A new way socialists might fight the right
As the rightwing continues winning around the world and threatens to win even bigger next month in the US, I've been thinking about stuff socialists can do to actually fight them off. After brewing an idea for awhile now, I think I'm ready to write about it. Bare with me. The idea doesn't have to do with education explicitly, but preventing fascists from capturing our state apparatuses is pretty relevant to education I'd say!
First, a little look at the rightwing itself. Dan Denvir, in his recent interview with the Know Your Enemy podcast, elegantly boiled the right's coalition down to three parts. There's the foreign policy hawks and neocons working on military intervention abroad. Next there are the fundamentalist Christians of the New Right, evangelicals and their attendant Catholics. Finally, there are the factions of ultra-rich capitalists that either explicitly support the rightwing or support them implicitly by not speaking out against them.
Where should socialists push? We have a nascent but sclerotic approach to internationalism and foreign policy. I'm not sure socialists have figured out how to fight on the Christian fundamentalist terrain yet. But I think there's an opening when it comes to the ultra-rich capitalists. These capitalists--investors, industrialists, finance people--provide the material conditions for the whole rightwing show. There are two other reasons to focus on the capitalists themselves. We need money and they have money. Plus, the rightwing has benefitted from converts: some of the most powerful rightwing organizers and intellectuals were once leftists. The left could use some class traitors, not only for material resources but also intellectual and political resources.
What about that base?
Focusing on capitalists themselves, intervening in markets, would be a new strategy in contrast to two other strategies predominant on the contemporary left.
The first predominant strategy is movement disruption. In movement disruption, you organize groups of people to disrupt business as usual and get everyone in the society thinking and acting differently. My first movement was Occupy Wall Street in New York City where I saw the power of movement disruption, in which I'd include mutual aid. The second predominant strategy on the left is a state power strategy. In the state power strategy, socialists take state power (get elected or appointed to office) and use the force of the state to weaken the capitalist relations of production. (I'd include labor in the state power strategy, since it's labor that can ultimately influence elections and policy while improving working conditions, even though strikes are movement disruptions.) I woke up to the state power strategy when Kshama Sawant got elected in Seattle in 2013 and have seen its power from Bernie to AOC and beyond.
In my time on the left, I've seen a pretty dramatic shift from exclusively using movement disruption to doing both that and state power. I think both are great and necessary--and I'm so happy socialists are now doing both, letting them build on each other--but I think we can all agree there's a sense of stalled confusion and stagnation in the broad left at this moment.
I'm talking about the significant rightwing victories coming out of the Supreme Court, the sense of putrid inevitability of a neofascist congress later this year, but also the limited kind of efficacy that mass street actions have had--from student walkouts against gun violence to the Floyd Rebellions-- combined with the slow pace of electoral victories socialists have seen in the last five years, as well as stagnation/incoherence of socialist electeds once in office. I don't mean to say these aren't or haven't been effective. They have. But I think the stagnation on the left comes at least in part from the sense that movement disruption and state power are only effective in certain ways.
On a traditional Marxist framework, this makes sense. Movement disruptions are a wake up call. They stop normalcy from happening, for a short time. Consciousness erupts and the Overton window shifts. The main arenas of action for such disruptions are the ideological state apparatuses. The electoral victories create new opportunities for resources, legislation, and possible worlds to become more actual. They focus on the repressive state apparatus. But there's a whole part of society these strategies leave out: the mode production. What Marx called the base of society. The economy itself; which, in our case, is finance capitalism.
My idea is that there's a different sort of force socialists could try out along with movement disruption and state power: influencing markets directly in capitalism, going into the finance markets in particular, the markets that make other markets go. What if socialists got into finance markets with the explicit, public goal of building socialism?
The beauty contest
There's a famous idea in economics called the Keynesian beauty contest. So far as I understand it, the concept is about how stuff becomes valuable in the complex house of mirrors of social expectations. John Maynard Keynes articulated it using a metaphor: judges deciding the winner in a beauty contest. One simplistic view of how this happens has the judges each individually thinking about which contestant they think is the most beautiful, end of story. But Keynes notes how in real life the judges will probably, game-theory style, take into account who might think which contestants are beautiful to make their decisions. When it comes to contestant 1, does Judge A think Judge B finds them beautiful? If so, where does Judge B get that information? Maybe Judge C, who is taking cues from audience member Z, etc. The point is that the value of beauty gets attributed to a contestant--a contestant becomes beautiful--through very complex networks of perceptions, filtered through presumptions about what others are thinking, saying, and doing. Individual preferences emerge based on what we perceive others prefer.
The idea sheds some light on what happens in markets, particularly when it comes to demand. Why do people want what they want? Why are certain things valued when they're valued? One simple reason could be that individuals just want what they want. But the more complex view is that there's a welter of signals, perceptions, and presumptions roiling through groups of people who filter their preferences through what they think others prefer. When I was a little addicted to business news, I could see this very plainly: the guests on Bloomberg, MSNBC, Fox Business, and any number of podcasts were all sending signals meant to influence the beauty contest: people are buying this, people don't like that, etc etc. Why am I talking about this? You'll see.
A socialist financial investment firm
One thing I've noticed is that socialists punch way above our weight discourse-wise. If socialists say or do something, it can make sort of a big splash precisely because it's coming from socialists. That's why socialist electoral victories get so much coverage. It's partially why the right seethes with hate at AOC and the Squad. At the end of the end of history, socialism is on the table, and people don't quite know what to make of it. I think this can be true in the mode of production too. That's why I started talking about the Keynesian beauty contest. What if there were a socialist financial investment firm that went into the market with socialist goals, leveraging this powerful political presence of socialism within capitalism itself? The idea behind the investment firm would be to invest with the goal of building socialism. I think this strategy could have several interesting effects:
1) The beauty contest would have a new kind of participant. Suddenly, there's a voice in the business world--not accustomed to hearing from socialists--talking about socialism. The signal would be unique, unheard of, and punch above its weight. People would want to know about what the socialists wanted to buy because of how strange it is. It could very well influence what other participants perceive as valuable. The socialist investment firm would never have to make a single investment, so long as it grew somewhat and had a public messaging strategy. At the very least it would educate people about socialism. At most, it could influence how they invest.
2) As fascism emerges and centrism basically throws up its hands, I think socialists have garnered a lot of sympathy and support. My hunch is that there are class traitors out there who would want to give money to a socialist investment firm. As Joe Schwartz would say at the end of a DSA convention, to make a fundraising pitch, "socialist cash beats capitalist trash." We'd have to find these class traitors and present them with a coherent strategy. But we could organize these investors and perhaps after contributing capital to the fund they'd want to contribute to campaigns, pay dues, provide resources like office space. In any case, this would be fundraising for socialists. Then as money comes into the fund, the impacts of (1) increase and our ability to influence the market increases as well.
3) There may actually be an opportunity to invest in things that are meaningful for socialists. I'm thinking of certain kinds of green technology companies, firms that contribute to the well-being of the working class, and municipal bonds--like school districts, public water systems, etc--where socialists would want to provide resources. The sheer act of putting a potential portfolio together would be an interesting ideological project. There would be two kinds of investments, I imagine: investments that directly strengthen the working class and investments that directly weaken the ruling class. We'd have to work out what each of these would be.
The socialist financial investment firm would have to have a particular structure of accountability, relationship to socialist organizations like DSA, staff, business model, and strategic plan. I don't know whether it would be better to explicitly connect with DSA, for example, or try to make that connection more indirect. I don't know how we'd find the right people to staff this fund but I have to imagine there are people out there in DSA chapters and elsewhere, sympathetic but not exactly sure how to plug in, who would want to do something like this. All of these questions would have to get worked out in meetings that follow certain protocols. I imagine something could be drawn up in two years.
Three precedents
I'd cite three influences on my thinking about this idea of the socialist financial investment firm. The first is the unsung hero of the Russian Revolution: Israel Gelfhand, also known as Helphand or Parvus. An early leader in the movements for social democracy in Russia (he co-facilitated the 1905 St. Petersburg Soviet with Trotsky during that unsuccessful uprising), Helphand knew socialists would need resources to do their work, and to get these resources, they had to get into the markets and state power behind the scenes. Helphand became a businessman who did big deals with companies and then shifted profits to the Bolshevik cause, buying real estate to house and feed organizers and paying for the publication and distribution of Iskra. Through his business dealings, Helphand made connections with powerful figures internationally, most famously negotiating with the German ambassador to charter the train that would take Lenin and the Bolsheviks from their exile in Switzerland to Russia in 1917. After all, it was Helphand who convinced Germany that it was in their interest to have communists take power in Russia, headed by Lenin, because they were antiwar and would end the fighting on Germany's eastern front. He set that all up by being a businessman!
The second example is Yugoslavian investment firms during the height of their market socialism post-1948, specifically the forms of banking and finance practiced there. I'm thinking particularly of Johanna Bockman's work on Yugoslavian bankers providing no-cost loans to firms in Tanzania to build up the working class and strengthen the non-aligned movement. The last example is the Tehol Beddict story line in the fourth book of the epic fantasy The Malazan Book of the Fallen by Stephen Erickson. Beddict is a financial genius who also happens to disagree with the structure of his society and is able to over-leverage debt markets to weaken its ruling class. (I think I'd call the firm Helphand Beddict for this reason.)
In any case, I'm sick of fascism settling in without a serious challenge. I'd like to make sure we're trying everything to stop it in its tracks and socialists getting into the markets might be one thing we haven't tried.