, and to leave the Socialist International.

Both of these were moves that had been repeatedly attempted in years past, with no success. The founders of DSA were by and large Zionists or at least friendly to labor Zionism, and any too-severe criticism of Israel's occupation of Palestine tended to run aground on accusations of anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, the Socialist International was taken as a mark of legitimacy and a link to those powerful social democratic parties--the French Socialist Party, the Swedish Social Democrats, among others--that an older generation of DSA took as an inspiration and a model.

But this year, despite a few vocal opponents, support for BDS and opposition to SI membership passed by what appeared to be at least 90 percent margins. Since the convention, there have been a few showy displays of horror from erstwhile democratic socialists, particularly about BDS. But these people are largely [irrelevant geezers](http://www.ericlee.info/blog/?p=1286) or [ex-Left renegades](http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/242683/disgrace-and-democratic-socialists-of-america) who would never lift a finger to build DSA in any event. Likewise with the (more muted) criticism of the SI position, which has mostly come from superannuated social democratic cosplayers, clinging to a fantasy version of the old socialist parties that is about as connected to contemporary politics as a Brezhnev-era Communist Party member's faded hopes in the USSR.

The votes we took were tremendously encouraging to me, and made me feel closer to the mainstream of DSA's politics than I ever have. We also passed a solid political priorities document, prioritizing universal health care, labor organizing, and electing socialists to office. We instituted a grievance procedure, and took some boring but incredibly important steps toward increasing our dues rate, and hence increasing our ability to hire staff and support all of our new chapters. And we elected a strong new National Political Committee, with a broad mix of ideological perspectives, and incorporating a solid core of experienced DSA veterans alongside many new faces.

(And yes, there is an ongoing controversy involving one newly elected NPC member, Danny Fetonte of Austin, who did not disclose his employment with a police union during his campaign. The NPC is engaged in an ongoing process with Fetonte, which I am still hopeful will be resolved amicably. My personal preference would be for him to resign, but for the NPC to negotiate the appointment of a replacement member who will reflect his region of the country and his ideological tendency within DSA.)

Perhaps the most encouraging thing I saw all weekend, however, was what took place during the final parliamentary session on Sunday. Throughout the convention, comrades with disabilities had become increasingly frustrated with what they felt was a lack of accessibility and acknowledgment of their issues during the proceedings. On Sunday, they decided to make a forceful intervention.

I encourage everyone to read the DSA Disability Working Group's own detailed [account](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CylzxsZ2AfL87e4dbXA5FQzxvuuPAo39KwVjUPFRYME/edit) of what went down. But the short version is this: after attempting, and failing, to add language about disability to our national priorities document, a protest broke out. Comrades scattered through the room began chanting "nothing about us without us." At that point the chair, Chris Riddiough--who, I want to emphasize, did a heroic and indispensable job presiding throughout the rest of the convention--made the unfortunate decision to call for the removal of the protesters.

This was an *extremely* fraught moment. The protest immediately divided the room, with some delegates furious at the chair, and others furious at the protesters. I confess that I myself wavered for a moment, and I was afraid that the entire proceeding was about to devolve into chaos. But I soon realized that what was at stake, at that moment, was far more politically significant than keeping to a schedule or voting on a few remaining resolutions. This was about whether we, as the assembled delegates of DSA, were going to show some flexibility in order to affirm our solidarity with our comrades with disabilities, and by extension with all those who may find themselves marginalized or excluded in DSA.

And I'm proud to say that we passed this test. Our Robert's Rules acumen had been sharpened by days of parliamentary procedure, and someone quickly realized that we had the authority to vote to overturn the chair's ruling, which we thankfully did before there could be any question of carrying out the disastrous option of forcefully removing protesters from the hall. After that, the original motion on disability language was affirmed by huge margins, order returned, and we proceeded with the agenda. That one moment isn't sufficient to address the larger issues raised by the protesting comrades, of course. But I'm hopeful that it was a sufficient display of solidarity to avoid permanently alienating some of our most committed members.

When all was said and done, we did make it through our agenda, and we closed with a singing of the *Internationale*, in traditional socialist fashion. As well as, in more of a new school touch, breaking out into chants of "eat the rich, feed the poor" and "DSA ain't nothing to fuck with!"

And then we all went back to our chapters, where we'll take up the hard work of building up our base and taking up the day to day struggle for socialism. It remains to be seen whether the current burst of enthusiasm can be sustained, or if it was just a flash in the pan. But for now, at least, I've been convinced that the historic rebirth I've long dreamed of is a reality.

DSA is dead. Long live DSA!

Elizabeth Bruenig has [written](https://medium.com/@ebruenig/understanding-liberals-versus-the-left-5cff7ea41fd8) about the distinction between "liberals" and "the left." She proposes that everyone in the broad tent of what she calls "non-Republicanism" is actually a liberal, in the following sense:

> The second sense in which almost every non-Republican is a liberal is that they all agree with the tenets of liberalism as a philosophy: that is, the worldview that champions radical, rational free inquiry; egalitarianism; individualism; subjective rights; and freedom as primary political ends. (Republicans are, for the most part, liberals in this sense too; libertarians even more so.)

This is an easy statement for me to agree with--but I also think it brushes past some political distinctions that are important.

Am I a partisan of "radical, rational free inquiry"? I suppose I am, in that, like Marx, I endorse a ["ruthless criticism of the existing order,"](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09-alt.htm) one which "will shrink neither from its own discoveries, nor from conflict with the powers that be."

Do I believe in "egalitarianism"? Naturally--one of the basic structural features of my [book](https://www.versobooks.com/books/1847-four-futures) is the distinction between a hierarchical society, like our own, and one where everyone shares in both the benefits and the sacrifices that are possible or necessary given our level of technological development and ecological constraint.

Individualism? Also uncontroversial, although it's not entirely clear what the term is supposed to mean. I side with Oscar Wilde, who [said](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/) that "With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism." That instead of the false freedom of those condemned to work for others for a paycheck--free in Marx's "double sense" of being free to sell our labour power and free of anything else to sell--we can have what Philippe Van Parijs calls "real freedom", the freedom that comes from having the time and the resources to pursue self-actualization.

As for "subjective rights," I'm not completely sure what that's supposed to mean. Rights that are politically stipulated and democratically assigned, I guess, rather than arising from some divine concept of natural law? In that case, again, I'm on board, and I think the "social rights" arguments of people like [T.H. Marshall](http://delong.typepad.com/marshall-citizenship-and-social-class.pdf) can be usefully synthesized with the politics of opposing oppression and exploitation.

And then, of course, there is freedom. A word lodged deeply in the liberal tradition, and in the American tradition. And one, I think, that should be at the center of socialist politics as well. But freedom *from* what, and freedom *to* do what?

Here is Bruenig's gloss on the meaning of socialism: "the economic aspects of liberalism (free or freeish market capitalism) create material conditions that actually make people less free."

I like this, yet again I find it vague. In describing my own political trajectory, I often talk about my parents' liberal politics, and my own journey of discovery, through which I concluded that their liberal ideals couldn't be achieved by liberal means, but required something more radical, and more Marxist.

But what would it mean to escape "the economic aspects of liberalism"? Would it mean merely high wages; universal health care and education; a right to housing; strong labor unions?

To be clear, I am in favor of all of those things.

But we've seen this movie before. It's the high tide of the welfare state, which is nowadays sometimes held up as an idyllic model of class peace and human contentment: everyone has a good job, and good benefits, and a comfortable retirement. (Although of course, this Eden never existed for much of the working class.) Who could want more?

The historical reality of welfare capitalism's postwar high tide, though, is that *everyone* wanted more. Capitalists, as they always do, wanted more profits, and they felt the squeeze from powerful unions and social democratic parties that were impinging on this prerogative. More than that, they faced the problem of a working class that was becoming too *politically* powerful. This is what Michal Kalecki [called](https://mronline.org/2010/06/08/kalecki-again/) the "political aspects of full employment," the danger that a sufficiently empowered working class might call into question the basic structure of an economy based on concentrated property rights and capital accumulation.

Sometimes socialists will emphasize *economic democracy* as the core of our politics. Because as the [Democratic Socialists of America's](http://www.dsausa.org/where_we_stand) statement of political principles puts it, "In the workplace, capitalism eschews democracy." According to this line of argument, socialism means taking the liberal ideal of democracy into places where most people experience no democratic control at all, most especially the workplace.

But when you talk about introducing democracy, you're talking about giving people control over their lives that they didn't have before. And once you do that, you open up the possibility of much more radical and disruptive kinds of change.

For it is not just capitalists who always want more, but workers too. A good job is better than a bad job, is better than no job. Higher wages are better than low. But a strong working class isn't inclined to sit back and be content with its lot--it's inclined to demand more. Or less, when it comes to the drudgery of most jobs. After all, how many people dream of punching clocks and cashing paychecks at the behest of a boss, no matter what the size of the check or the security of the job? The song "Take This Job and Shove It" appeared in the aftermath of a period when many workers could make good on that threat, and did. In the peak year, 1969, there had been 766 unauthorized wildcat strikes in the United States, but by 1975 there were only 238.

All of this goes to the point that even if we could get back the postwar welfare state, that simply isn't a permanently viable end point, and we need a politics that acknowledges that fact and prepares for it. And that has to be connected to some larger vision of what lies beyond the immediate demands of social democracy. That's what I'd call socialism, or even *communism*, which for me is the ultimate horizon. The socialist project, for me, is about something more than just immediate demands for more jobs, or higher wages, or universal social programs, or shorter hours. It's about those things. But it's also about transcending, and abolishing, much of what we think defines our identities and our way of life.

It is about the abolition of class as such. This means the abolition of capitalist wage labor, and therefore the abolition of ["the working class"](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/04/the-politics-of-getting-a-life) as an identity and a social phenomenon. Which isn't the same as the abolition of work in its [other senses](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/02/work-it/), as socially necessary or personally fulfilling labor.

It is about the abolition of "race", that biologically fictitious, and yet socially overpowering idea. A task that is inseparable from the abolition of class, however much contemporary liberals might like to distract us from that reality. As David Roediger details in his recent essay collection on [*Class, Race, and Marxism*](https://www.versobooks.com/books/2467-class-race-and-marxism), much of the forgotten history of terms like "white privilege" originated with communists, who wrestled with the problem of racism not to avoid class politics but to facilitate it. People like [Claudia Jones](http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Claudia-Jones-Unknown-Pan-Africanist-Feminist-and-Communist--20160210-0020.html), or Theodore Allen, whose masterwork *The Invention of the White Race*, was, as Roediger observes, borne of "a half century of radical organizing, much of it specifically in industry."

And so too, no socialism worth the name can shrink from questioning patriarchy, gender, heterosexuality, the nuclear family. Marx and Engels themselves had some presentiment of this, some understanding that the control of the means of reproduction and the means of production were intimately and dialectically linked at [The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/). But they could follow their own logic only so far, and so it fell to the likes of [Shulamith Firestone](https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/on-shulamith-firestone-preface/) to suggest radical alternatives to our current ways of organizing the bearing and raising of children. It took communists the likes of [Leslie Feinberg](http://www.lesliefeinberg.net/) and [Sylvia Federici](http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/permanent-reproductive-crisis-interview-silvia-federici) to complicate our simplistic assumptions about the existence of binary "gender." And the more we win reforms that allow people to define their sexualities and gender identities, to give women control of their bodies, to lessen their economic dependence on men, the more this kind of radical questioning will spill into the open.

So that's what it means to me to be on "the left." To imagine and anticipate and fight for a world without bosses, and beyond class, race, and gender as we understand them today. That, to me, is what it means to fight for individualism, and for freedom.

That's one reason that I make a point of arguing for a politics that fights for beneficial reforms--single payer health care, living wages, all the rest--but that doesn't stop there. A politics that fights for the ["non-reformist" reform](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/05/curious-utopias/): a demand that is not meant to lead to a permanent state of humane capitalism, but that is intentionally destabilizing and disruptive.

The other reason is that, for all the economic and political reasons noted above, we can't just get to a nicer version of capitalism and then stop there. We can only build social democracy [in order to break it](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/06/social-democracy-polanyi-great-transformation-welfare-state).

Is that what every liberal, or even every leftist, believes? From my experience, I don't think so. That's not meant to be a defense of sectarianism or dogmatism; I believe in building a broad united front with everyone who wants to make our society more humane, and more equal. But I have my sights on something beyond that.

Because if we do all agree that the project of the left is predicated on a vision of freedom and individualism, then we also have to regard that vision as a radically *uncertain* one. We can only look a short way into the future--to a point where the working class has had its shackles loosened a bit, as happened in the best moments of 20th Century social democracy. At that moment we again reach the point where a social democratic class compromise becomes untenable, and the system must either fall back into a reactionary form of capitalist retrenchment, or forward into something else entirely. What our future selves do in those circumstances, and what kinds of people we become, is unknowable and unpredictable--and for our politics to be genuinely democratic, it could not be any other way.

The ethics of punching Nazis may be exhausting its useful life as a topic for punditry. But there's one aspect of the debate that perhaps hasn't received sufficient attention.

In the wake of Richard Spencer's punching, and the shutdown of Milo Yiannopoulos's speech in Berkeley, debate flared over whether these actions were justifiable and necessary direct action against the far right, or whether they represented something counter-productive or even politically unprincipled.

First, it's necessary to pull apart several different things that are being argued about, which tend to get confusingly mashed together.

Some want to argue the question of whether the Left should use "violence". But most of what we're arguing about should not be described as violence. Punching Richard Spencer in the head would certainly qualify, albeit in a fairly minor way; but much of what people are calling violence is really just property destruction, the smashing of windows or the [burning of limos](http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/21/politics/washington-dc-limo-driver-protests/). We should make a clear distinction between the mere destruction of objects and actual violence against human beings. Spencer notwithstanding, the worst violence seen thus far has come from [supporters](http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/uw-shooting/) of the right.

A second separation we ought to make is between the general strategy of denying fascists a platform to speak, and specific, more disruptive "black bloc" tactics, including the aforementioned smashing of windows. One can affirm the validity of the strategy while questioning the tactics. A good example of this, dating back to the aftermath of the Occupy Oakland protests of 2011, is [this post](https://www.facebook.com/boots.riley/posts/10151186157408664) from rapper and communist organizer Boots Riley. Here he is talking about acts like window smashing as *impediments to organizing*, not as things that are always wrong in principle.

So we have three issues: violence, black bloc tactics, and the strategy of denying a platform to fascists. I'm not concerned here with debating the first two. The first because there has been so little actual violence, and the most notable has come from the right. The second because, while I tend to agree that adventurist tactics are often counterproductive for the Left and can put other activists at risk, this is a problem of discipline that movement organizers have to figure out how to solve internally. I doubt I have much to contribute as an outside observer.

My concern is with the broader issue of denying fascists the ability to spread their message. Was it right to interrupt Richard Spencer's interview? (Whether or not one thinks it should have been done with an elbow to the head.) And was it right to organize protests large enough to prevent Milo from speaking at the University of California, after the school had approved his event? My starting point is generally that the far right does not respect norms of liberal discourse, and advocates positions that should be outside the realm of reasonable debate. So we shouldn't feel bound by the terms of liberalism either when dealing with them.

This is the point in the conversation where we conventionally move to debating "free speech", and whether the unconditional right of speech is something to be defended by the Left in all circumstances. But there are some problems that arise when we try to define just what a "right to free speech" includes, or doesn't include.

A recent Peter Beinart [article](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/everyone-has-a-right-to-free-speech-even-milo/515565/) is representative of the liberal line that says "you can't shut down a talk, everyone has a right to free speech!" Beinart essentially says that every student at Berkeley should have an equal right to give a platform to whatever speech they like, and thus the Left has failed by denying the College Republicans their inalienable right to hear Milo.

One response to this is that it's misleading to say that protesters are abridging "the right of free speech" by shutting down an event. The argument is summarized in [this](https://xkcd.com/1357/) XKCD cartoon: free speech means that the *state* can't censor your expression, not that you are guaranteed an audience and a platform wherever and whenever you want. When someone cries "free speech" and shouts ["help help I'm being repressed"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS_1bzaj2fw) upon being banned from a blog comment thread, this makes for a handy response. And since almost nobody is calling on the government to ban fascist speech at the moment, we could say that "free speech" is an irrelevant argument in this context.

This is fine as far as it goes, but one could easily respond: sure, that's the constitution's definition of free speech, but it doesn't have to be ours. Some would argue that it is simply contrary to core leftist principles to deny even the most odious people their opportunity to speak. Others argue from a more strategic perspective, claiming that shutting down right wing speech will inevitably backfire, because it will draw sympathy and attention to it, and because the right and their allies in the state apparatus are more willing and able to restrict expression than we are.

The strategic argument is one I find wanting. The argument against "drawing attention" to the far right only makes sense if you think they will win because their ideas have so much inherent mass appeal, rather than because such movements rely on intimidation and force. And as for the backlash argument, it's not clear to me how leftist actions are causally related to right wing moves toward censorship. The Right will certainly deploy the trope of free speech--as many of them did to me when I [tweeted](https://twitter.com/pefrase/status/827014217932877824) my support for the actions in Berkeley. But it would be foolish to believe that they have any actual intention of respecting our speech rights should they achieve greater power, whether or not we honor theirs. In other words, the Trump administration didn't start [shutting up](https://insideclimatenews.org/news/03022017/epa-donald-trump-climate-change-science-scott-pruitt) the EPA on climate change because somebody interrupted Richard Spencer.

The argument from first principles seems harder to refute; you either believe it or you don't. You could argue that the principle fails because the distinction between "speech" and "action" is impossible to cleanly maintain. That, as Austin and other [speech act](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/speech-acts/) theorists argued, words can sometimes directly *do* things in the world. This is certainly applicable to Milo, who has been known to promote [harassment](http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/12/milo-yiannopoulos-harassed-a-trans-student-at-uw-milwaukee.html) of trans people and who apparently intended to directly [target](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/uc-berkely-protests-milo-yiannopoulos-publicly-name-undocumented-students-cancelled-talk-illegals-a7561321.html) immigrant students at his Berkeley event.

However, this quickly gets us back into the world of legalism and logic-chopping, and debating what is or isn't an innocent or "protected" act of speech. Is this mere rhetoric, or is it yelling fire in a crowded theater?

I think we can move beyond this to a deeper problem with the more wide-ranging definitions of the right to speech. Because once you disconnect the concept of free speech from the specific notion of keeping the *state* out of regulating expression, you run into a new problem. You need some way of deciding who does or doesn't have the power to enable speech.

Sitting here at my desk, I have the unconditional right to speech, in the sense that I can yell out whatever I please, to be heard by nobody but my dog and my partner trying to work in the office across the hall. Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer are similarly unconstrained. The problems arise when a TV network chooses to interview Spencer, or the University of California chooses to give Milo access to their facilities.

They have the right to do that, you might say, and we should respect it. But what *is* it, exactly, that gives them a right to decide who gets to speak, but *doesn't* give a mass protest movement the right to say who shouldn't get to speak?

I've seen some people argue that shutting down speech through protest is undemocratic--because, I suppose, we didn't all get a vote on whether fascists should give speeches. But that's precisely it--we didn't get a vote on this, it was the media and places like UC Berkeley that made the decision. So in that sense all the decisions are equally undemocratic, and we have a contest of power, between two conflicting claims about who has the right to grant someone the ability to disseminate their message. And as Marx [put it](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm), "between equal rights, force decides."

Here we get to what I think is the heart of the matter. This is about a principle that is fundamental to the mainstream of modern liberalism, one that tends to override all others. It is not the principle of free speech, or *any* other abstract right. Rather, it is an unwavering faith in the unquestionable legitimacy of the state, and of the rest of society's powerful institutions.

This faith is distilled perfectly in [this tweet](https://twitter.com/shadihamid/status/823545199360180225) from Shadi Hamid. "Can't believe ppl on my Twitter feed are saying punching Richard Spencer is okay or encouraging it. I mean, it's illegal to punch people."

That's it. That's the whole argument. What makes this especially rich is that Hamid, a foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, is known for [saying](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2016/10/19/is-a-better-world-possible-without-u-s-military-force/) things like "the better, more just world that so many hope for is simply impossible without the use of American military force." So an opponent of violence he most definitely is not. He simply demands that it be carried out by agents of the U.S. government.

This, of course, is a very old liberal faith. It is merely the insistence that, as Max Weber put it, a state, to even be a state, [must claim](http://crookedtimber.org/2007/04/20/weber-and-violence/) the "monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force".

The presumption of legitimacy, for people like Beinart in the article cited above, extends beyond the use of force and beyond the core apparatus of the state itself. Public institutions created by the state, respected private institutions and private property guaranteed by its laws; all must remain inviolate. And it is these institutions alone that may decide who does or does not receive a platform to speak.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's decision to give Richard Spencer a platform is presumed to be legitimate; a protester's decision to deny him one is presumed not to be. The University of California's decision to host Milo cannot be questioned, while the decision of the students and local community to shut him down must be denounced. (In other situations, the principle is ambiguous. Had Shia LaBeouf constituted the legitimate authority to [shout down](http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/01/23/shia_labeouf_faced_off_with_a_white_supremacist.html) a white supremacist who attempted to shout a Nazi slogan on a livestream he had set up?)

The liberal will respond that because we voted for our elected representatives, everything that they do, everything that legally constituted institutions do, and anything that is consistent with the laws of private property, is legitimate. All else is dangerous and subversive, and risks anarchy, fascism, or worse.

But for radicals, America is not [already great](https://www.salon.com/2016/07/28/america_is_already_great_president_obamas_moving_dnc_speech_lifts_hillary_destroys_trump/), nor is it completely democratic. And so we are under no obligation to grant legitimacy to the existing order.

This is, and always has been, a crucial dividing line between liberals and radicals. It's not that we necessarily think it's ideal to decide questions of speech--or anything else--through ad-hoc clashes between protesters and institutionalized power. What we insist on, however, is that the legitimacy of the state and of other institutions of capitalist society can be *questioned*. This presumption is necessary to justify even something as basic as [waging an illegal strike](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/nyregion/transit-union-leader-sentenced-to-10-days-in-jail-over-strike.html) or marching without a permit. But it leads, for some socialist traditions, all the way to the idea that in truly revolutionary situations (which is far from where we are now), an actual [dual power](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/09.htm) can be constituted, with new institutions arising to contest and eventually replace the existing ones.

Liberals instinctively resist these ideas, and fall back on their reverence for the process, the procedure, and the rule of law. But it will be interesting to see how their thinking develops in the era of Trump.

For we are now living in a moment where the executive intends to rule by decree, and where its agents cavalierly [defy](https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/01/29/white-house-defies-courts-as-chaos-protests-and-lawsuits-erupt-over-immigration-ban/) direct court orders. And at the same time, also one where, as Corey Robin [argues](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/trump-pence-presidency-executive-orders/), many horrors are completely achievable within the boundaries of the traditional institutions and rules. If all the rusty machinery of American constitutional democracy is so easily disregarded, or so easily turned to evil purposes, what will become of the liberal insistence that it is only the old institutions, and not the masses in motion, who represent a legitimate order?

What the Trump administration has done, over the past few days, is horrific. And it has terrible human consequences for the migrants and other people caught up in it. I don't want to minimize that.

If there's a silver lining here, though, it's that I have a feeling Steve Bannon is going to end up getting hellaciously dumpstered behind this shit.

Sure, he seems to be riding high now. Writing inauguration speeches and executive orders; even getting himself stuck on the National Security Council!

But things are already spinning out of control and falling apart, in the face of resistance from both mass street protest and the judiciary.

And Donald Trump is known to be a person whose primary loyalty is to Donald J. Trump. To stay in his inner circle, you need to have a "value proposition", as the sleazy businessmen like to say. That is, something you have to offer, that can increase the revenue of the business.

And what, exactly, is Bannon's value proposition?

It isn't any special connection with the conventional Republican political elite. Paul Ryan and the like have always regarded him with something between indifference and contempt. And they're probably starting to wonder if his agenda is crowding out more traditional conservative priorities, such as starving out grannies, enabling financial fraud, lowering taxes on billionaires, and ensuring that sick people die in the gutter if they aren't rich.

Bannon also isn't a gateway to the super-rich donor class. From the perspective of the billionaires, his pipsqueak Seinfeld-residuals-cashing ass barely registers.

What Steve Bannon provides--or was *supposed* to provide--is the mass base, the hordes of frothing Trump supporters, who would pour forth from 4chan and Breitbart.com to give aid and cover to the schemes of the Ayn Rand-worshipping ideologues and the cynical rich.

The problem is that he isn't actually delivering this. Hence the half-empty inauguration, followed up with packed Women's March protests. The definitive image from Trump's coronation wasn't hordes of his adoring fans; it was Richard Spencer getting punched in the face. This was an embarrassment so severe, Trump was reduced to harassing the Park Service for more flattering photos. And then we got the executive orders on migrants that presumably were supposed to bring out the grateful masses, but which only succeeded in bringing on a whirlwind of mobilization *against* Trump.

Trump's vanity and idiocy are sufficient that it may take him some time to realize this. But once he does, it's bedtime for Bannon, who will be defenestrated without ceremony. That leaves the rest of the ghouls in this administration and in congress, who are no less terrifying in their own way. But we'll have gotten our first win, and hopefully far from the last.

Sent on a whim while I was killing some time in Troy, New York, [this](https://twitter.com/pefrase/status/807339363155791872) appears to be my most popular tweet of all time. (Not that there's much tough competition.) Explaining a tweet seems sort of like explaining a joke, but I'm going to make a run at it anyway.

"Class war trumps hate."

The reference, of course, is to those squishy liberal "Love Trumps Hate" bumper stickers. As though warm feelings are enough to combat the bigotry of the Right.

As for my alternative slogan, maybe part of its appeal was its ambiguity. In one reading, I'm saying that the way we respond to the haters is not by embracing them, but by fighting them in the streets. And when it comes to hipster fascists like [Richard Spencer](https://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2016/11/calling-them-alt-right-helps-us-fight.html) and his ilk, I couldn't agree more. We should all admire anti-fascist street fighters like [this guy](http://www.spunk.org/texts/antifasc/sp000832.html), my favorite of Keith Ellison's clients from his days as a leftist lawyer in the Twin Cities. (And that's a story I hope I can tell at greater length sometime in the future.)

But that wasn't actually what I was thinking about when I wrote that tweet. What I *was* thinking about was the picket line I had just visited with Jon Flanders, near Troy in upstate New York. Jon is a veteran socialist, a veteran unionist (former Machinist local president), and the mastermind of the wonderful [James Connolly Forum](https://jamesconnollyforum.wordpress.com/), a non-sectarian lecture series that I visted for a discussion of my book.

Jon took me to see the workers who have been on strike at [Momentive](http://labornotes.org/blogs/2016/11/thanksgiving-picket-lines-momentive), a chemical manufacturer and former GE subsidiary where the workers have suffered a decade of brutalization from the company's private equity owners. "Picket line" isn't even the right word; the vast Momentive complex stretches on for perhaps a half mile, and each entrance is staffed by a small crew of workers, with a tent for shelter and a large pile of broken-up pallets to be burned for warmth.

They were a range of ages, but mostly men, mostly white. Some of them, Jon told, me, would have voted for Trump: "Drain the Swamp", he said, was a sign he had seen from some younger strikers. But out here, they were just union brothers and sisters, so I said to them what I would say to anyone fighting a similar battle: *solidarity with your struggle*, the verbal equivalent of the stream of supportive honks from the passing truck drivers. The little spark of joy I noticed whenever I said that was heartwarming, but also a depressing indicator of just how little solidarity these workers have received.

Which brings me to the inspiration for that tweet. Jon told me a story about a particular form of strike support that he had helped facilitate. The Capital District Coalition Coalition Against Islamophobia organized a visit to the strikers by three women from the local Islamic Center. They brought food, and introduced themselves to the workers on the picket. Jon himself was apprehensive beforehand, concerned about potential bigotry and Islamophobia coming from the strikers.

In the end though, the strikers were grateful for the support--they know they are in a fight for their lives, and they know better than to refuse an ally. And their visitors learned something about a labor struggle that had been obscure to them. "I can't honestly say that I knew much about strikes or have ever visited a picket line, so I learned a lot today", one of them wrote on Facebook. "I'm pretty sure most of the strikers had never met a Muslim before but they all thanked us profusely for taking the time to give them some support."

It's a small thing, this one little act. But small acts like that are the elements of any sustainable reconstruction of the Left, one that is "intersectional" in practice, not just in rhetoric. So that was what I was thinking when I wrote that tweet, just after getting my picture taken with the statue of Irish revolutionary legend and onetime Troy resident [James Connolly](https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/): class struggle trumps hate. That is, a solidarity forged in struggle can overcome the abstract indoctrinations of race hatred. Which is not to say that the realities of imperialism or white supremacy can simply be ignored or left in the past. Merely that the overcoming of those systems begins where people are thrown together in common struggle.

Politics is full of surprises of late, as both a resurgent left and an atavistic right win one surprising victory after another.

One peculiarity of the conjuncture is that the rising social democratic left in the English-speaking world has produced two oddly similar, and similarly odd figureheads: Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.

Both, of course, fit a similar style profile, as old and somewhat disheveled white men, seemingly a bit out of touch with the contemporary culture that has propelled them to unprecedented levels of political success. Hence the inherent humor of something like Corbyn's [arrival](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3pacMThWVE) on talk show *The Last Leg*, or [Bernie Sanders' Dank Meme Stash](https://www.facebook.com/groups/berniesandersmemes/). Each exploits the incongruity of these men's nebbishy affect when contrasted with their youthful supporters.

But I don't think it's quite an accident that it was men like these who ended up in this position, in this particular moment.

Our political period is characterized by a rising, but still largely disorganized left, arrayed against a moribund but still institutionally powerful neoliberal order that uses its accumulated power to compensate for its complete lack of compelling answers to contemporary political questions. In order to contest state politics at the highest level--the presidency of the United States, the Prime Minister of the UK--someone had to be found, within the higher echelons of power, who could serve as a figurehead.

After decades of reaction, few such people were available. But what we found was people like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.

And so the interesting question is, how do we characterize politicians like them? I'd suggest that they are best summarized as *survivors*. They are people who lived through a period of reaction, during which their leftist peers generally burned out, faded away, or reinvented themselves as neoliberal hacks. Whereas people like Sanders and Corbyn managed to hold on to something resembling traditional social democratic politics, while remaining in proximity to the highest reaches of power within the capitalist state. They managed to survive a period of reaction without either being driven out of politics or becoming reactionaries themselves.

Although Sanders and Corbyn were immersed in the left during its high points in the 1960s and 1970s, nobody would have considered them great figures for the history books until recently. Sanders participated in the civil rights movement as a student, and in left-wing electoral projects in Vermont, but was essentially a minor figure. Corbyn [attended](http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/15/jeremy-corbyn-world-supporters-mentors-influences) discussion groups with luminaries of the British left like Ralph Miliband and Tony Benn, but was mostly remembered as a quiet and unremarkable figure, peripheral to the movers and shakers on the left of that era.

So what distinguishes people like Sanders and Corbyn is that they survived. Not just in the literal sense that they're still alive, but in the sense that they were in a position to contest the Democratic presidential nomination or the leadership of the Labour Party from the left, when nobody else was.

People like that have, I would say, three important characteristics.

First, and most obviously, some level of idealistic and ideological commitment to social democracy or left-liberalism. This is the aspect that the lazy press tends to harp on--look at these doddering hippies, with their "values" and their "ideals"! See how out of touch they are with the cynical compromises with capitalism that, as all savvy observers know, are the essence of politics.

And of course it's true that Sanders and Corbyn had to have some kind of principled commitment in order to avoid giving up their ideals in favor of what would surely have been a better dispensation, had they conceded to Clintonism and Blairism.

But to portray them as merely hippy-dippy idealists is to leave out two other, and equally important parts of their political persona.

The first is that they are, in fact, extremely pragmatic, strategic, and at times ruthless politicians. How else, after all, could they have survived for so long, in an environment where even their own ostensible party-mates and allies rejected their positions?

At the apex of the Bernie Sanders campaign, the *New York Times* ran an [article](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/us/politics/bernie-sanders-campaign-history.html) entitled "Bernie Sanders’s Campaign Past Reveals Willingness to Play Hardball." It detailed some of the tactics that Sanders used to win and maintain power in Vermont, sometimes with harsh attacks on his opponents. The subtext of the coverage seemed to be that such tactics were at odds with Sanders' program or his image. But all the article really demonstrated was that the media's portrayal of Sanders as a genial hippie grandpa was at odds with his real nature as a political survivor, someone who was always interested in merging principle with power.

The final distinguishing characteristic of these left-wing survivor politicians, who have been thrust into leadership, is that they tend towards an individualistic, lone-wolf approach to politics. Bernie Sanders has spent decades as the only party-independent member of congress (despite caucusing with Democrats). Corbyn was content to tend his London district until he reluctantly agreed to pursue what he [thought](http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/15/jeremy-corbyn-world-supporters-mentors-influences) would be a doomed protest candidacy for Labour leader. And what other course would have been available, during a period when New Labour and the Democratic Leadership Council were loudly and fiercely denouncing the politics of a Corbyn or Sanders as out of date, out of style, and beyond the boundaries of respectable politics? (This is, perhaps, a neglected interpretation of Sanders' initial difficulties when confronted by Black Lives Matter activists: it wasn't just that he had some blind spot about racism, but that he was generally not used to being held accountable by a mass movement.)

And so it is that we enter a period of renewed left organizing with men like this as our figureheads. Their particular combination of idealism, ruthlessness, and iconoclasm made them well suited to the dark years of "lifeboat socialism" that they survived. These traits do not, however, make them particularly well-matched to the period we are now entering. And so we will need to find new leaders from the ranks of organizers who have been radicalized over the past decade.

In the meantime, however, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go to war with the social democratic politicians you have. Which means Bernie Sanders, who took his campaign farther than anyone could have reasonably expected, and Jeremy Corbyn, who will hopefully hold on against the inept and despicable attempts of his parliamentary peers to depose him. And hopefully we will all look back at their improbable moments in the spotlight, and see them as the early days of a better world.

Patrick Iber and Mike Konczal have an essay at [Dissent](https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/karl-polanyi-explainer-great-transformation-bernie-sanders) in which they use the Bernie Sanders phenomenon as an opportunity to explain the theories of Karl Polanyi, and what they mean for the future of progressive politics.

Polanyi was a Hungarian emigré to Vienna and later England and the United States, a veteran of the interwar period that gave us the Great Depression and the rise of fascism. His most famous work, *The Great Transformation*, was written in the 1930's and 1940's. In it, he attempted to diagnose the failures of the free-market capitalism of his time, which in his view had given rise to the reaction and war he lived through.

His central point, and the one which has been most influential on contemporary liberals, is that there has never been any such thing as an unfettered or "natural" free market. Rather, all really-existing social formations involve complex ties between people based on a variety of norms and traditions. As Iber and Konczal put it, "the economy is 'embedded' in society--part of social relations--not apart from them." For this reason, the attempt to establish unfettered and unregulated markets is doomed: "a pure free market society is a utopian project, and impossible to realize, because people will resist the process of being turned into commodities."

This is an important insight, and to this point there's not much about it that I can disagree with. The problem arises when one tries to derive a complete political strategy from this analysis. This is where I part ways with the Polanyian analysis that Iber and Konczal offer.

They suggest that the vision of "socialism" offered by Polanyi, and also by Bernie Sanders, ultimately just involves subjecting capitalism to some humane and democratic limits. They quote a passage in which Polanyi defines socialism as "the tendency inherent in an industrial civilization to transcend the self-regulating market by consciously subordinating it to a democratic society." Polanyi does not seem to think that markets or capitalist property relations could be superseded (although the later parts of *The Great Transformation* introduce some ambiguity on this point.) Capitalism will only be humanized and controlled. Iber and Konczal attribute something like this idea to Bernie Sanders: "people use democracy to change the rules governing our national political economy."

There is a long tradition, especially associated with Leninism, that rejects this program on the grounds of "reformism." According to this view, the Polanyi perspective is inadequate because it embraces reforms that ameliorate capitalism. This is taken to be a distraction from the need to build a revolutionary force that can seize state power, overthrow the ruling class, and reconstruct property relations. This is a perspective that Iber and Konczal quickly dismiss: a "traditionally Marxist idea of having the state seize the means of production" which, they say, "has been abandoned even by most who identify as socialists."

I consider myself a socialist and a Marxist, although a questionably "traditional" one. My objection to the Polanyian analysis is somewhat different, however, from the one Iber and Konczal adduce. I am very much a "reformist" in the sense that my day to day politics involves working for things like universal health care or stronger unions or a less corrupt local government. (This, it should be noted, was also true of many historical communist militants, even if they looked forward to the seizure of power as their horizon.) Where I part company with the Polanyian left--and in some ways, also the traditional Marxist left--is in where I think such struggles ultimately lead.

Some time ago, I [wrote a bit](http://www.peterfrase.com/2014/12/beyond-the-welfare-state/) about the way Polanyian ideas influence advocates and defenders of the welfare state. In response to sociologist Daniel Zamora's attack on the theory of Michel Foucault, I noted that for many left critics of neoliberal capitalism, the project of the left is conceived in Polanyian terms, and is therefore limited to the struggle to "cushion workers from the vagaries of the market, while leaving the basic institutions of private property and wage labor in place." Thus there can be nothing beyond "a welfare state that protects the working class from the workings of an unfettered market."

There are two distinct objections that I would raise against this project. One is basically normative: a world of somewhat humanized wage labor isn't the one I want to live in, even if it would be better than the one we live in now. This is rooted in the [anti-work socialist](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/04/the-politics-of-getting-a-life/) tradition, which insists that the ultimate goal of socialist politics isn't to make wage labor nicer, but to abolish it altogether. Since I've written extensively about that elsewhere, I won't repeat those arguments here.

The second objection has to do with the long-term viability of Polanyian welfare capitalism as an equilibrium within capitalism. The fundamental distinction I would make, between Marxist and Polanyian social democracy, does not have to do with debates over "reform" or "revolution". In other words, I accept the proposition that in the near term, the socialist project unfolds through incremental struggles that win material gains for workers, within the context of capitalism.

But the end point of Polanyi's socialism is really the regime that the theorist of the welfare state, Gøsta Esping-Andersen, called *welfare capitalism*. That is, it is still a society in which the means of production are privately controlled by a small elite, and most people must sell their labor to survive. It differs from unfettered capitalism because of the presence of things like unions, regulations, and social safety net programs, which partially--but never totally--[decommodify](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/06/de-commodification-in-everyday-life/) labor.

It is at this point that we discover the divide between the Polanyian perspective and the Marxist alternative I'm proposing. It all turns on the question of whether this regime is *viable*.

What is viability? A concise definition comes from the sociologist Erik Olin Wright--who comes from a Marxist background, but whose work has strong Polanyian overtones. He has worked extensively on defining ["real utopias"](https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/Published%20writing/Presidential%20address%20--%20uncorrected%20page%20proofs%20--%202012.pdf) that could be offered as alternatives to the present system. He argues that any such utopia must satisfy three criteria: desirability, achievability, and viability. The first two are what they sound like: is this where we *want* to go, and can we get there?

As noted above, I think the Polanyian vision is somewhat lacking in terms of desirability. But it would still be a step forward. And on the question of achievability, I have no real quibbles: I support reformist struggles for the welfare state because I view them as achievable, compared to the alternative strategies of building an insurrectionary communist party, or writing sectarian polemics and waiting for capitalism to collapse on its own.

Viability is where all the problems arise. Wright defines the viability question as follows: "If we could create this alternative, would we be able to stay there or would it have such unintended consequences and self-destructive dynamics that it would not be sustainable?"

Recall the definition of Polanyi socialism as the situation in which "people use democracy to change the rules governing our national political economy." Is that a stable equilibrium, acceptable to both capitalists and workers? Or is it an inherently unstable situation, one which must break toward either the expropriation of the capitalist class, or the restoration of ruling class power?

Unlike the Polanyians, I think the welfare state is, in Wright's terms, *not viable*. Unlike Wright, however, I do not think that this invalidates it as a goal. Rather, I think that socialist politics is inevitably a task of "building the crisis." And the great tragedy of postwar socialism was the perverse division of political labor it gave rise to, between revolutionaries who refused to engage with reformist politics, and reformists who were unable or unwilling to deal with the crisis that their victories inevitably produced.

So, what makes social democracy non-viable as a stable system? For this, we need to turn to the Polish economist Michal Kalecki, and his famous 1943 [essay](http://gesd.free.fr/kalecki43.pdf) "Political Aspects of Full Employment." The core insight of that essay is that economic struggles between workers and bosses are ultimately not about the size of the wage, or the stability of employment, or the generosity of benefits. They are about power.

It is possible to construct arguments showing that putting unemployed workers back to work would be good for capitalists too, in the sense that it would lead to faster growth and more profits. But as Chris Maisano explains in his [exegesis](https://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/maisano080610p.html) of Kalecki, "the biggest barriers to the maintenance of full employment are primarily political in nature, not economic."

This is because in a situation of low unemployment, workers are less afraid of what Kalecki called the "power of the sack". As they become less afraid of the boss, they begin to demand more and more of the capitalists. Unions and social democratic parties strengthen; wildcat strikes [proliferate](http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6768/when_workers_fought_back_1970s_rebel_rank_and_file). Eventually this dynamic calls into question not just profits, but the underlying property relations of capitalism itself. Welfare capitalism thus reaches what we could call the "Kalecki point," where its viability has been fatally undermined.

In that situation, employers become willing to take drastic action to get workers back into line, even at the expense of short term profitability. This takes many forms, including state-led [attacks](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/opinion/reagan-vs-patco-the-strike-that-busted-unions.html) on unions and the refusal of capitalists to invest, a ["capital strike"](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/09/the-rights-favorite-strike/) in which money is moved overseas or simply left in the bank, as a way of breaking the power of the working class.

David Harvey, in his [*Brief History of Neoliberalism*](http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Neoliberalism-David-Harvey/dp/0199283273), essentially portrays the right wing turn of the 1980's as a reactionary resolution of this crisis: a move away from the Kalecki point that entailed a restoration of capitalist class power rather than a leap into socialism. Jonah Birch provides a useful [case study](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/francois-mitterrand-socialist-party-common-program-communist-pcf-1981-elections-austerity/) of France's Mitterand government during this period, which pushed the boundaries of the social democratic compromise and was finally forced back by the power of capital. The failure of the [Rehn-Meidner plan](http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/12/22/a-visonary-pragmatist/), which was essentially a gradualist scheme to socialize the means of production in Sweden, provides a similar example.

So far I've argued that the social democratic class compromise is inherently non-viable, and tends toward conflict and crisis. But another way to look at it is that welfare capitalism can be *made* viable, but only in a way that subverts its socialist promise. This is because "the power of the sack" can be reconfigured into other kinds of disciplinary power, depending on the nature of the particular welfare capitalist regime we're talking about.

Recently, I discovered (via [Mariame Kaba](http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/)), the work of [Elizabeth Hinton](http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674737235). Hinton's work focuses on Lyndon Johnson's 1960's "Great Society" expansion of the welfare state, and its connection to the construction of the carceral state--the rise of mass incarceration and militarized policing. She shows that while the Great Society was expanding access to things like income support and health care, a simultaneous "War on Crime" was subjecting the poor, and especially the black poor, to increased surveillance and state repression. Her analysis indicates that this was not an accidental juxtaposition, but part of a cohesive reconstruction of the relationship between the state and the working class.

This is easily comprehensible in terms of the contradictory nature of the welfare state and the problem of the Kalecki point. Without the welfare state, workers are disciplined by the power of the sack--or, in situations where workers are sufficiently organized and cohesive to resist the boss anyway, by private [militias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Matewan).

In the era of the welfare state, however, the partial decommodification of labor creates a great danger to capital, because it enhances the autonomy of workers, whether employed or not, to make demands on capital and the state. It was just this recognition that drove organizers like [Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward](http://www.thenation.com/article/weight-poor-strategy-end-poverty/) to organize welfare recipients in the late 1960's.

Police violence, drug wars, mass incarceration, onerous requirements on benefit recipients: these are all ways of disciplining the worker in the era of the welfare state, in the absence of the power of the sack. This also means that struggles against police oppression and incarceration are not parallel or ancillary to class struggle and the movement for socialism, but are fundamental to it: they attack the disciplinary regime that maintains the stability of our particular regime of capital accumulation.

For the the more Polanyi-ish, and Pollyana-ish, it's possible for us all to get along in a world where workers have comfortable lives and the bosses still make money. That's the vision that seems to animate Iber and Konczal's explainer. The alternative Marxist argument is that capitalism is defined by the power struggle between workers and capital, and the Polanyian version of socialism attempts to elide that contradiction in favor of a vision of harmonious co-existence.

Where this vision fails is not in the short term but in the long run. It leaves the left ill-equipped to address the inevitable crises that a successful reformist program generates, and I would argue that the belief in the possibility of permanent class compromise contributed to the defeat of the left and the victory of neoliberalism.

So the problem isn't that we can't win reformist victories for workers. History has shown that we can. The problem is what comes *after* victory, and we need a theory of socialism and social democracy that prepares our movements for that phase.

How high is too high, for the minimum wage?

Dylan Matthews, in his [wrap-up](http://www.vox.com/2016/4/15/11436488/hillary-bernie-winners-losers-cnn) of the Democratic primary debate, says that his "off-the-record conversations with left-leaning Democratic economists" indicate that many of them "express grave concern about the $15-an-hour figure, about the danger that this time we might be going too far." His Vox colleague Timothy Lee is tagged in to make the [same argument](http://www.vox.com/2016/4/15/11436868/hillary-clinton-fights-for-15) in another post.

This despite the fact that Hillary Clinton has now apparently joined Bernie Sanders in endorsing the $15 minimum, going back on her previous unwillingness to go above $12.

And you know what? I think they might be right. It might be the case that a $15 an hour minimum wage is, as Matthews put in a (https://twitter.com/dylanmatt/status/720786520509165568), "dangerous". To which my response is: that's awesome!

The reason that bourgeois economists tend to think a high minimum wage is "dangerous" is because they think it will lead to reduced employment. This is for two reasons.

First, because if it becomes economically infeasible to hire people at $15 per hour for certain jobs, the employers may just go out of business, reducing the demand for labor. There is a large body of literature suggesting that this objection is overblown, dating back to [Card and Krueger](https://www.nber.org/papers/w4509) in the early 1990's. But it's hard to dispute that there is *some* level at which higher minimum wages will lead to reduced employment.

The second thing that could reduce employment, even if the minimum wage doesn't force any businesses to go under, is automation. If it costs $15 an hour to pay a burger-flipper at McDonalds, perhaps it will become more appealing to turn to a burger-flipping robot, of the sort offered by [Momentum Machines](http://www.businessinsider.com/momentum-machines-burger-robot-2014-8). This is a retort often thrown at living wage advocates by conservative critics: joke's on you suckers, raise your wage and we'll just automate your job!

Together, these arguments amount to a radical case *for* high minimum wages, not against them. Because they both get at the underlying political principle that should motivate any argument for higher wages: people need more money. That's completely separate from the question of whether things like low-wage fast food jobs should exist at all, which they probably shouldn't.

In other words, if $15 an hour makes it a little easier for a McDonalds worker to survive, that's great. But if it leads to some of those jobs disappearing entirely, then that forces us to confront an even bigger and more important question. Namely, how do we separate the idea of providing everyone with a decent standard of living from the idea of getting everyone a "job"? I've argued before that job-creation is a hole that we should [stop digging](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/stop-digging-the-case-against-jobs/).

The fight for 15 *should* be dangerous. I hope it is! I hope it leads to [shorter hours](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/05/eight-hours-for-what-they-will/), and a [universal basic income](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/05/curious-utopias/). That's what I'd call some real [disruptive innovation](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine).

So it seems that a Trump-related mania has led some of the leading lights of the American right to take off the gloves and reveal that it isn't just non-white working class people they hate, it's all of you dirty proles. [Kevin Williamson](https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/432569/father-f-hrer):

> The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

The proximate cause may be Trump, but there are deeper forces at work. What seems to be dawning on the right wing of our ruling class is that the people who they long ago made economically superfluous may now be politically inconvenient as well. And in that case, what good are they? A few years back, I [put it](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/) like this:

> The great danger posed by the automation of production, in the context of a world of hierarchy and scarce resources, is that it makes the great mass of people superfluous from the standpoint of the ruling elite. This is in contrast to capitalism, where the antagonism between capital and labor was characterized by both a clash of interests and a relationship of mutual dependence: the workers depend on capitalists as long as they don’t control the means of production themselves, while the capitalists need workers to run their factories and shops. It is as the lyrics of “Solidarity Forever” had it: “They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn/But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.” With the rise of the robots, the second line ceases to hold.

For a newer rendition of that argument, in more terrifying detail, you can order [my book](http://www.amazon.com/Four-Futures-after-Capitalism-Jacobin/dp/1781688133), which I will now commence shilling with tedious regularity.