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EDITOR & PUBLISH ERBhaskar Sunkara

CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Remeike Forbes

MANAGING EDITOR

Nicole Aschoff

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Shawn Gude

ART EDITOR

Erin Schell

ASSISTANT EDITOR

Elizabeth Mahony

RESEARCHER

Jonah Walters

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

Colin BeckettLillian Osborne

OUTREACH COORDINATOR Neal Meyer

WEB DEVELOPMENT

Daniel Patterson

Citoyens

EDITORIAL BOARD

Seth Ackerman

Alyssa Battistoni

Mike Beggs

Megan Erickson

Peter Frase

Connor Kilpatrick

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Bashir Abu-Manneh

Jonah Birch

Sebastian Budgen

Liza Featherstone

Belén Fernández

Eileen Jones

Matt Karp

Cyrus Lewis

Chris Maisano

Scott McLemee

Gavin Mueller

Karen Narefsky

Catarina Príncipe

Kate Redburn

Corey RobinMiya Tokumitsu

Micah Uetricht

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Photo Attributions — Page 1 “Jeremy Corbyn” by David Hunt — Licensed under

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The German Social DemocraticParty therefore does not fight

for new class privileges and classrights, but for the abolition of classrule and of classes themselves, forequal rights and equal obligationsfor all, without distinction of sexor birth. Starting from these views,it fights not only the exploitationand oppression of wage earners insociety today, but every mannerof exploitation and oppression,

whether directed against a class,

party, sex, or race.

—The German Social DemocraticParty’s Erfurt Program ()


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ISSUE 20 WINTER 2016

Up From Liberalism

Curtis Atkins holds a h

in political science from YorkUniversity.

Mike Beggs is a Jacobin

editor and a lecturer

in political economy at the

University of Sydney.

Robert Brenner is director

of the University of California

Los Angeles’s Center

for Social Theory and

Comparative History anda member of the New

Left Review editorial board.

Jeremy Corbyn is the leader

of the UK Labour Party.

Lily Geismer is an assistant

professor of historyat Claremont McKenna

College and the author

of Don’t Blame Us: Suburban

Liberals and the Trans-

formation of the Democratic

Party .

Shawn Gude is an associate

editor at Jacobin.

Paul Heideman is a h

candidate in sociologyat New York University.

Adam Hilton is a doctoral

candidate in political science

at York University.

Premilla Nadasen is a

historian and the authorof Household Workers Unite:

The Untold Story of African

American Women Who Built

a Movement .

Leo Panitch is a professor

of political science at York

University and coeditor

of the Socialist Register .

Bhaskar Sunkara is the

founding editor and publisherof Jacobin.

Hilary Wainwright is a

coeditor of Red Pepper .

Special thanks to Michael

Gould-Wartofsky.

Contributors

ILLUSTRATIONS

Luca Yety Battaglia

ISSUE EDITOR

Shawn Gude

Jacobin · Winter


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The Makingof Jeremy CorbynHilary Wainwright

How a DemocratKilled WelfarePremilla Nadasen

Atari DemocratsLily Geismer

The Third Way

A Better Way

Up From Liberalism

Searchingfor New PoliticsAdam Hilton

The Business VetoShawn Gude

The Third WayInternationalCurtis Atkins

A Long Way to GoJeremy Corbyn

The Void Stares BackMike Beggs

ContentsIt’s Their Party Paul Heideman

The Dynamics

of RetreatRobert Brenner

The Not-SoGolden Age

Up From Liberalism


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Decades before Tony Blair and Bill Clinton took power,

Anthony Crosland posited another third way.

Crosland, a British Labour politician, gazed upon the

welfare state his party had swiftly built after World War

— the crown jewel of which was the National Health Service

— and effectively pronounced socialists’ work complete.

Even if further reforms were needed to loosen up Britain’s

famously rigid class system, Crosland wrote in , the

welfare-state-plus-full-employment mix was so widely

accepted that “the Conservatives now fight elections largelyon policies which years ago were associated with the

Left, and repudiated by the Right.”

In this changed environment, Crosland held, socialists

should let go of their traditional commitment to socializing

the means of production and focus on the present.

Up FromLiberalism

Jacobin · Winter


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Across the advanced capitalist world, social-democraticparties took his advice. They spent the postwar decades

building up their own countries’ welfare states and using

macroeconomic tools to bring about full employment and

improve living standards. But, in keeping with Crosland,

they didn’t fundamentally challenge private capital’s con-

trol over what, how, and where to produce, and for whomto produce it.

With few exceptions— the most prominent being the

Democratic Party— these center-left formations acted as

the electoral agents of a union movement whose power

derived from its militancy.

Yet zoom out, and it’s easy to see now that both were still

jostling on capital’s terrain. Sure, the postwar consensus

was premised on a labor movement sufficiently organized

and potentially disruptive enough to make business sweat

(so much so that even center-right parties expanded or

added new programs to stay electorally viable). But the

welfare state couldn’t have sucked up an increasing share

of national wealth if the captains of industry hadn’t thoughttheir profits would continue to swell.

This is where Crosland’s avowed pragmatism — we

must not confuse means with ends, he maintained —

revealed its impracticality. When economic crisis began

to swirl in the s, the roots of social democracy showed

Up From Liberalism


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themselves to be rather shallow. Full employment and anever-more-comprehensive welfare state suddenly conflicted

with the imperatives of business to turn a profit. And busi-

ness still controlled the levers of economic activity.

It was a structural dilemma that social democracy could

not solve by simply trying to weather the storm. Either

the roots had to be plunged deeper, toward a more radicalsocialism, or the entire thing would tumble.

After fits and starts, capital launched its political

response: bust unions, enact deflationary measures, allow

unemployment to rise, and roll back the welfare state.

Social-democratic parties played a central role in the

attack. In some countries, like New Zealand, center-left

formations implemented the rollbacks themselves. In most

others, they succeeded pivotal conservative governments

(like Margaret Thatcher’s), accepted the new order of

things, and took their turn privatizing and cutting.

With traditional social democracy off the table, Clinton,

Blair, and other Third Wayers pushed a new centrist pro-

gram: reform the bureaucracy and state programs tomake them run more like the private sector, abandon full

employment to render labor markets slack, weaken ties to

organized labor, and move closer to business.

The shift wasn’t to a smaller state necessarily, but a dif-

ferent kind of state— one less focused on directly providing

Jacobin · Winter


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social goods and economic security and more interestedin using government to create markets and competition

where there had been none.

For the poor and working classes, the results have been

disastrous. Stuck with stagnant wages and an indifferent

state, they tried to pad their living standards with consumer

debt even as they were more exposed to life’s vagaries.Meanwhile, center-left parties were undermining their

own basis of support. Workers increasingly stayed at home,

seeing little point in voting for or being active in forma-

tions that now resembled their center-right foes. The mass

struggles that provided the basis for both reformist and

revolutionary left politics seemed like a thing of the past.

Recent years have brought some stirrings of an alter-

native. The emergence of Jeremy Corbyn represents an

unexpected opportunity to fight for socialist ideas within

the Labour Party. And in the United States, the popular

reception to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign shows

there is a hunger among many for a politics with substance,

a politics in their class interest.Both phenomena— especially Sanders’s bid— are only

baby steps in the right direction. We’ll need a more forth-

right anticapitalist politics to go further. But there is at

last hope that Blair and Clinton’s Third Way may suffer

the same fate as Crosland’s. ■

Up From Liberalism


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THE

NOTSO

GOLDEN

AGE


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n , after decades of defeat, it might seem odd to talk about

the limits of the New Deal, much less the expansive welfare

states constructed in Europe. In fact, to hear the progressive

end of American liberalism tell it, all we need today is a return

to that less lean era, when at least many workers felt a sense of

security and stability.

Yet the original New Deal settlement was not one tilted entirely in ordinary

people’s favor—

and it housed contradictions that in time would destroy it. What would a more durable justice have looked like? And what social forces

made the New Deal and the postwar “Golden Age” possible in the first place?

In late December, Jacobin publisher Bhaskar Sunkara spoke to Robert Brenner,

a professor of history at University of California Los Angeles, about the myths

and realities of this often-romanticized period.

Bhaskar Sunkara: When people think about the New Deal, there are two main

accounts. In one of them, Franklin Roosevelt is the hero, leading a band of

workers against the big capitalists who had just driven us into an economic

depression. On the other extreme, there are those who make it seem like

Roosevelt was acting solely in the interest of elites smart enough to want tosave capitalism from itself. Which is closer to the truth?

Robert Brenner: I would say that the key to the emergence of the New Deal

reforms was the transformation in the level and character of working-class

struggle. Within a year or two of Roosevelt’s election, we saw the sudden

emergence of a mass militant working-class movement. This provided the

material base, so to speak, for the transformation of working-class conscious-

ness and politics that made Roosevelt’s reforms possible.

Following the labor upsurge and radicalization that came in the wake of

World War , workers’ militancy tailed off, and the s saw the American

The Dynamics

of RetreatThe politics that underpinned

the welfare state brought about its

very collapse.

Ian interview with

Robert Brenner

Illustration by Luca Yety Battaglia Up From Liberalism


14/124

capitalist class at the peak of its power, confi-

dence, and productiveness, in total command of

industry and politics. Manufacturing productivity

rose more rapidly during this decade than everbefore or since, the open shop (which banned

union contracts) prevailed everywhere, the

Republican Party of big business reigned

supreme, and the stock market broke all records.

The onset of the Great Depression, which

followed the stock market crash of , changed

everything. The Hoover administration had stood

paralyzed in the face of unemployment that

reached a record percent and devastated living

standards, discrediting the Republican Party for a

generation.Nevertheless, the incoming Roosevelt

administration had relatively little to offer

working people. Its signature effort, the National

Industrial Recovery Act, aimed to revive industry

by propping up capitalist prices and profits

through cartels and monopolies. But it could not

make a dent in the economic crisis.

What transformed the political landscape

beyond recognition was the outbreak of what

Rosa Luxemburg would have called a “mass strike

upsurge,” a phenomenon she had witnessed andanalyzed at the time of the revolution in

Russia and the accompanying wave of mass

strikes. Out of the blue, starting in Detroit auto

plants in spring , you got a series of ever

larger and more encompassing strikes, mobilizing

ever broader groups of workers on the shop floor

and the streets— organized and unorganized,

employed and unemployed, in an ascending wave.

Programmatic demands and ideas that seemed pie

in the sky were now, with the increase in workers

power, plausible and actionable.

The strikes soon spread to the Southern

textile mills, the Eastern coal mines, and the

Midwestern steel mills. But Roosevelt stood aside

and did nothing as the companies and the local

repressive forces crushed one strike after another.

The miracle year for the workers movement

was . Workers fought and won three great

urban general strikes: San Francisco (led by

longshore workers), Minneapolis (led by team-

sters), and Toledo (led by auto parts workers). In

these struggles, as well as a series of others that

shook cities across the nation, union organizers

built their power by reaching out to workers in

other industries, mobilizing the citizenry tosupport their picket lines, allying with unem-

ployed councils, and engaging in pitched battles

with the police.

The resulting shift in the balance of power and

in political consciousness set the stage for the rise

of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (),

the ascension of the Democrats to the country’s

dominant political party, and the passage of the

New Deal reforms.

In November , the Democrats achieved a

crushing landslide victory in the midtermcongressional elections, increasing the electoral

majority they had achieved in . Democrats at

the radical end of the political spectrum were

elected in disproportionate number, and even a

few socialists came to office. Newly active workers

entered into urban politics and joined up with the

Democrats.

Equally important, the smashing victories in

the strikes endowed the nascent radical-led

labor movement with the confidence and capacity

to organize the United Auto Workers () andthe over the next three years. Roosevelt was

transformed from a standard politician into a

reformer, the carrot and stick of the new labor

movement inducing the administration to

advocate a series of historic sociopolitical reforms

that included the Social Security Act, the Fair

Labor Standards Act (which set maximum hours

and minimum wages for most workers), and the

Wagner Act (which extended union recognition

and set up routinized collective bargaining).

To what extent did this upsurge rely on preexisting

organizations, particularly the Communist Party

(CP) and perhaps other socialist forces like the

Trotskyists and the Socialist Party of America?

I think Rosa Luxemburg’s understanding of the

social psychology of the mass strike must remain

the indispensable point of departure.

The point is that no amount of organizing can

by itself turn a situation of low activity and

Jacobin · Winter


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Red UnionsThe combined membership of the Communist-led unions and their share of the total CIOmembership in selected years.

1 9 3 9

each figured represents200,000 members ofCommunist-led unions

each figure represents200,000 members of non-Communist-led unions

1 9 4 6

1 9 4 9

1 9 4 8

Source: Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions (2002) Up From Liberalism

The Dynamics of Retreat


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For these militants, the defining principle was

the independence of the working class. This

meant, explicitly, that the new movement could

not depend on, and should expect to be opposedby, union officials, the judges who mediated

industrial disputes, and Democratic Party elected

officials.

Because it had to rely on its own members, it

had to amass power through direct action on the

shop floor and in the streets, forging ties of

solidarity with other groups of workers and

preparing itself to confront (and not be bound by

the laws of ) a state that favored the bosses.

The ensuing series of union recognition

strikes organized by these forces culminated inthe victory over General Motors (), the world’s

largest corporation, in the Flint Sit-Down

Strike of –, which ensured the establish-

ment of the .

Elsewhere, throughout the advanced capitalist

world, the trade union movement and trade union

organizing provided the basis for social-demo-

cratic labor parties. But there was no

breakthrough in the United States. What

accounts for this inability to build a workers partyindependent of the Democrats in the US?

The rise of the militant mass workers movement

of – generated the kind of political

conditions and radical consciousness that were,

and will continue to be, the prerequisite for the

formation of an American labor party.

Without this kind of struggle, the win-

ner-take-all, first-past-the-post character of the

American electoral system makes any third party,

including a labor party, all but impossible. This is

because under normal conditions, in which a thirdparty cannot conceivably secure a majority, to

vote for it is in effect to throw away your ballot.

To put the point in a more general way, an

electoral strategy of voting for a third party could

never be sustained, as the right-wing party would

typically win greater electoral majorities as the

third party increased its vote share. Only if the

third party could achieve a majority all at once,

perhaps on the back of a titanic mass movement

that brought about a sudden lurch to the left

consciousness into a mass strike upsurge, and it’s

equally difficult to sustain a wave of mass radical

activity past a certain point. When people are

incapable of taking action together to resist theiremployers, egoism, stemming from workers’

atomized condition, is the order of the day.

The unexpected and unplanned explosion of

workers’ collective action is the key to opening up

a new period of mass activity and radical politics,

and it’s no accident that the waves of mass

activity, political radicalization, and social reform

that have marked US history have taken place

discontinuously, in a cyclical fashion. Think of the

Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Great Society.

That said, organized groups of socialists andrevolutionaries have played an indispensable role

in unleashing the potential of increased worker

self-activity. They have helped provide continuity

between temporally disconnected struggles,

offered historically grounded analyses of the

current moment, and, above all, suggested

strategies for action.

The seeds of worker action during the

Depression were planted when Communist Party

and other radical trade unionists initiated the

Trade Union Educational League with the goal oftranscending the narrowness and conservatism of

American Federation of Labor () craft

unionism and establishing industrial unionism, an

idea that had come to the fore in the great strike

wave of .

Critically, Communist and Socialist Party

members and Trotskyists consolidated strategic

positions as worker leaders and worker organizers

on the shop floor in various industries in the s

and early ’s. They were therefore perfectly

positioned to play the central roles in organizing

the three great general strikes of — Commu-

nists in San Francisco, Trotskyists in Minneapolis,

followers of A. J. Muste in Toledo.

The same radical political parties and

networks of Communists, Trotskyists, and

Socialists at the heart of the general strikes

were also responsible for strategizing and

organizing a rank-and-file movement in the

and the between and .

Jacobin · Winter


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officers from the unions that would break

away to help organize the — and were at first

carried along by its militancy — fought from the

start to steer the new labor movement into thesafe confines of the Democratic Party.

These officials would come to form the heart

of the social-democratic mini party that would

operate throughout the postwar period inside the

Democratic Party.

Though also responsible for much of the

reformism the Democratic Party evinced during

the postwar epoch, they saw as their first priority

repressing insurgencies from below that might

lead to confrontations with employers that could

be risky for unions and officials’ position withinthem. With threats neutralized, the route pursued

was a safe one: use the postwar boom to (mini-

mally) pressure capital and attempt to gain union

membership by adopting the non-threatening

tactics of electoral competition, lobbying, and

collective bargaining.

Can you sketch out the transition that carried the

labor movement from the explosive peak of its

power in the mid 1930s to the more routinized

politics of the postwar era?

By summer , the movement was already in

decline, due in part to objective economic

pressures and in part to subjective political

decisions. Above all, before the middle of the year,

the economy was sinking into the “second

depression,” and skyrocketing unemployment was

having a devastating impact on worker

combativeness.

Well before this time, however, the newly

installed officialdom of the had moved to

pacify the unruly movement. The ink had barelydried on the historic contract granting union

recognition when the new leaders of the

prevailed upon militants to refrain from seeking

better terms elsewhere in the auto industry, in

order to avoid undermining weaker companies’

competitiveness and profitability. Simultaneously,

these same officers moved to repress the tsunami

of sit-ins and wildcat strikes that shop-floor

militants, emboldened by their victory at , had

unleashed.

among a large section of the citizenry, would it

have a chance of succeeding. Otherwise, dull

electoral calculation ensures the hegemony of the

two-party monopoly. At the founding convention of the in

, the membership actually did seek to exploit

the broad radicalization taking shape and refused

to support Roosevelt and the Democrats, seeing

them as representatives of capital. But this

political act of defiance could not be sustained for

more than a brief moment and, before long, the

and the more generally had committed

themselves to the Democratic Party on a perma-

nent basis.

From this time on, the Democrats became theparty of labor in this limited sense— of the trade

union movement, but one in which the labor

movement was from the start subordinate to

capitalist elements.

What have been the consequences of not having a

viable independent labor party?

Well, one thing should already be clear. There is

no need for a labor or social-democratic party to

win important reforms. The mass working-class

upsurge brought by itself a sufficient increase in

working-class political power and sufficient

leftward movement of working-class conscious-

ness to oblige the Roosevelt administration to

shift its political position and pass reform

legislation.

The same groups of Communists, Trotskyists,

socialists, and syndicalists that provided most of

the leadership for the general strikes and the

mass workers movement were also behind the

fight for the labor party. They saw this as the

culmination of their program of creating anindependent rank-and-file movement for indus-

trial unionism. In their eyes, the labor party would

form the political carapace for the emergent .

In sharp contrast, the social layer that

typically formed the core of social-democratic

parties— labor officialdom— was completely

absent from the struggle for the labor party. The

trade union leaders of the established were at

all times implacably opposed to it. And even those

Up From Liberalism



18/124

bourgeoisie.” In the US, this meant linking up

with Roosevelt, the Democratic Party, and the top

officials in both the and unions.In effect, the militants subordinated

themselves to the emerging layer of top officials,

who saw as their highest priority winning

acceptance for the new union federation from

employers as well as the state, even if that meant

undermining the only real source of union power.

So the trade union officials, as well as the party

politicians, undermined the very social forces on

which those organizations were based and which

enabled them to extract gains from capital andthe state.

Yes. The rise of this militant mass movement

threw up a new cadre of radical leaders, while also

turning a section of the old official leadership into

radicals, at least for a moment. But as the mass

movement began to dissipate, the same leaders

looked around them and saw that they were in

danger of being squeezed between a capitalist

class on a warpath and a union membership

The coup de grâce came shortly thereafter,

when leaders John L. Lewis and Philip

Murray ordered their organizers to “trust inRoosevelt” in their campaign to organize the steel

industry. The break from the hitherto prevailing

strategy of rank-and-file independence could

hardly have been more evident. The outcome was

the Memorial Day massacre, in which the Chicago

Police Department, headed by Democratic mayor

Ed Kelley, shot and killed ten unarmed demon-

strators and wounded thirty more in May ,

leading to the crushing defeat of the embryonic

United Steel Workers union.

It was the effective end of the mass strike

movement of the s and marked what was, in

retrospect, the stunningly rapid consolidation

of a new bureaucracy. This development was

made possible by the shift taking place in the

Communist Party’s political line internationally.

After being directed by Stalin’s Comintern,

the party switched from a program of work-

ing-class independence and self-organization to

the so-called Popular Front line, which called for

an alliance with “the progressive wing of the

Dealbreakers

The California Farmworkers

Strike of 1933 was among

the most important strikes

in the history of American

agriculture, affecting

springtime harvests from the

pea fields of Santa Clara

to the cotton estates in the

San Joaquin Valley. 47,500workers participated in strikes

on approximately 30 farms

during that spring.

The Textile Workers Strike

of 1934 began in northern

mills but quickly spread

to textile workers in the mid-

Atlantic and southern states

as workers across the

country protested industry-

wide “stretch outs,” which

increased output by assigningmore looms to individual

workers. The strike involved

400,000 workers and lasted

twenty-seven days.

The Pacific Coast Waterfront

Strike of 1934 paralyzed the

West Coast shipping industry

when 32,000 dockworkers

struck to oppose dangerous

speed-ups and unfair job

selection. Striking workers

repulsed attacks from scabs,

hired strikebreakers, and theNational Guard for four

months, eventually inspiring

a four-day general strike

in San Francisco in solidarity.

The New Deal era saw some of the biggest strikes

in American history.

Jacobin · Winter


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Still, it should not be forgotten that the major

pieces of legislation that marked the high point of

reform in the s and early s could not

have been passed in the absence of the pressurefrom below from the great social movements of

the period— especially the black struggle and the

fight against the war in Vietnam.

This trajectory doesn’t seem that much different

from that of European social-democratic parties.

Obviously, the Democratic Party is a capitalist

party, but labor parties, even without representa-

tives of capital in their own ranks, also faced

similar constraints. What price has the US

working class faced for its failure to win a properlabor party?

I think the way to answer this question is to

compare developments in Europe, say England,

and the United States in the years after World

War . In the United Kingdom, you have a

tremendous mass mobilization behind the war

effort, but by the end of the conflict, people are

exhausted, tired of the austerity, and expecting

major improvements in living standards.

The British Labour Party is thus able to win a

smashing landslide electoral victory in which it is

seen to be representing the aspirations not only of

the working class but of the citizenry more

generally. In the US, at the same time, the

Democratic Party is able to sustain its electoral

dominance. What’s the difference in the outcome

in the two places?

The advantage possessed by the labor and

social-democratic parties of the UK and Western

Europe over the Democratic Party is that they not

only could present themselves as representing

what were more or less politically unified labormovements, but, by way of electoral mobilization

and victory, legitimately speak for a broader base

across the whole citizenry.

They were therefore in a position to fight in

the name of the entire populace for social reforms

that spoke to what were in fact common interests

and on that basis, to secure decisive advances for

everyone— health insurance, retirement pension

support, unemployment protection. These

Meanwhile, they did everything they could

to disrupt rank-and-file mobilization. It was

a strategy that, over time, could not but corrode

the power and effectiveness of their ownorganizations.

If the paradox of these reformist elements was

that their whole political approach tended to

destroy the very forces that provided them with

their power, how does one account for their

successes in the postwar period?

Well, though few now recall this, it was probably

the consensus view that, with the end of World

War , disarmament and the deep decline inmilitary spending would bring a drop off of

demand that would return the economy to

recession or even depression. Under such

conditions, the prospects for a labor movement

that had already seen its power fall off precipi-

tously seemed bleak.

But very unexpectedly in the eyes of many,

what one got instead was the greatest economic

expansion in capitalist history, and this provided

the US version of social democracy, inside the

Democratic Party, with a new lease on life.

In the United States, as throughout the

advanced capitalist economies, the growing

surpluses provided by the postwar boom opened

the way for workers to enjoy increasing wages and

a growing welfare state without much cutting into

profits. Employers, for their part, found that they

could better maximize profits by granting workers

steady gains in the interest of continuous produc-

tion, rather than redistributing income in their

favor at the cost of disruptive strikes and social

disorder.

In this situation, the Democratic Party, like itssocial-democratic counterparts abroad, was able

to maintain their position as the dominant party

for another quarter century by presenting

themselves as the main advocate of labor and

social reform, naturally within the strict limits set

by the needs of profit and investment. The

Republicans, for their part, had no choice but to

compete with the Democrats on the latter’s

chosen ground, in what was inevitably a subordi-

nate position.

Jacobin · Winter


21/124

But the center-left parties of Europe were also

unable to defend living standards and working

conditions.

The bottom line is that the deep decline in the

rate of profit, beginning in the late s and early

s, and the subsequent failure of its recovery,

destroyed the precondition for the wage gains and

welfare state reforms sought by trade unions and

social-democratic parties.

Union officials and parliamentary politicians

at the heart of all these organizations, no less than

the Democratic Party, accepted unconditionally

the capitalist system. They accepted without

question that their top priority must be the

restoration of their corporations’ profitability.

This is because without a sufficient increase in

“their” corporations’ rate of return, these compa-

nies could not be expected to increase the invest-

ment and employment needed to accommodate

adequate wage gains, direct and indirect, for their

members.

It’s not surprising, then, that just like the

Democrats, social-democratic parties across the

advanced capitalist world moved over the past

three decades to repress demands from their

memberships for increased compensation andsocial welfare benefits in order to push up profits.

The first manifestation of falling profitability

and the slowdown of capital accumulation in

Western Europe came in the s. In virtually

every country trade union officials, as well as

associated social-democratic and labor parties,

responded by approving government and

corporate cutbacks of various sorts. The aim was

to restore international competitiveness and, in

turn, manufacturing profitability, at the expense

of labor.But this acceptance of the need for workers to

make sacrifices to restore corporate treasuries did

not go unchallenged. All across Europe— from

Germany to France to Italy to the UK— rank-

and-file workers unleashed major revolts from

below against the party political and trade union

bureaucratic forces that had demanded givebacks

in the interest of revitalizing capital

accumulation.

provisions came, in retrospect, to be viewed as

human needs and have been as a result quite

difficult to roll back.

In the US, similar reforms were also adopted,and in a big way. But they were won and put into

practice not by national political parties seeking

to construct a welfare state benefiting everyone

and financed out of taxation, but by individual

trade unions who extracted them from employers

and got them inserted into union contracts as

employee benefits.

So the , the United Electrical Workers,

the United Steel Workers, and the other major

unions all negotiated what you might call “mini

welfare states” for their members. These benefitswere then extended to much of the rest of the (less

organized) working class, as employers’ costs

were more than made up for by gains derived

from continuous production and labor peace.

By the early s, the panoply of welfare

advances that had been won by way of union

contracts had been substantially supplemented by

the major pieces of social legislation enacted

under Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. And here, too,

the union officialdom, working largely though the

Democratic Party, rather than as in Europethrough social-democratic or labor parties, were

central agents of reform— although they could

not have succeeded to the extent that they did

without the mass movements of the time.

But the fact remains that the failure of the US

working class to create its own labor party had

undeniably major negative consequences. The US

welfare state— constructed largely in an ad hoc

manner through the efforts of multiple individual

unions acting for themselves— was significantly

less complete and durable than that brought into

being by unified working-class parties elsewhere.

Moreover, because they had to be defended by

the individual unions that had initially secured

them, the reform measures attained in the US

were also significantly more vulnerable to being

rolled back once the crisis hit than in much of the

rest of the advanced capitalist world.

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22/124

I do think it’s clear today that, short of the

overthrow of the capitalist order, there were

powerful economic and political pressures that

make it unsurprising that we’ve ended up where

we are.On the one hand, the economic responses of

capital itself to its profitability problem have only

made things worse. The reduced rate of return has

decreased the incentives for capitalists to invest

and employ. It has, at the same time, motivated

capital and the state to cut back on the growth of

compensation and social spending so as to jack up

profits by reducing the cost of production. The

outcome has been ever-slower growth in demand

for investment goods, consumer goods, and state

services, and this has put further downward

pressures on the rate of return.

The political responses by social-democratic

and labor parties, as well as of the Democratic

Party, have been similarly self-undermining. For

these forces, the acceptance of the inviolability of

capitalist property and profitability has made a

break from austerity unthinkable.

Nevertheless, the resulting continuation of

the plunge in aggregate demand has meant that

protecting corporations’ rate of return has

In Germany, there was a wave of unofficial

strikes that completely destroyed the policy of

wage restraint backed by the Social Democrats. InFrance, there was May ’; in Italy, the Hot

Autumn of . In England, the miners strike

brought down the government.

This surge of working-class resistance did

slow the employers’ offensive and the revival of

profitability. But the deep recession of –

brought a major reversal, specifically a major

increase in unemployment that sapped worker

energy and reduced combativeness. The way

was thus opened to round after round of wage

restraint and spending cuts that, sooner or

later, received the backing of the official social-

democratic and labor leaderships in every

country.

Did it all have to collapse? Was there a reformist

path out of the contradictions that you’re talking

about? Or can we say that, unless there had been

some kind of anticapitalist break sometime in the

1970s, we were unlikely to prevent the situation

we’re suffering through today?

When the GoingGets Tough

Rate of Returnon Capital

for Nonfinancial

Corporations

% By the 1970s, the postwarboom seemed to be over.

Source: Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the

Future of American Politics (1986)

Jacobin · Winter


23/124

the purses of a handful of financiers. This is ever

more obvious to ever larger sections of the

population. These background conditions could

help us see a break to the left of a traditionalreformism that has all but given up the fight for

reforms.

It’s extremely important, it seems to me, that

Bernie Sanders goes from one place to another

getting thirty thousand people at meetings. And

Jeremy Corbyn the same. These are very

important indicators of a changing ground, so to

speak, for actual organizing.

And even without this organizing, what’s great

about Corbyn and Sanders is the seemingrejection of the whole political scene by their

supporters.

The mass upsurges of – focused on the

squares in Greece and Spain already posed the

need to cleanly break to the left, beyond social

democracy, and begin to challenge capitalism

from a position of direct democracy. But they

were never able to mobilize the strength to force

through major reforms from the outside in the

manner of the US labor rebellion of the mid s,

let alone constitute institutions of workers power

like factory committees.

Syriza and Podemos did aim to take power,

but they have defined taking power almost

entirely in electoral terms and failed entirely to

carry through the indispensable task of rebuilding

mass movements in factories, offices, and the

streets. As a result, their tendency has been to

replace a financialized and neoliberalized social

democracy with the traditional version, despite

the fact that for close to forty years the latter has

capitulated ever more completely to austerity.Today we face a bit of a lull, but it is not

indicative of defeat. It seems clear to me that

alienation from and opposition to the system is

growing rapidly. What needs to be pondered is

where the new movements are going to come

from and what the form of organization is going

to be that can sustain the level of militancy and

political innovation needed to challenge

capitalism. ■

become ever less compatible with even the most

minimal increases in wages or social spending and

has seemed to require their absolute reduction.

It’s because the operation of the financialsector makes possible the most extreme and

dramatic upward distributions of income— to the

top percent, above and away from almost

everyone else— that the turn to finance has been

so widespread. It appears, for those who have

access, to be the most effective way to protect and

increase capitalist profits, the sine non qua for

everyone and everything under the prevailing

more of production. That financial expansion goes

together with increasingly severe financial-

economic meltdowns, as well as absolute declinesin income for increasingly large sections of the

population, is understood to be the unavoidable

cost of keeping the economy healthy.

That social-democratic parties of Western

Europe, as well as the Democratic Party, have not

hesitated to throw in their lot with the financial

sector seems superficially paradoxical. But it

follows logically from their unwillingness to

question capitalist property relations and their

acceptance, like every other player in the capi-

talist political game, of the primacy of profits forthe dynamism of the economy and thus work-

ing-class living standards. Acknowledging that

the ascent of finance today is part and parcel of

the descent of workers’ incomes is simply to

accept the unavoidability of what is seen as

collateral damage.

Still, the fact remains that the willingness of

official social democracy and labor to ally with

financial capital has enormous implications for

politics going forward, as it is creating real

openings for resistance. Support for capitalist

profitability has always been justified by the

apparent requirement of rising surpluses for

rising investment and rising living standards. But

today, with the expansion of the financial sector,

the link between profits, growth, and worker

compensation has been broken to a significant

degree.

Reformist forces have thus become engines of

predation overseeing the massive transfer of

income from the pockets of millions of workers to

Up From Liberalism



24/124


25/124

n , there were few things that Students for a Democratic

Society and Barry Goldwater agreed on.

was becoming a key voice of a new wave of American

radicalism, and the organization’s veterans would go on to shape

the US far left for decades. In much the same way, backers of

Goldwater’s failed presidential campaign that year would eventually become

key figures in the new Republican Party, turning it into a proselytizer for free-

market fundamentalism whose vigor was matched only by the evangelical

commitments of its new voting base.Though the future trajectories of and the Goldwater campaign were

unknown at the time, in they were already implacable opponents. , con-

vinced of the threat Goldwater represented, reluctantly agreed to campaign for

his opponent, Lyndon Baines Johnson, with the slogan “Half the way with LBJ.”

Yet and Goldwater did find themselves in agreement on one central

question in American politics: the place of the South. Historically a one-party

region controlled entirely by segregationist Democrats known as the Dixiecrats,

the successes of pro–civil rights forces inside the national Democratic Party had

thrown the region’s alignment into question.

For Goldwater, it was obvious that these reactionaries belonged inside

his emerging Republican coalition. Speaking before an audience of Georgia

Republicans, the candidate assured them that he “would bend every mus-

cle to see that the South has a voice in everything that affects the life of

the South.”

In a time of federal civil rights laws, and the use of federal troops to enforce

school desegregation, this kind of appeal to regional self-determination had a

clear meaning. And the rationale for such an overture was equally obvious —

black voters were not about to abandon the Democrats, and as such, the should

“go hunting where the ducks are.”

Strangely enough, agreed. In the Port Huron Statement, the

defining manifesto produced by the group, they called for “the shuttling of

It’s Their

Party A generation ago, socialists and civil

rights activists tried to transform the

Democratic Party. Why did they fail?

IPaul

Heideman

Illustration by Luca Yety Battaglia Up From Liberalism


26/124

Southern Democrats out of the Democratic Party.”

It went on to comment specifically on Goldwater,

musing that

It is to the disgrace of the United States that

such a movement should become a prominent

kind of public participation in the modern

world — but, ironically, it is somewhat to the

interests of the United States that such a move-

ment should be a public constituency pointed

toward realignment of the political parties, de-

manding a conservative Republican Party in

the South.

was hardly alone on the Left in welcoming such

a shift. From liberals to socialists, the attempt topush the Dixiecrats out of the Democratic Party

was widely held to be a necessary step in the proj-

ect of building a more equal country, allowing the

Democrats to become a party more like those of

European social democracy.

Things did not exactly work out this way. The

defection of the South to the Republicans coin-cided with the conservatization of the Democrats,

and, in some accounts, even laid the foundation for

the reemergence of the Republicans as a majority

party. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to dismissthe advocates of the realignment perspective, who

included both liberals like Walter Reuther of the

United Automobile Workers () and radicals

like Bayard Rustin, as deluded or shortsighted in

their strategy.

Indeed, their project was based on an analysis

of American society whose level of sophistication

and scale of ambition puts much of progressive

thought today to shame. And, unlike most recent

projects of the US left, it succeeded. Though many

revolutionary leftists dismissed the possibility at

the time, the Dixiecrats really were driven from the

Democratic Party, even if the consequences of that

exodus were not what and other radicals had

expected they would be.

Ultimately, the realignment strategy repre-sented one of the high points of the struggle for

social democracy in the United States. For a time,

it seemed possible to transform the Democrats into

a social-democratic party. The failure of this project

should not be taken as a verdict on the failure of

social democracy as a strategy. Its history does, how-

ever, contain lessons for adherents of that strategy

today, as well as for socialists looking beyond it.

The Strategy

The strategy of realigning the Democrats by pushing

out the Dixiecrats and creating a party run by a lib-

eral-labor coalition was backed by much of the union

leadership and social movements at the time. Figures

from Walter Reuther to Martin Luther King Jr no-

ticed that the Democratic Party contained within

it both the most liberal forces in official American

politics, like Hubert Humphrey, and the most re-

actionary, like Strom Thurmond.The idea that the latter could be forced out, and

that the party could be hegemonized by the former,

was an attractive one that gained plausibility as the

incipient civil rights insurgency intensified the con-

tradiction between the two groups. By the early

s, realignment was the implicit strategy guiding

the work of many of the leaders of the national Civil

Rights Movement.

Inside the movement, the most important par-

tisan of realignment was Bayard Rustin, perhaps the

most talented organizer the US left ever produced.Rustin had been, among other things, a Young Com-

munist, a pacifist, and an organizer for A. Philip

Randolph’s March on Washington Movement for

civil rights.

By the s, he was a well-known figure. When

the Montgomery Bus Boycott began in , Rustin

quickly headed down to Alabama, becoming a key

advisor to Martin Luther King Jr. A few years later,

Rustin would become the main organizer behind

the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Rustin was a tireless advocate of realignment.

He consistently argued that black Americans had

to secure real political power in order to achieve

equality. The only way to do this, he asserted, was

by transforming the Democratic Party. Traditional

methods of protest were insufficient:

We have to look at political parties differently

than we look at other institutions, like segre-

gated schools and lunch counters, because a

political party is not only the product of social

Jacobin · Winter


27/124

relations, but an instrument of change as well.

It is the Dixiecrats and the other reactionaries

who want to paralyze the Democratic Party in

order to maintain the status quo....

If we only protest for concessions from with-

out, then that party treats us in the same way

as any of the other conflicting pressure groups.

This means it offers us the most minimum con-cessions for votes. But if the same amount of

pressure is exerted from inside the party using

highly sophisticated political tactics, we can

change the structure of that party.

Later in the decade, Rustin’s insistence that black

insurgents orient themselves around official poli-

tics in the US would bring him into direct conflict

with the nascent expressions of black power, and he

would eventually become one of its most prominent

black critics. In the early s, however, he was still

moving with the general current of black protest.

His position on realignment was similarly pop-

ular in left milieus. In , Reuther declared his

intention to “bring about a realignment and get the

liberal forces in one party and the conservatives in

another.” And the Mississippi Freedom Democratic

Party, who famously attempted to unseat the seg-

regationist delegation from their state at the

Democratic Party convention, was in part motivated

by the same perspective.

1960 Presidential Election



Kennedy

NixonByrd

Johnson

Goldwater

Humphrey

Nixon

Wallace

How the SouthWas LostAfter signing the 1964Civil Right Act, Lyndon B.Johnson told an aide,“We have lost the Southfor a generation.”That would prove to bean understatement.

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Looking back on their effort, Student Nonviolent

Coordinating Committee () and orga-

nizer Cleveland Sellers recalled that

We were thinking far beyond Atlantic City. If

our venture there was successful, we intended

to utilize similar tactics in other Southern

states, particularly Georgia and South Carolina.

Our ultimate goal was the destruction of the

awesome power of the Dixiecrats, who con-

trolled over 75 percent of the most important

committees in Congress. With the Dixiecrats

deposed, the way would have been clear for a

wide-ranging redistribution of wealth, power,

and priorities throughout the nation.

Realignment’s embrace by such a wide variety of

progressive forces belies its rather obscure origins.

Before Reuther and Rustin threw their considerable

skills behind the strategy, it was being promoted

by a little-known but key figure in the history of

American radicalism: Max Shachtman.

Shachtman was the leader of a heterodoxTrotskyist grouping that, although small, had helped

lead important struggles in an earlier era, such as

the fight against the no-strike pledge, enforced by

both the Congress of Industrial Organizations ()officialdom and the Communist Party during World

War .

Shachtman had come to the position that the

advance of the American workers movement was

dependent on the formation of a labor party, and

looked to union leaders like Reuther as the incip-

ient nucleus of such a party. During the late s,

Shachtman and his associates attempted, unsuccess-

fully, to convince Reuther and other left-wing labor

leaders to break from the Democrats and start such

an organization.

By the late s, it had become clear that a split

was not on the agenda. Even before the reuni-

fication of the American Federation of Labor ()

and the — in which progressives like Reuther

took a back seat to the new organization’s head, the

apostle of business unionism, George Meany— the

labor movement had grown more conservative.

At the same time, the development of civil rights

insurgency raised the possibility that a right-wing

split from the Democrats, led by the Dixiecrats,

CivilRights

Policy AreaSouthern Democrats

10%

81%

81%

68%

73%

42%

Non-Southern Democrats

72%

87%

89%

77%

84%

85%

Republicans

77%

22%

32%

25%

30%

26%

Fiscal

Planning

Regulation

WelfareState

Labor

Average Left Bloc Votingby Policy Area, 1933–1950

All in theFamily

At the mid-century mark, Democratsof all stripes aligned closelyon most policy questions, exceptcivil rights and labor.

Source: Limiting Liberalism: The Southern Veto in Congress,

1933–1950, Political Science Quarterly (1993)

Jacobin · Winter


29/124

both the significance of this split, and why it failed to

transform American politics in the way the theorists

of realignment thought it would, requires examining

the forces responsible for assembling the modernDemocratic Party.

The pre–New Deal Democratic Party was in

many ways a regional party, based in the Solid South

with support from urban political machines in the

North. Virtually the entire business class supported

the Republicans, the default party of government

for the first three decades of the twentieth century.

All of this changed during the Great Depression.

Faced with a crisis of unprecedented severity and

longevity, the political unity of the American cap-

italist class fractured. A large segment abandonedthe Republican Party, whose traditional economic

policies of protectionism and anti-labor repression

had failed to halt the downturn. This section of cap-

ital, though wary of labor’s growing power, wasopen to the reforms promised by Franklin Delano

Roosevelt, and became a key base of support for his

administration.

The split within the capitalist class was not

merely the result of differing approaches toaddressing the crisis — as Thomas Ferguson has

argued, it was also rooted in the political economyof American industry. The firms that supported

Roosevelt were, by and large, from two groups:

capital-intensive industries who were interna-

tionally competitive, and internationally-oriented

commercial banks. Both groups strongly supported

Roosevelt’s affinity for free trade. But even more

importantly, they were better able than other sec-

tions of American capital to bear the costs of reform.

A major swath of New Deal reforms— from the

public employment programs to unemployment

insurance — tightened labor markets by giving

workers options other than either starving or toiling

at the price capital would pay. Other measures, such

as legislation compelling firms to recognize unions,

made it easier for already-employed workers to bid

up their wages.

For labor-intensive sectors, such as textiles

or agriculture, wage-boosting reforms seemed to

have near-apocalyptic ramifications. But for capital-

intensive industries, such as oil, the consequences of

higher wages were not nearly so dire— labor costs

might be more likely than a left-wing one. Theway might then be clear, Shachtman reasoned, for

labor and its liberal allies to take over the party,

transforming it into something like a Europeansocial-democratic party.

Shachtman’s thinking gained influence through

the efforts of his followers, most importantly Michael

Harrington. Harrington had joined Shachtman’s

group in the early s and, as the leader of the

party’s youth section, quickly became a prominent

member.

Hard-working, intelligent, and charming, Har-

rington gained influence in left-liberal circles, writing

for Dissent magazine and becoming chairman of the

League for Industrial Democracy, out of which would be born. He befriended Rustin in the mid

s and forged an alliance between the older civil

rights activist and Shachtman’s milieu. Together, the

three men worked to build a broad consensus in the

American left around realignment.

The material conditions supporting such a

strategy certainly existed. What political scientists

have called “the Southern veto” had effectively

blocked efforts to secure progressive legislation

around race or labor at the national level. Moreover,

the Dixiecrats had prevented the Democrats fromassuming a coherent political identity as the party

of American liberalism.

Thus, the partisans of realignment held, even

if the exit of the Dixiecrats cost votes in the short

term, it would allow liberals and labor to run the

party unopposed, finally creating a national political

party unambiguously committed to a left agenda.

The Party of Which People?

The realignment strategy was powerfully attractive

because it seized on major tensions in American po-

litical life in a way that connected political realities

with radical ambitions. Unlike most left strategies

today, it began neither with individual action ori-

ented, somehow, toward social transformation nor

with visions of social transformation disconnected

from the grubby reality of society as it exists.

Instead, it latched onto what was arguably the

key political fracture in the postwar period: the split

at the center of the Democratic Party. Understanding

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of disrupting through nonviolent civil disobedi-ence put the federal government on the defensive,

the endless stories of white supremacist brutality

proving troublesome for the US’s efforts to gaininfluence in the decolonizing world. The interests

of the Southern ruling class had been throw into

conflict with those of the wider ruling class.

The Realities of Realignment

The tension developed into a chasm, and then a split.

But not only did the Democratic Party move to the

right in the decade or so following the departure of

the Dixiecrats, some argue it was precisely the exit of

working-class whites from the “New Deal coalition”that paved the way for such a shift.

So why didn’t the outcome that Rustin and his

cothinkers sought come to pass? Explanations that

focus on factors like the voting behavior of the white

working class are ultimately too superficial to explain

the sea change in American politics since the s.

It is instead necessary to attend both to the realign-

ment strategy’s evolution, and to the same kinds of

political-economic forces that made the odd coali-

tion of Northern liberals and Southern reactionaries

possible in the first place.Legend has it that, in , Lyndon Johnson

told an aide that his signing of the Civil Rights Act

had given the South to the Republicans “for a gen-

eration.” What Johnson saw with trepidation the

partisans of realignment celebrated.

Of course, the Dixiecrats did not leave the party

in one fell swoop. Many of the most prominent

among them, such as James Eastland, remained

Democrats until the end of their careers. Nonethe-

less, was a turning point. In the election,

only the independent segregationist candidacy of

George Wallace kept Republicans from sweeping

the South. The way had been cleared, it seemed, for

a liberal-labor coalition to begin turning the Demo-

cratic Party around.

The advocates of realignment had little time to

savor their victory, however. Other developments

in American politics put increasing strain on both

their strategy and coherence as a political current.

Ultimately, these developments all flowed from

the escalation of the war in Vietnam — by the late

constituted a smaller share of their overall bill. For

these businesses, the ameliorative programs of the

New Deal were a sounder bet than either continued

stagnation, or, even worse, the prospect of a revo-lutionary labor movement.

The South fit only awkwardly into the agenda of

reform-minded capital. With a still heavily agricul-

tural economic base, run largely on coerced black

labor, Southern politicians were, at best, lukewarm

toward the New Deal’s pro-labor reforms. Indeed,

they worked furiously to secure exceptions that

would allow them to keep their labor force as it was.

This helped ensure that the benefits of the NewDeal would flow disproportionately to workers in

the North.Southern politicians were, however, far friendlier

to aspects of Roosevelt’s program that dispropor-

tionally benefited the South: the mushroomingsubsidies to groups like agricultural producers and

federal works programs that attempted to renovate

the infrastructure of the country’s more backward

areas. This Southern politicians could get behind

— but the Republican Party, still committed to bal-

anced budgets, was unlikely to endorse.

The modern Democratic Party, then, was born of

a strange marriage, between the most advanced andreform-minded sections of American capital and the

most economically backward section of the country.

What united them was their support for economic

policies that went far beyond what capital had pre-

viously been willing to stomach, from subsidies to

regulation to forays into state planning.

This unity of interests, however, was accom-

panied by real tensions, particularly over civil

rights and labor. Initially, civil rights was theless potent of the two. Before the late s, the

national Democratic Party had done little that

would upset Southern sensibilities. Instead, clashes

centered around labor, with Southern legisla-

tors playing a key role in both blocking pro-labor

legislation and passing repressive bills like the Taft-

Hartley Act.

As the s progressed, however, and the

movement for black equality gained in strengthand scope (at the same time the labor movement was

beginning its long decline), race moved to the fore as

the party’s key fault line. The movement’s strategy

Jacobin · Winter


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working-class fighters”), as well as the various counter-

insurgency regimes installed in South Vietnam. For

Rustin, the compromise was more difficult, as he

continued to support a negotiated end to the war inprivate, and defended Martin Luther King’s public

opposition to it.

Still, Rustin ultimately maintained a coalition

with pro-war forces like the - for prag-

matic reasons. He refused to support any part of

the antiwar movement, and went out of his way to

attack antiwar spokespersons. He also tempered his

longstanding opposition to racism in the labor move-

ment, declaring, “I myself am, in my own capacity,

committed to end the vestiges of discrimination in

the trade union movement, but I absolutely refuseto conduct the battle along lines that will ultimately

injure the labor movement.”

The result was that Rustin, Shachtman, and their

supporters effectively stopped trying to remakethe Democratic Party at all— they simply became

backers of its leadership. Meany and the -

officialdom were, on the whole, perfectly happy with

Johnson’s performance as president. Moreover, as it

became clear that those attempting to build a more

left-wing Democratic Party were largely motivated

to do so by Johnson’s prosecution of the war, theserealignment proponents began spending more time

opposing those trying to change the party than trying

to change it themselves.

New Politics

Not all realignment supporters were willing to fol-

low this strategy. Led by Michael Harrington, a sec-

ond group maintained its intention of remaking the

Democratic Party in the image of the liberal-labor

coalition. Their struggles to do so took them into the

heart of the party — and, despite opposition from

their former comrades, they managed to secure some

real changes in party structure.

But the reforms did little to change the funda-

mental nature of the Democratic Party, and, in the

context of the s economic crisis, weren’t enough

to prevent it from moving even further to the right.

The first victory for Harrington came in the early

s, when the Democratic Party implemented a

series of reforms intended to open up the party and

s, one of the central issues in American politics.

While it might seem that, for the group of socialists

and pacifists pushing realignment, the war would

hardly be a cause of internal discord, it produceda major schism.

To understand how this could be, it is useful to

recall the view of Shachtman and other realignment

advocates that labor officials like Walter Reuther

were potential leaders of a nascent American social

democracy. As Shachtman and his followers gained

influence in the wider labor movement, they broad-

ened this stance to cover the labor leadership as a

whole.

The most important figure in this milieu— and

the most important figure in the American labormovement for the entire period of the realign-

ment approach — was George Meany, head of the

-. Meany was a labor bureaucrat’s bureau-

crat, bragging that he had never walked a picket line

in his life and openly contemptuous of organizing

unorganized workers. Also a staunch anticom-

munist, Meany enthusiastically backed the warin Vietnam (which delivered plenty of money to

- workers in defense industries) and was

deeply involved in the federation’s efforts to combat

communism in unions abroad.In their efforts to remake the Democratic Party

under the leadership of the liberal-labor coalition,

figures like Shachtman and Rustin were unwilling

to take action that would push Meany out of that

coalition. This carried enormous consequences.

It meant shrinking from even some of the main-

stream demands of the civil rights movement.

Affirmative action, for example, became an unac-

ceptable position, as Meany and other officials in the

- bitterly opposed such policies in deference

to unions that still practiced black exclusion, such as

the building trades. Crucially, it also meant refusing

to publicly oppose the Vietnam War. For some, such

as Shachtman, this was hardly even a compromise.

Shachtman had moved steadily to the right over

the previous decade, and now held that American

capitalism was preferable to Soviet totalitarianism,

even if socialism was still preferable to both.

In line with this perspective, Shachtman publicly

backed the Bay of Pigs invasion (calling the

US-backed counterrevolutionaries “good, stout,

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DemocraticNationalCommittee

A Revolution From Within

Congressional

and SenatorialCampaignCommittees

State andLocal PartyOrganizations

Before the 1970s, the DNC was often characterized as an

example of “politics without power,” playing a relatively

insignificant role in most races. The real power in the party

was in the hands of state, precinct, and county leaders,

who controlled the nominating process. But in the past

forty years, the party has undergone a process ofcentralization through the enforcement of national party

rules and the control of resources distributed to state

parties.

Before the 1970s, state parties controlled the nomination

process, and they ran most candidates’ campaigns.

Additionally, the distribution of positions was governed

by a patronage-based system. The patronage system

was undermined by the reforms of the New Politics era,

by the intervention of public sector unions, and by Supreme

Court rulings in the 1970s.

Pre-1970s

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From 1968–1974, new party rules forced state parties to

change the nominating process from one dominated by

caucuses to one dominated by direct primaries. Over time,

state parties evolved into what political scientists call“service agencies” for Democratic campaigns. These

featured professionalized leadership and staffing, as well

as permanent headquarters, increased budgets to support

statewide candidates, and assistance to precinct- and

county-level organizations. State parties are run by state

chairs and state central committees, which are tasked

with fundraising, calling state conventions, drafting

platforms, enforcing party rules, and assisting local party

organizations at the level of the county, municipality, and

ward or precinct.

Since the 1980s, the party has also operated “coordinated

campaign” organizations that are jointly funded by the

DNC, state party organizations and allied interest groups

(including labor unions), as well as candidates themselves.Perhaps the most important of these are the state

legislative campaign committees, which parallel the

national congressional and senatorial campaign commit-

tees. Legislative campaign committees now operate

independently of state central committees. The campaign

committees are made up of incumbent legislators who

perform fundraising and other functions for local and

statewide races. The most well-funded of these are found

in competitive states with high campaign costs and weak

state central committees.

The DNC is no longer dependent on state party

organizations to function. After the reforms of 1974,

the DNC was given a bigger role in campaign fundrais-

ing, voter mobilization, and financial and technical

assistance to state and local units. The committee

abandoned equal representation for each of thestates, embracing a new representational formula

taking states’ populations and Democratic vote shares

into account. Notably, caucuses of African Americans,

Latinos, and women also gained influence over the

DNC in the 1970s, but were formally dissolved by the

national chair in 1985.

Over the past 40 years, the DNC has also undergone a

major expansion in its membership. But the increased size

of the committee has made deliberation difficult. This

means that de facto power falls to the national chair and

executive committee, who meet prior to national commit-

tee meetings and then have their decisions ratified by thefull committee. There are also caucuses and factions that

meet informally but have little power to alter the chair’s

decisions. Today, it is also responsible for planning

and managing party conventions, generating publicity

for candidates, and maintaining networks of (and data on)

state leaders, county leaders, and rank-and-file activists.

Both the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee

and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee

have been around for over a hundred years, but they have

gained greater influence and importance since the 1970s.

Each of these committees plays a lead role in raising fundsand allocating resources for races in their respective

chambers of Congress. In addition to steering campaign

contributions from wealthy donors, PACs, and unions

toward candidates, these organizations are also permitted

to make their own “coordinated expenditures.”

1970s Reforms Post-1970s

A generation of activists tried to bringdemocracy into the Democratic Party.

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environmentalism, repelling its (white) blue-collar

base and eliciting the -’s decision not to

endorse McGovern.

But however influential, this telling bears littleresemblance to the actual history. For one thing,

labor wasn’t especially powerful in the party even

before the McGovern-Fraser reforms. In , with

a Democratic supermajority in both the House and

the Senate, unions failed to win passage of a bill to

ban state-level “right-to-work” legislation, an objec-

tive Meany had declared labor’s highest priority.

Labor did wield power as a behind-the-scenes

broker, trading delegate slates and endorsements

like machine politicians. The - official-

dom’s ability to play this role was undermined bythe McGovern-Fraser reforms.

However, it was precisely because they felt that

they weren’t getting a fair shake from Meany’s

wheeling and dealing that unions like the ,

, and the communications workers, sup-

ported these reforms. As such, it hardly makes sense

to characterize the New Politics reforms as effecting

a middle-class takeover of a formerly working-class

party.

Nonetheless, there is a grain of truth to the idea

that the commission’s reforms helped cost the partythe election. Meany’s outrage over losing some

of his backroom power translated directly into an

intense hostility to McGovern and everything his

supporters represented. That McGovern was also

a steadfast opponent of the war in Vietnam only

intensified Meany’s hatred.

He demanded that the - executive board

vote unanimously against lending the federation’s

support. While he came up short, Meany was none-

theless able to prevent the - from playing

an active role in the campaign. Aiding him in this

endeavor were the remaining Shachtmanites, who

labeled McGovern the candidate of surrender and

used their influence to attack his support in pro-

gressive circles.

These attacks undoubtedly made McGovern’s

campaign more difficult, and while many union affil-

iates of the - endorsed his campaign, the

organizational muscle of the federation itself was

sorely missed. Thus, though it is true that McGovern

was too far left for an important Democratic

decrease the power of party elites. The reforms came

on the heels of election, in which a candidate

who had run in no primaries, Hubert Humphrey,

ultimately won the nomination at a conventionmarked by Democratic Chicago Mayor Richard

Daley’s police force cracking the heads of protesters

outside.

Disgruntled by this experience, supporters of

the antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy managed

to win a vote to create a party reform commission,

which would be headed by South Dakota Senator

George McGovern. The body (called the McGovern-

Fraser commission) instituted affirmative action in

delegate selection, required that delegates be picked

in the year of the election, eliminated prohibitivedelegate fees, and put in place a new, more trans-

parent set of rules for delegate selection.

The immediate consequence of these rulechanges was the nomination of George McGovern

for president in . McGovern had entered the

race late in , but had drawn attention as a prin-

cipled opponent of the war with a solidly liberal

voting record.

Drawing on the experience of the McCa-

rthy campaign, McGovern employed a grassroots

strategy, relying on networks of volunteers to securethe vote in key states like New Hampshire and Wis-

consin and running a thoroughly antiwar and liberal

campaign. It worked.

His success in dislodging frontrunner Edmund

Muskie and winning the nomination quickly gave

way to disappointment, however. In the November

general election, McGovern lost every state

but Massachusetts.

In subsequent years, McGovern’s campaign

has come to stand as the symbol of a Democratic

Party gone too far to the left, alienating the “silent

majority” of Americans repulsed by the variousmanifestations of s radicalism.

From this perspective, realignment failed by

being too successful — activists like Harrington

and his followers pulled the party so far to the left

that they destroyed its chances with a still-moderate

American electorate. In many versions of this story,

the advocates of party reform— known as the “New

Politics” supporters— drove the party toward sup-

posedly middle-class concerns like feminism and

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The final reason for Nixon’s resounding victory

in was the “political business cycle” of that year.

For decades now, scholars of American politics have

noticed the tendency of economic policy to becomereflationary in election years, effectively boosting the

campaign of the incumbent (or his party).

Nixon furnished a particularly notable instance

of this pattern in the years before the election.

From to , the Federal Reserve, chaired

by close Nixon associate Arthur Burns, expanded

the US money supply at an average rate of per-

cent a year. With the money supply expanding so

quickly, businesses could easily acquire money for

investment, powering rapid growth in the economy.

Nixon also embarked on a program of strong fiscalexpansion, pushing the growth rate to climb from

about zero in to almost percent in .

Even with the specter of inflation lurking, aMcGovern triumph in the context of such rapid

economic growth would have been astounding. After

taking into account the - officialdom’s aban-

donment of McGovern and Nixon’s wooing of the

multilateral investment bloc, McGovern’s loss is

entirely explicable.

Realignment at Last?By the mid s, the realignment strategy had lost

much of its appeal. Shachtman and Rustin allied

themselves with the extant power blocs in the party,

essentially reconciling themselves to the existing

order.

Harrington and his supporters, however, had not

given up the fight, even after the McGovern debacle.

The Watergate scandal had given the strategy a

shot in the arm, ushering Ni

jacobin issue 20

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