Why socialism always comes back
Socialism is having a moment. Polls across the West are showing increased support for the idea, particularly among young people repelled by what’s on offer under capitalism. It wasn’t meant to be like this. In the 1980s and 1990s, every respectable university lecturer, newspaper editor, government official and politician across the West was explaining that socialism was finished.
The attacks on socialism came from many directions. The right wing, of course, is always hostile to socialism. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher argued in the 1980s that “there is no alternative” to unbridled capitalism and did her best to make it a reality. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 unleashed a right-wing propaganda barrage declaring socialism dead. Liberals, such as US Professor Francis Fukuyama, backed them up.
But it wasn’t just the hard right and liberals attacking the socialist project. Postmodernist university professors, some of whom were former communists, made a name for themselves arguing that “metanarratives”, such as the idea that socialism could defeat capitalism and usher in a better society, were dangerous. This notion came to dominate university social science departments.
Others preached a “third way”, a politics “beyond left and right”, which supposedly forged a path between rampant capitalism and socialism. Tony Blair’s government in Britain used the third way as an ideological weapon to batter socialists in the Labour Party. Former leftists justified their new positions by arguing that the neoliberal offensive of the 1980s and 1990s had destroyed the working class.
But while these ideologues did their best to bury socialism, the brutal reality of capitalist society meant their efforts were in vain. Following the 9/11 terrorist attack in 2001, the US invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, killing millions. Who could explain US aggression? Not those who had argued that capitalism was a force for progress, but socialists who had long argued that capitalism bred war and imperialism.
The global financial crisis of 2008-09 soon followed. The crisis ruined millions of working-class lives while governments bailed out the billionaires. Who could explain economic crises and austerity? Not those who argued that capitalism led to prosperity, but socialists who pointed to the system’s inherent crisis tendencies.
The evidence of capitalism’s failures is mounting. The climate crisis, the pandemic, the housing crisis and Israel’s genocide in Gaza have created a bigger audience for socialism. Those who would bury socialism must now reckon with its re-emergence in the belly of the capitalist beast—the United States.
Cycles of development
This cycle of developments from capitalist triumphalism to socialist revival is not new.
Capitalism has a series of lines of defence that reinforce its rule. It deploys both force and fraud to justify its existence and crush its enemies. The everyday experience of life under capitalism and the powerlessness that goes with that for most of the time make systemic change seem impossible. Those who have given up on fighting the system can provide the capitalists with arguments as to why the struggle for a better world is futile.
But capitalism cannot exist without attacking the working class. It cannot exist without dragging nations into war. It cannot exist without infringing on democratic rights up to and including installing fascist dictators. And it suffers the objective limit that it also depends upon those it exploits. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels put it in 1848, capitalism creates its own gravediggers—the working class.
The experience of oppression and, often, the experience of struggling against that oppression explain why the best efforts of the capitalists and their ideologues often come to nothing. They say capitalism is the best possible system. But they have no credible answers for those looking for a way out of the crises, hardships and wars capitalism creates. Only socialism can provide such answers. That is why every time that socialism is declared dead, it rises once again.
Socialism in the nineteenth century
We can go as far back as the nineteenth century to see how this works. The 1840s were a period of advance for the working class in the few pockets where it had established itself. In Britain, the Chartist movement organised monster rallies of hundreds of thousands to press for the right to vote and to organise.
In 1848, the spirit of revolt extended to Europe as workers joined the throngs on the streets to demand the overthrow of the reactionary regimes across the continent. Marx and Engels fought to push the working class forward in these struggles, joining the radical movement and furnishing it with the Communist Manifesto.
By 1850, however, the working-class surge was over. The middle classes, who were supposedly allies of the working class, swung behind the old order, leaving the working class to fight alone. The workers were defeated, and reaction triumphed across Europe.
But soon, the red flag—a symbol of socialist internationalism—was once again flying as socialists, trade unionists, Marxists, anarchists and others came together to form the International Working Men’s Association, or the First International, in 1864. It supported striking workers and the demand for an eight-hour day, universal suffrage, an end to militarism, the fight for Polish independence and a Union victory against the Southern plantation owners in the US Civil War.
The First International was also a forum for intense debate among the movement’s different ideological currents. Marx sharpened his ideas in the process and won a wider following for what was at the time called “scientific socialism”.
Then, in 1871, the workers of Paris showed the world working-class power in action as they formed the Commune to take over the running of the city after the capitalists and their government fled to Versailles in fear of an advancing Prussian army. The Commune set about organising production and distribution of essential goods and services through cooperatives. It made all officials and militia officers subject to election and recall and paid a worker’s wage. It declared a moratorium on rent and boosted labour rights. Socialists across Europe rejoiced at the Commune, seeing in it a revival of the spirit of 1848.
The smashing of the Commune by the Versailles government put an end to the high hopes it had aroused. In the following decades, capitalism spread across Europe and the US. The working-class insurrection vanished.
But as industry advanced, so too did the working class. By the turn of the century, new battalions of the working class had been created across Europe, North America, Australia, Japan and in pockets of the colonial world. And as the working class grew and began to fight for its rights, so too did socialism flourish. Everywhere, new socialist parties were winning the leadership of the working class and drawing in critical minorities of students and intellectuals. Alarmed ruling classes alternated between repression and concessions, but the tide was turning against them.
War, revolution and reaction from 1914
The outbreak of the First World War in 1914, specifically the betrayal by socialist leaders who opted to back their own ruling classes in the conflict, once more sent socialism into sharp reverse. Those leaders who remained faithful to socialist internationalism, arguing for working-class unity across borders, were a small minority in most countries.
Even in this situation, however, many workers refused to be swept away by jingoism. As casualties on the front rose along with misery in the rear, socialists who had stood against the tide began to win a bigger audience. In February 1917, Russian workers brought down the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty and, in October, established the first workers’ state.
Inspired by the Russian Revolution, working-class radicals established communist parties to fight for revolution in their own nations. Within two or three years, they had gathered hundreds of thousands in their ranks. It seemed that socialism might triumph.
The failure of the working class to seize power outside Russia led to the defeat of the workers’ state. Joseph Stalin’s new dictatorship crushed everything that remained of the 1917 insurrection. The Russian leader purged the international communist movement of any genuine revolutionaries and allowed Adolf Hitler to take power in Germany.
Capitalists in the West took advantage of the ebbing of the revolutionary wave to preach the end of socialism. Big US corporations used posters, films, pamphlets, workplace newsletters and community groups to spread pro-capitalist messages. Hollywood and the mass media joined in. The ideological offensive was backed by violent assaults on union organisers and socialists. In Australia, governments, bosses, cops and courts raided union offices, spied on union activists, broke up public meetings and deported radicals.
Socialism bursts forth in the 1930s
But the working class was not done. The Great Depression and fascism reinforced for millions of workers the belief that capitalism brought only misery for their class. Socialism once again came out of the shadows. Unlike the capitalist ideologists whose only answer to the Depression was yet more austerity, socialists explained that capitalism is a crisis-prone system that cannot serve humanity.
By the late 1930s, socialism was making deep inroads. In 1936, millions of workers in France and Spain rose against their ruling classes and waged a serious fight with the capitalists and the reactionary forces they backed. Many wanted socialism.
The socialist revival was also evident in Australia in the 1930s. Socialisation Units blossomed in the ALP, demanding the immediate implementation of socialist policies. The Communist Party (CPA) made headway, winning positions in many unions. University students radicalised by the Depression and the rise of fascism joined the CPA. The tragedy was that this appetite for socialism was then harnessed to Stalin’s authoritarian project, which sent it into a dead end.
We see the same phenomenon in fascist-occupied Europe during World War Two and its immediate aftermath. Workers had had enough of what capitalism was delivering, but Stalinism choked off the prospect of liberation.
Cold War counter-revolution
The Cold War and the postwar economic boom of the 1950s and 60s included a sustained capitalist offensive against socialism. In the US, where the Cold War reached its zenith, repressive wartime legislation was used to arrest dozens of Communist leaders, while the House Un-American Activities Committee and FBI drove thousands from their jobs, creating a climate of fear.
The rightward turn in the West in this period was amplified by university professors, some former radicals, proclaiming the death of socialism and “the end of ideology”. They argued that the basic problems of capitalism had been solved. Workers were dismissed as bought off: “We’re all middle class now”. Socialism was labelled an anachronism.
The relative affluence of the 1950s and early 1960s served to dull the urgency of class struggle in the West for a period. But prolonged full employment fuelled working-class confidence and raised expectations.
Socialism stirs again in the late 1960s
By the mid-1960s, a new generation of young workers was demanding more. The result was a steady rise in strikes and a willingness to strike for political ends. Newspapers began anxiously to discuss “wildcat rebellions”. The left in the unions began to feel the wind in their sails. In the US, the Vietnam War gave a radical edge to the discontents of this younger generation. As the war dragged on, young workers and students began to turn against it.
Those who had been promoting capitalism had no answers other than to press ahead with the war. It was time once again for socialists to provide answers. Although initially small in number, socialists could explain why the US and Australia were embroiled in a war against a peasant army many thousands of kilometres away. Socialists could explain the connections between the racism suffered by African Americans and the imperialist project of the US and its allies in Indochina. Socialists could tie together the pressure to speed up in the factories and the war drive. Socialism once again came to the fore among young people questioning the system.
The tragedy was that no coherent revolutionary socialist organisation had been built beforehand to lead the upsurge of strikes and demonstrations in the late 1960s and 1970s. The Communist parties were still too beholden to Stalinism to play a useful role. A new revolutionary left did emerge, but it was too small and too politically inexperienced to have a significant impact.
The downturn in struggle that followed in the 1980s pushed socialism once again to the margins, only for war and economic crisis to open the door to its revival in the 2000s and 2010s. Crisis-ridden capitalism breeds resistance.
Nothing about this is guaranteed, however. We cannot simply fold our arms and wait for history to turn in our direction. In countries without socialist traditions or organisations, decades of capitalist misery need not give birth to a socialist revival; barbarism may be the only result. A socialist organisation of some form is necessary to provide the answers that young people, in particular, will be searching for.
What kind of socialist politics emerges in moments of socialist revival also matters. Unfortunately, in both the 1930s and the 1960s and 1970s, the politics of Stalinism or its derivatives dominated. Working-class independence and leadership were sacrificed in favour of some other social force, whether “progressive capitalists”, the peasantry, guerrillas, students or the most marginalised and jobless sections of society. This distorted the socialist revival and blew it off course, leaving it open to capitalist counterattack.
A new revival?
Today, we are witnessing a healthy revival of socialist sentiment, but there are limits to the current shift. Left-wing politics today generally takes the form of reformist electoral projects, which puts it at the mercy of the politicians who, like the Syriza government in Greece in 2015, sell out their base within months of taking office. Related to this, identity politics is still widespread, weakening the politics of class solidarity.
Marxists advocate a world in which the working class is in the driver’s seat. In other words, socialism means smashing capitalism. Electoral challenges can be part of that process, but we must go much further than just changing the governing party. The working class must take things into their own hands. That involves mass agitation including strikes and demonstrations, all the way through to workers taking over and running society.
We currently lack the kind of mass revolutionary parties necessary to harness and build on the new socialist sentiment. In the absence of this, we risk losing the opportunity to challenge capitalism once again. Now, as in the earlier socialist revivals, the task of building a revolutionary organisation is urgent. It cannot be put off; it has to happen now.
