The plans of the “democratic socialists” can at best bring increased living standards for the workers who are able to enter the most privileged labor strata. This strata will expand should these social-democratic policies be implemented, but the supporters of this reformist “socialism” won’t be able to claim their movement has rescued the working class. Because as long as your goal is merely to reform capitalism, rather than overthrow the capitalist state and build an actual workers state, then a large number of the working class will inevitably be left behind. Historically, a large part of this permanent underclass has been the rural poor, who remained in their position throughout the New Deal era which the socdems seek a return towards. So will be the case after the socdems return to power, except in this stage the contradictions will be far more severe.
They’ll be more severe because technology has continued to progress exponentially, meaning the capitalists must exclude more workers from employment in order to keep profits up. Machines have replaced an unprecedented proportion of human workers, and the effects from this can only be remedied by taking society beyond the capitalist mode of production. Otherwise the economy will continue to be ruled by the anarchy that’s inherent to capitalism, as Stalin explained in his rebuttal towards the logic of the Roosevelt reformists:
These Americans think they are reorganising society; objectively, however, they are preserving the present basis of society. That is why, objectively, there will be no reorganisation of society. Nor will there be planned economy. What is planned economy? What are some of its attributes? Planned economy tries to abolish unemployment. Let us suppose it is possible, while preserving the capitalist system, to reduce unemployment to a certain minimum.
But surely, no capitalist would ever agree to the complete abolition of unemployment, to the abolition of the reserve army of unemployed, the purpose of which is to bring pressure on the labour market, to ensure a supply of cheap labour. Here you have one of the rents in the "planned economy" of bourgeois society. Furthermore, planned economy presupposes increased output in those branches of industry which produce goods that the masses of the people need particularly. But you know that the expansion of production under capitalism takes place for entirely different motives, that capital flows into those branches of economy in which the rate of profit is highest. You will never compel a capitalist to incur loss to himself and agree to a lower rate of profit for the sake of satisfying the needs of the people. Without getting rid of the capitalists, without abolishing the principle of private property in the means of production, it is impossible to create planned economy.
Let’s say that ten years from now, the socdems have successfully enacted their social welfare expansions and wage increases. They’ll be able to point to improvements, but only within certain parts of the country, mainly where the urban workers are. And even inside the cities there will remain a large population that’s been permanently pushed out of a productive role; the AI job crisis has only gotten started, and this crisis emerged out of a much greater collapse anyhow. We’ll see the socdems, and the liberal technocrats who are backing them, try to create a new wave of “BS jobs”—roles that wouldn’t exist in an economy that’s actually oriented around the collective benefit, but that keep a certain layer of people busy.
Outside of the labor aristocrat bubble, America’s collapse will still be unfolding. And the U.S. empire will still be ramping up its wars, with China and Africa being the likeliest places where Washington will pivot to after it’s forced to retreat from West Asia. The metropolitan workers who have benefited from the social reforms will be by far the most susceptible to the propaganda which justifies these wars, even as we see policies like the genocidal Cuba sanctions applied to numerous other countries; there’s no limit to what committed pro-imperialists will be willing to support. Amid this rise in imperial chauvinism, the socialist organizations will be faced with a question: should they stay confined to the metropolitan centers, as they overwhelmingly have been for a long time, or should they expand outward?
This was the question that the Communist Party of China had to confront after its own favoritism towards the urban became unsustainable. Mao described this process of taking accountability for the party’s errors:
During the first period, we didn't have clear ideas about the countryside. Under the Right opportunist line of Chen Tu-hsiu, the peasants, our chief ally, were abandoned. Many of our comrades looked on the countryside as a plane rather than a solid, that is to say, they did not know how to look at the countryside from the class viewpoint. It was only after they had some grasp of Marxism that they began to adopt the class viewpoint in looking at the countryside. The countryside turned out to be not a plane, but stratified into the rich, the poor and the very poor, into farm labourers, poor peasants, middle peasants, rich peasants and landlords. During this period I made a study of the countryside and opened peasant movement institutes which ran for several terms. Though I knew some Marxism, my understanding of the countryside was not deep.
During the second period, we had to thank our good teacher, Chiang Kai-shek. He drove us to the countryside. This was a long period, a period of ten years of civil war, in which we fought against him, and thus we were obliged to make a study of the countryside. In the first few years, our understanding of the countryside was still not so deep, but later it became better and deeper. During this period the three "Left" opportunist lines which were represented successively by Chu Chiu-pai, Li Li-san and Wang Ming caused great losses to our Party, and Wang Ming's "Left" opportunist line in particular brought about the collapse of most of our Party's rural base areas.
The way that the American communist movement could fall into such left opportunism is by tailing after the socdems, and de-prioritizing the rural—even after the consequences of this practice have been made glaringly apparent. Since the 1970s, the prevailing mindset within U.S. “Marxism” has been to orbit the existing metropolitan activist spaces, without reaching into the broader masses. Because the organizations that engage in this tailism have remained inert, and have failed to capture the popular revolutionary momentum from recent years, the only option communists have had is to break out of this pattern. To start engaging in mass work with more seriousness than they have in the past, as the American Communist Party has done through its outstanding community aid efforts.
I have found that even among many Marxists who don’t want to join the ACP, there’s still a growing desire to break out of the stagnant old activist model, and pursue new innovations in what mass work means. The trajectory is towards a reinvention of the American communist movement, in ways that might very closely parallel what happened with China’s communists; the state’s counterinsurgency inherently has the upper hand in a city environment, so the police forces could end up driving the communists into the countryside like Chiang Kai-shek did. The practical realities of America’s class war are forcing more and more communists to stop pretending they’re bourgeois politicians, and start acting like actual agents of proletarian struggle.
The left opportunist model can only work for those who are part of the establishment, and have the role of arbiters for imperialist war. If your goal is to advance revolutionary politics, exclusively staying inside the metropole will only keep you weak, letting the counterinsurgency more easily crush you. This is the doom that awaits all who are unprepared; the counterinsurgency will only keep getting more intense as time goes on, even if a “progressive” president comes after Trump. This is what we can expect in a phase where the empire will keep expanding its wars indefinitely.
The way that the socdems seek to gain control of the empire is by appealing towards not just the left-leaning workers, but also the conservative workers. This is apparent from how socdems have recently been staying away from identity politics rhetoric, and focusing on economic populism. Though the socdems are aligning with these broader masses in rhetoric, and they may successfully gain support from rural America, in terms of their actual policies they’re going to remain antagonistic towards the rural masses. As well as towards the many people in the metropole who may “slip through the cracks,” and find themselves unable to gain employment as our technological upheaval accelerates.
Communists need to reach into these masses who will remain alienated from the imperial order, even if the socdems “fix” certain problems through expanded social benefits. We must build organizational structures throughout the country’s rural communities. We must bring back the American tradition of unemployment councils. We must reach the Gen Z Americans who the socdems seek to bring into the labor aristocracy, but who are in a deeply precarious position for the time being, and could remain committed revolutionaries even if they find upward mobility. The socdems want to use imperial wage bribery to neutralize the members of the “precariat,” and create a new generation of agents for the empire. But if we build an organizational base that encompasses all parts of the revolutionary masses, we’ll create a counter-force that overpowers this trend.
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