I debated whether to attend personally the talk by the alleged Marxist Adolph Reed Jr’s talk on the fascist threat and its implications for working-class politics. I suspected that it would be posted online on YouTube–and I was right (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2LonZNB1c0&list=LL&index=12&t=2458s). I did not attend. I had heard of Reed from Sam Gindin, a so-called Marxist leader here in Toronto.
Watching the talk, I did not see much difference from Gindin’s social-democratic approach to politics and that of Reed. The typical dichotomy of “good public sector” vs. the implicit “bad private sector” characterized Reed’s talk. Thus, Reed states the following:
But I think the key practical reason to stress the danger on the horizon is the possibility that the national and global political economic order wev’e know as neoliberalism has evolved to a point at which it is no longer capable of providing enough benefits, enough opportunity, enough security to enough of the population to maintain its popular legitimacy. …
If neoliberalism has reached such an impass, I’ve argued that there are only two possible directions forward politically. One is toward social democracy or something like it, and pursuit of solidaristic downward redistributive policy agendas within the framework of government in the public good. The other is toward authoritarianism, and I’ve sometimes described this as being like a T-intersection–only two ways to go. And each direction is like the opposite of the other.
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Building a broad, working-class based movement is the only way we might successfully defeat the reactionary right-wing, and we need to begin trying to build the sort of popular movement that we need. And we must be clear that such a movement does not yet exist.
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A left with real political capacity has been absent for so long in the U.S. that even most sympathetic people can’t conceptualize what one would look like, how we could distinguish it from what my comrade Mark Dudzic called “the pageantry of protest,” or the effluvia of premature proclamation and branding.
In fact, Dudzic and I, in an article in the Socialist Register, laid out what we mean by a serious movement [YouTube shows the 2015 article “The Crisis of Labour and the Left in the United States”]. By left we mean a reasonably coherent set of class-based and anti-capitalist ideas, programs and policies that are embraced by a cohort of leaders and activists who are in a position to speak on behalf of and mobilize a broad constituency. Such a left would be, or would aspire to be, capable of setting the terms of debate in the ideological sphere, and marshaling enough social power to intervene on behalf of the working class in the political economy.
Some measures of that social power include: the ability to affect both the enterprise wage and the social wage; power to affect urban planning and development regimes; strength to intervene in the judicial and regulatory apparatus to defend and promote working-class interests; power not only to defend the public sphere from encroachments by private capital but also to expand the domain of non-commodified goods; and to generally assert a force of influencing, even shaping public policy in ways that advance the interests and the security of the working class.
Now clearly this is not the kind of formation that could be built overnight. You guys may be like two centimeters farther down the road toward building this kind of movement in Canada than we are, although my Canadian friends keep telling me, no, that’s just a new romantic twaddle. But we hope. But it’s clear that we’re no where near there.
Reed then admits that in 2024 the left cannot generate such opposition to the right because the right is moving too fast.
He then implies that if the working class and others understanding of the source of funding proceeds from the federal government, then they would not oppose such funding:
Many readers will recall from the 2008 presidential campaign the agitated cries among McCain’s backers, calling on the federal government to “Keep your hands off my medicare,” not understanding that it was a federal program. There’s an ample social-science scholarship finding that whether or not one recognizes that government is the source of benefits one receives has an impact on trust and regard for the government, which seems to make sense.
… But the one study that I’ll mention is by one of our former Penn students, Ashley Tallevi, in a study of medicaid, managed care and federal contraception policies, that research, which dovetails with experience from Debs-Jones Douglass Institute’s trainings–and I’m on the board and functionary basically of DJDI–with the rank-and-file union workers on economic inequality and healthcare crisis, underscores that privitation and outsourcing are not merely objectionable in so far as they turn the public sector into a wood lot for profiteers (though they’re objectionable for those reasons too). …
We can only chip away at those critical setbacks on the ideological front if lefttists, including left or progressive-leaning advocacy and interest group and most of all the labour movement, lobby and agitate for that public good perspective and approach. Concretely, that means taking advantage of the openings, ambivalent and limited as they may be, to press where possible in our networks, workplaces, civic engagements and institutional affiliations in the public realm for those with ready access to it for the administration’s infrastructure plans to reinvigorate the public sector but alas–and I want to bring your attention to one other, one quite important thing to read, an article on Bidenomics by our own Sam Gindin, called “Bidenomics and the Left,” in NONsite.org from a few months ago.
… What Sam shows is that, like so much else in our politics now, that sort of left tilt was performative, and was much more about giving the appearance of redistribution and breaking with neoliberalism than it was with actually doing so. … It’s a very important article.
But what this means too [is] that we have to do is working to anchor climate change policy to job creation and a serious commitment to make whole those workers who are displaced in the economic and social reorganization that addressing climate change will require. It means also agitating and building public support for initiatives like postal banking like in the U.S., and eliminating the income cap on social security [tax?]. I think now what workers pay tax on only the first $162,000 earned a year, and this is how the other side, the bipartisan other side, can keep pretending that there’s a crisis in the social security system because they won’t fund the damn thing.
In the electoral domain–and this is the kind of stuff that we’ve been trying to address in our trainings, in our worker trainings– in the electoral domain in DJDI we’v observed in our worker trainings that even allusion to candidates or signature partisan issues for many workers sets off alarm bells of distrust, barriers of unnecessary resistance to the substance of our training program. … even in states that characteristically vote Republican voters have also passed ballot measures that raise the minimum wage and legislate other pro-worker initiatives that Republicans steadfastly oppose. This underscores the importance of getting outside the Democrat/Republican divide and gearing electoral interventions to push clear working-class programs and agendas with an institutional base and foundation that can win them. That in turn suggests that electoral engagement can be more productively directed toward ballot initiatives that place clear working-class oriented proposals before the electorate without all the noise and confusion (personalism) that accompany candidate-centered campaigns. An inititative led by the Massachusetts Teachers’ Association in Massachusetts Fair Share Amendment won a levy of 4% on incomes over a million dollars a year, and which is projected to generate $2 billion annual revenue that will support education, transportation and other public goods–and they won this at the ballot, and they have a couple more going out.
I think the above suffices to provide the reader with the flavour of Reed’s talk.
I will make a few comments on the above statements. Firstly, Reed’s reference to the creation of a climate change policy seems to assume that such a policy can be rationally formulated in the context of a society dominated by the class power of employers, with its accompanying economic, political and social structures. I find such a position simply utopian. How can any climate change policy address the destruction of the natural world when the nature of capital is necessarily the infinite process of obtaining more and more money and reducing the production of our lives to mere means to that end (see The Money Circuit of Capital).
Secondly, references to “classes,” “the working class,” and “working-class politics” sounds radical, but they need to be linked to the nature of capital–and Reed fails to meet this basic condition. His working-class politics seems tied to a very typical social-democratic point of view–a humanized form of capitalism rather than the abolition of the class power of employers.
Such a view is expressed above as well in a number of instances. Reed’s attitude reflects The typical dichotomy of “the good public sector” vs. the “bad private sector.” The provision of “non-commodified public goods” (goods that need not be purchased to be able to appropriate and consume them) is allegedly a socialist society whereas the provision of commodified goods (goods that can only be appropriated and consumed by means of an exchange) is capitalist. Apparently, he believes in the gradual transformation of a commodity-producing society into a non-commodity producting society via the expansion of public goods at the expense of the production of private commodities–and social democrats expressed such a view since at least Eduard Bernstein formulated such a view explicitly in his book Evolutionary Socialism.
Reed, like his friend Sam Gindin, fails to criticize the public sector itself. His reference to the expansion of education by means of the Fair Share Amendment, for example, lacks any criticial reference to the limitations of educational institutions as institutions of learning (whether in terms of grades (notes or marks) (see The Expansion of Public Services Versus a Basic Income, Part Two: How the Social-democratic Left Ignore the Oppressive Nature of Public Services: Part One: Oppressive Educational Services) or in terms of the curriculum (see for example the biases in various provincial curricula here in Canada in the series “A Case of Silent Indoctrination,” such as A Case of Silent Indoctrination, Part One: The Manitoba History Curricula and Its Lack of History of Employers and Employees ; see also Much Educational Research Assumes the Legitimacy of the Current School Structure).
In other works, Reed also seems to reflect a social-democratic attitude. Thus, in an article written by Marc Dudzic and him (2014), “The Crisis of Labour and the Left in the United States,” in pages 351-375, Socialist Register 2015, page 360, we read:
From flipping houses to accessing benefits under the Affordable Care Act, workers have been conditioned increasingly to believe that public goods and security are not the outcomes of collective struggle and are inferior to individual initiative and responsibility.
This tendency has become more pronounced as bipartisan attacks have sharpened on the public sector, which is also among the last bastions of decent social-wage benefits like defined-benefit pensions.
To be sure, defined-benefits pensions (where the pensioner receives a predetermined pension) are better than defined contribution pensions (where the amount varies with investment performance) since they provide a definite income with which the pensioner can plan her/his life. To obtain either one, though, requires a lifetime of subordination to the class power of employers–hardly something decent. To quibble over the particular form of a pension without linking the choice of form to that issue–the issue of the class power of employers–is simply to engage in social-democratic reformism.
Now, it is certainly defensible to resist the conversion of publicly produced goods into private ones (such as healthcare here in Canada), but Reed seems to lack any critical sense of the oppressive nature of employers in the public sector nor the limitations of services provided by the public sector. Workers in the public medical sector, for instance, often are oppressed. From Barbara Briggs (1984), “Abolishing a Medical Hierarchy: The Struggle for Socialist Primary Health Care,” pages 83-88, in the journal Critical Social Policy, volume 4, issue #12, page 87:
GPs AND SOCIALISM
Socialists have traditionally argued for state control of key areas of the economy and of the provision of welfare services such as health and education. Socialist health workers have argued for general practitioners to become salaried employees of the Area Health Authorities, along with the ’ancillary workers’, instead of continuing to enjoy the independent self-employed status that they insisted on to protect their status when the NHS [National Health Service of the United Kingdom] was set up.
But the NHS, the largest employer in the country, has shared with nationalised industries the failure to demonstrate any evidence of ’belonging to the people’: because of the backing of the state it has proved a ruthless and powerful employer, keeping the wages of unskilled and many skilled workers also at uniquely low levels; time and again, union members seeking improvements in pay and amelioration of very poor working conditions have been defeated. Nor has the NHS shown any kind of effective accountability to its users. Public spending constraints have hit the NHS not only by causing a decline in working conditions and in the services provided, but also by imposing even more centralised planning priorities based on the need to save money whatever the cost.
This situation likely characterizes the Canadian public health-care system as well.
Reed does not address this problem. For example, in the above article, Dudzic and Reed tend to idealize the public sector. Page 365:
Struggles to preserve and expand public institutions and to decommoditize basic human needs like housing, transportation, healthcare and education could begin to address
the immediate challenge, which is to create a new popular constituency for a revitalized movement, instead of reorganizing or re-mobilizing an already existing but totally marginalized left.
They also tend to idealize some admittedly more innovative unions, such as the Chicago Teachers’ Union. Page 368:
Fights over public education are also central to a reconstructed and revitalized movement. The work of the Chicago Teachers Union in building a community and labour response to retrenchment and privatization of public education has been widely embraced by urban organizers and is sparking a wave of victories by union reformers in teachers’ unions from
Massachusetts to Los Angeles.
See my own critique of the Chicago Teachers’ Union’s publication The Schools Chicago Students Deserve: Research-Based Proposals to Strengthen Elementary and Secondary Education in the Chicago Public Schools, at https://www.academia.edu/40010639/A_Deweyan_Review_of_the_the_Chicago_Teachers_Union_Publication_The_Schools_Chicago_Students_Deserve_Research-Based_Proposals_to_Strengthen_Elementary_and_Secondary_Education_in_the_Chicago_Public_Schools_2012_ .
They appear to see the importance of ideological struggle, but then they do not engage in such struggle in relation to their own social-democratic assumptions expressed above. Page 369:
In the ideological sphere, we need to take a page from the right-wing playbook and invest in a long-term project to seize the terms of debate. As Richard Seymour points out, ‘The traditional ruling class is not merely good at exploiting opportunities; it thinks long-term in a way the left must learn to do’.42 We must present a vision of a world outside of the constraints of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is all about commodification and the inescapable dictatorship of the market over all of human activity. This movement must
work to decommoditize the public and civic spheres by asserting the values
of public goods and the public sphere in healthcare, education, housing, etc.
It must work to revive the values of industrial and economic democracy and
assert the right of people to participate in determining the conditions under
which they work and distribute and consume the products of their labour.
We need to begin to assert the possibility of a life beyond the constraints of
capitalism. [bold–my emphasis]
As noted above, the National Health System is hardly an expression of worker freedom. As for “the right of people to participate in determining the conditions under which they work,” this is called “free collective bargaining” and is hardly socialist. The right “of people to participate in determining the conditions under which they distribute and consume the products of their labour”–what does that mean? Through legislative representatives? Are they calling for the abolition of the class power of employers or merely restrictions on that power? The tenor of their article and Reed’s video tend in the direction of social reformism and opposition to neoliberalism but not in the direction of opposition to the class power of employers as such.
As for the “values of industrial and economic democracy,” this seems to be a mere add-on that receives little real consideration. The use of the word “democracy” is often used by the social-democratic left to appropriate something which is supposed to be positive without indicating what is meant by “democracy.”
Thus, industrial and economic democracy are meaningless unless the power of those both within the governmental structure (such as the judiciary) and outside the formal governmental machinery but with certain monopolized skills (such as doctors, engineers, lawyers and so forth) are subject to democratic control. From Sonja Buckel (2021), Subjectivation and Cohesion: Towards the Reconstruction of a Materialist Theory of Law, pages 270-271:
Taken together, the reification of social relations as well as the plurality of power technologies both show what is at stake in leaving behind the paradigm of juridical democratic theory – a fundamental extension of the concept of democracy. This means that what matters is to develop procedures that make subjects not only the authors of their own laws, but of the network of political conditions that surround them. The idea of ‘self-legislation’ is thus transferred to plural social spaces: ‘Democracy then ceases here to be only a political condition and becomes the condition of society as a whole …’ This corresponds to a shift in the concept of ‘democratic positivism’, namely the idea that an
‘adequate constitutional theory’ can todayhardly be anything but an extension of this procedural principle [the correctness of the decision is inferred from its democratic organizational form] to the context of the social totality, as self-determination understood as ‘total’.
The ‘profound subversive power of the democratic discourse’ lies, as Laclau and Mouffe rightly note, precisely in the extension of equality and freedom to increasingly wider domains. ‘It can act as a fermenting agent upon the different forms of struggle against subordination’. An emancipatory project therefore has to situate itself entirely on the terrain of democratic revolution: ‘It is not in the abandonment of the democratic terrain, but, on the contrary, in the extension of the field of democratic struggles to the whole of civil society and the state, that the possibility resides for a hegemonic strategy of the
Left’.
Conclusion
I do not regret not attending Reed’s talk. It was presented on YouTube, and so there was no real personal reason to attend. Its content was really nothing new. There were, however, several hundred people who did attend. I doubt that I share much politically in common with many of those who attended.
Reed tends to equate the public sector with socialism, and such an equation needs to be criticized. The working class needs to question both the exploitation and oppression characteristic of the private sector and the exploitation and oppression characteristic of the public sector. Reed’s talk does not address this need in any significant way.
The Abolitionary 