What is Wrong with the American Left: the Abandonment of Class |
CounterPunch Exclusives
CounterPunch Exclusives
What is Wrong with the American Left: the Abandonment of Class
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Introduction: A Tradition That Forgot Itself
I write these essays not as an enemy of the left but as someone who believes it has lost the thread of its own best tradition. That tradition is the democratic socialism of Eduard Bernstein, who tied the classless society to the ballot rather than the barricade, and of Michael Harrington, whose The Other America forced a prosperous country to look at its own poor.
That tradition began with a sharp diagnosis. Karl Marx argued that capitalism rests on a class relationship in which those who own the means of production extract surplus value from those who own only their labor power. One did not have to accept the inevitability of revolution to accept the centrality of class, and Bernstein did not. He kept the analysis and changed the method, betting that universal suffrage could be turned into economic democracy.
That bet defined what the old left stood for. It was not merely taxing the rich and redistributing the proceeds, the liberal project of John Stuart Mill and later John Maynard Keynes, but democratizing economic decision making itself. The New Deal and the Great Society were humane achievements, yet they were state capitalism for the benefit of the many and left the boardroom intact. The democratic socialist asked a harder question: who decides what gets built, where capital flows, and whose work disappears?
Put most simply, the socialist project was about extending democracy into the economy. We accept that the people should govern the state, that no king or boss may rule a polity by private right. The socialist asked why the same principle stops at the factory gate, why the firm that shapes a person’s waking life should remain a little monarchy exempt from the democratic rule we demand everywhere else.
Robert Dahl made exactly this argument in his Preface to Economic Democracy, reasoning that if democracy is justified in governing the state it must be justified in governing economic enterprises. Charles Lindblom, in Politics and Markets, showed why this matters in practice. Business occupies a privileged position in any market democracy, holding a structural veto over public choice because it controls investment and employment, so that governments of every party must bend to its needs. The economy is not a neutral zone outside politics; it is where the decisive power lies, and to leave it undemocratic is to leave democracy itself half finished.
What now passes for left or progressive politics in the United States has quietly abandoned this question. The story runs through two ruptures. The first was the New Left of the 1960s, the world of Students for a Democratic Society, which rightly insisted that race, gender, war, and culture could not be reduced to economics, but........