Unpacking Class-Struggle Social Democracy: An Interview with Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht
The Trouble sat down with Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht of Jacobin to discuss their book Bigger Than Bernie, the Green New Deal, and lessons mined from the second Sanders campaign.
Johnathan Guy (JG): This book was written prior to this past spring’s primaries. Knowing what we all know now—that Bernie lost, and the way in which he did—is there any part of the book you’d write differently if you were writing it today?
Micah Uetricht (MU): There are a million postmortems out there, of various uses. Some of them want to talk about individual mistakes that the campaign made. Neither Meagan nor I believe that any mistakes that were made by the campaign are the primary reason why the campaign lost. The campaign was up against incredible structural barriers within the Democratic Party, within the American political system as a whole. We had hoped that the campaign would be able to overcome some of the barriers—clearly, that hasn't been the case. We are starting the process of building the kind of movement that can overcome those barriers, and shocker, we weren't able to do it in this incredibly compressed timeframe of less than four years. So to some degree we did a lot of the right things; we just need to keep doing them and keep building the movement that was behind Bernie in these past two elections. And if we can continue doing that—do it smarter, do it better, address the mistakes that are there—then we're generally on the right track in terms of rebuilding an American left.
Meagan Day (MD): I would have liked the opportunity to explain what I think actually happened to cause Bernie Sanders to lose: in particular, the great centrist consolidation right before Super Tuesday, which was a miraculous and completely unprecedented thing to witness and has received far too little scrutiny. In fact, Pete Buttigieg performed extremely well in early primaries, and Klobuchar didn't do so badly either. Them suspending their campaigns to endorse Joe Biden, before Super Tuesday was not a normal occurrence: it actually was the Democratic Party panicking enough that it was able to overcome its own ineptitude to organize against Bernie Sanders in the 11th hour, which was an astonishing sight.
I don't believe that Micah and I went into the role of the mainstream media in any depth in the book, even though obviously that's a trap we would have included if we had known that it was going to play such a central role, especially in those last few months or weeks before Super Tuesday. There are a couple of other things that I would have liked the opportunity to explore, now that they've happened. One of which, for example, is the way that the [Nevada] culinary union ended up positioning itself against the Bernie Sanders campaign and actually tried to agitate its members against Bernie and Medicare for All. I think that dovetails really nicely with some of the stuff that we wrote about the rank and file strategy and the need to both build but also reform the labor movement to make it compatible with resurgent left politics.
JG: You endorse Chris Maisano’s strategy of the democratic road, wherein “a left government (likely over multiple contested elections) mandated to carry out a fundamental transformation of the political economy, coordinated with a movement from below to build new institutions and organizations of popular power in society.” Obviously this transformation involves the Green New Deal. We all know the rich consume far more carbon than the rest, and that, as you put it, “individualistic, consumer-focused, guilt-laced appeals” are wrongheaded on both moral and strategic fronts. Yet the aspirations of many working-class Americans (if not their current living patterns) clash with ecological limits, something that Fox News—based on its scaremongering over cars, big homes and hamburgers—knows and exploits quite well. How can the left—in its attempts to secure the mandate of “the democratic road”—convince the American working class that many of their aspirations are worth giving up for the sake of an economically secure but perhaps more materially austere future?
MD: There's been in the environmental movement for the last several decades an increasing focus on vision for less of x, y, z. And the truth of the matter is that we want less of certain things so that we can have more of other things. But a rhetorical emphasis on the “less” side of that coin is alienating to working-class people who deeply feel that what they need is more: they need more security, they need more resources, they need a greater sense of safety, they need more faith in a future for themselves and for their children. One of the reasons why the Green New Deal is a really useful and important intervention, is because it has baked into it an emphasis on more over less. It centers working class gains: we're gonna have more jobs, we're gonna have more economic stability, we're gonna have more vitality in the community that you live in.
JG: In the book you defend Bernie from those further Left who dismiss him as a dead-end social democrat. You argue that he instead practices “class-struggle social democracy,” which you define as a political style pairing social-democratic reforms with rhetoric that makes it clear that reforms are meant as just the beginning. Still, with Sanders’s frequent paeans to Scandanavian welfare states and the frequent talking point among Berniecrats that “roads and schools are socialism,” it’s clear that Bernie’s execution of the rhetorical bit was far from perfect. What lessons can future socialist politicians learn from the Sanders’ campaign about rhapsodizing class-struggle social democracy?
MU: I'll start by saying that social democracy is not the horizon of our ambitions, but we also don't think that social democracy is anything to sneeze at. Social democratic welfare states—especially of the Nordic countries, but all social democratic welfare states everywhere—are products of working-class struggle. The extent to which they've succeeded is the extent to which they've made life bearable for mass numbers of working class people. So, despite our wanting to go beyond social democracy, you'll never hear us denigrating it.
Going beyond social democracy is not just about articulating the correct political horizon or correct political slogan. Frances Fox Piven has a quote somewhere where she says the establishment does not tremble at the correctness of the movement’s slogans. The actual demands that Bernie was arguing for were not full communism, but transformed millions of people from relatively passive observers into political subjects. So class-struggle social democracy is still the strategy that future Bernies should take up; there should be an emphasis on those very basic social democratic policies that we still lack, especially Medicare for All. But there should also be an emphasis that the way we win those things is not just by electing good people who believe in those things, but by millions of people actually getting activated and creating a real working-class movement to fight for and win those things. If that's done properly, then Medicare for All won't be the horizon of that movement's political goals.
MD: There's a difference between managing expectations and tempering militancy versus actually using the same policies in a different political context to raise expectations and heighten militancy. This is a basic principle of politics that we hold dear: you have to have a good assessment of your own political context. We tried to say in the book that the struggle for reforms has always been understood as necessary for building revolutionary capacity. If you read Reform and Revolution by Rosa Luxemburg, which is often cited by revolutionary socialists, you will discover very quickly that while she is railing against reformism (a political orientation towards reforms that sees them as being stacked on top of each other until you eventually arrive at a society that's worth living) she doesn't reject at all the idea that socialists should be identifying and striving towards reforms. This is because it is in the struggle for reforms that you mobilize people, and it is in their mobilization that they develop class consciousness and confidence, skills and associations that are necessary to have a revolutionary break, if that's a part of your theory of change.
JG: That's a perfect segue into my second question on class-struggle social democracy. You write about what you call “structural reforms” and what political scientists call “policy feedback”—that is, state reforms that “if fought for strategically and won on the right terms—position us better to square off with capitalists down the line, and not get obliterated in the process.” What will it take for the Green New Deal to be a structural reform in this sense? What are the policy measures and terms of victory you envision?
MD: The story of Medicare for All is extraordinarily instructive. We should all be paying very, very close attention to it because people's healthcare situation did not change dramatically between 2015 and 2018. It didn't get significantly worse: it was bad and it stayed bad. What changed between 2015 and 2018 was that Bernie Sanders ran for president and he made Medicare for All his flagship policy demand. He knew that this was a key site of intimate hardship in the lives of working-class people, and that it would be possible to not wait for Medicare for All to be poll-tested, but to actually set it forth and to watch people's expectations rise to meet it if it was articulated well enough on a large enough platform. That is precisely what happened.
In my view, it's really a matter of not choosing demands that are so pitifully incrementalist that they don't actually inspire anybody to think differently about what is possible through politics. You know, for example, Obamacare said "We're going to make the health care markets available to you." This was just not quite ambitious enough to transform people's political consciousness, and it didn't actually create a constituency that would mobilize to fight for it. On the other hand, if we demanded an American NHS right now—something that I want for us to have—you have to be conscious of the possibility of blowing your own credibility by aiming a little bit too high, where you haven't sort of correctly gauged where the working class is at. So it's a matter of calibrating appropriately and locating demands that are ambitious enough to cause people's expectations to significantly inflate without causing them to dismiss you as promising unicorns and ponies and all that stuff. Medicare for All is kind of the gold standard right now. The Green New Deal comes in a close second, but there's still more work to do to figure out precisely how to pitch it right to the working class, whereas with Medicare for All, it seems like the primary obstacle is simply the fact that our political leaders and the industrial titans to whom they are beholden do not want the policy to pass despite overwhelming support.
MU: I think that central to our contention of what makes for good structural reform is reform that creates more class struggle rather than tamping it down. That will have to be central to winning the Green New Deal and the forces that get activated by it. We know that part of the Green New Deal has to involve creation of new union jobs and all that, but they also have to be jobs that lead people to see class struggle as the way to win better things and to make the planet livable.
JG: Let’s talk about union organizing. On one hand, you dismiss the idea that socialists should attempt “vanguardism,” which you describe as “an approach to organizing that sees ideologically committed socialists as possessors of a higher knowledge who bluntly impart that knowledge to the dumb working-class masses.” On the other hand, you argue in favor of something that sounds awfully similar, “the militant minority”. What are the differences between the militant minority and vanguardist strategies, and why should socialists embrace the former and reject the latter?
MU: There's a difference between embracing the idea of a vanguard and then what we typically associate with vanguardism, which is more like sectarian asshole-ish behavior made all the worse usually by the fact that the self-proclaimed vanguardists alienate themselves from anyone they interact with. But the very idea of a vanguard is just about leadership in the working class, and anybody who studies social movements knows there is always a leadership layer that is really important to develop within movements. The American labor movement has been no exception. If you look at an organization like Labor Notes, essentially what they're dedicated to doing is developing that militant minority—that leadership layer of the class—that can lead the way in a lot of fights, but also broadening that leadership layer, bringing in new people to also be leaders. The vision for building a militant minority is one that is capaciously democratic and that involves bringing in more people to be in those leadership roles, not fewer of them in a way that the vanguard is normally associated with.
MD: One distinguishing characteristic here of the militant minority concept is that the militant minority is a layer of workplace leaders. Not all of them are going to be coming from the socialist movement, not all of them are going to be radicals, really, of any stripe. Many of them will simply be people who want to transform their own material conditions and have developed a degree of consciousness and confidence in the process of trying to change their own conditions. The purpose of radicals and socialists in the militant minority is simply to help foster that layer.
Another way to put it is the idea that socialists and radicals in the labor movement are there not merely to change the labor movement, but also to let the labor movement change them; to actually learn the characteristics and the rhythms, the limitations and possibilities of the working class broadly and workers in whatever industry they themselves work in. It's a stance of humility, a belief that you don't have all the answers from the outset. That's something that we think is really critical to our concept of socialists and radicals in the labor movement that I think distinguishes it quite a lot from what you often see practically from vanguardists of one stripe or another, who will often sort of charge in and start dictating to working people.
JG: The nature of work in the United States has changed significantly since the time of the original New Deal. Some more pessimistic leftists argue that Fordism offered unusually fertile ground for unionization that is no longer available. Do you agree? Either way, how can socialists in the labor movement adapt their organizing to modes of work that are less skilled, more socially-atomizing, and more precarious?
MU: Maybe there were parts of the Fordist era that leaned more towards unionization than the current era that we're in. But that doesn't mean that unionization should not be central to how we organize going forward. We talk in the book about strategic industries to organize in like logistics, many of which have been extremely roboticized. And, you know, workforces have been decimated in shipping, the stevedores are out of jobs, plenty of warehouses function with robots moving the stuff around. But that's also meant that the workers that do exist, that are running the robots, actually have more strategic leverage than any individual worker of the Fordist era. So the transformations of our economy taketh away and the transformations of our economy giveth. I think that labor organizing is still going to be essential. Of course we should be fully cognizant of the ways in which it's changed. In the last few years, we have seen that organized labor still has the ability to shake the foundations of our society. The red state teachers' strikes...teachers do not have their hands directly on the levers of profit-making in the same way that a Ford factory worker does. But those strikes were still able to grind important parts of society to a halt and totally reshaped the political conversation we were having about education and about austerity and a whole range of topics. So organized labor will look very different from the Fordist era going forward, but it's still going to be crucial to changing the world.
Johnathan Guy is a graduate student at UC Berkeley studying wealth inequality, social relations, and decarbonization. He is active in Sunrise Movement and the Democratic Socialists of America. He tweets @johnathanjguy.
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