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The Socialist Awakening: What's Different Now About the Left
The Socialist Awakening: What's Different Now About the Left
The Socialist Awakening: What's Different Now About the Left
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The Socialist Awakening: What's Different Now About the Left

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  • John Judis is the author of one of the seminal books about the 2016 election, The Populist Explosion, which has sold 38,000 copies and was named "One of six books to help understand Trump's win" by The New York Times and The Economist called it "Well-written and well-researched, powerfully argued and perfectly timed."
  • Judis is also the author of The Nationalist Revival, published in 2018, which was highly acclaimed and has sold over 9,000 copies. EJ Dionne in The American Prospect called it "essential reading."
  • Both titles have been popular as course adoptions
  • Judis is a veteran political reporter who examines national and global political trends through a nonpartisan lens. "He specializes in speaking truth to liberals," wrote EJ Dionne in The Washington Post. "Through his long career in progressive journalism, Judis has made a habit of seeing things that others were missing."
  • With his new book examining the new socialism of the left, he once again provides a clarifying look at one of the biggest political trends of our time.
  • Completes Judis's political trilogy explaining the Trump era.
  • The Populist Explosion, The Nationalist Revival and The Socialist Awakening have a branded cover design and display well together.
  • LanguageEnglish
    Release dateSep 29, 2020
    ISBN9781734420715
    The Socialist Awakening: What's Different Now About the Left
    Author

    John B. Judis

    John B. Judis is an author and journalist from Chicago, Illinois. He is an editor at Talking Points Memo.

    Read more from John B. Judis

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    • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
      1/5
      Socialism - because it has gone so well every time it was tried before. Read The Gulag Archipelago instead.

      2 people found this helpful

    • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
      4/5
      In 2002, John Judis wrote a book predicting a new Democratic majority. It was his riposte to Kevin Phillips' The Emerging Republican Majority (1969) which correctly predicted a quarter century of conservative Republican dominance of American politics. Judis argued then that demographic trends indicated that the Democrats were on the cusp of locking in a majority that would sustain them for decades to come. And then, in the 2004 Presidential election, the Democratic candidate went down to defeat at the hands of an unimpressive and unsuccessful Republican President. In his newest book, Judis argues that after many decades in hibernation, the socialist ideals espoused by Eugene V. Debs have undergone a resurgence of sorts in the United States. This is undoubtedly true. He points not only to the Bernie Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020, but also to the spectacular rise of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the successor organisation to Debs' Socialist Party. Judis is scathingly critical of some people in the DSA leadership who come from sectarian Trotskyist backgrounds. Those people reject the very strategy (known as realignment) that was first embraced by DSA founder Michael Harrington in the 1960s and that stood behind Bernie Sanders' campaigns. Instead of trying to create yet another failed third party, democratic socialists need to engage with the Democratic Party, which is where their natural audience (trade unionists, feminists, environmentalists, people of colour) are to be found. I think Judis is right about that. Where his book goes astray is in lengthy discussions of various academic disputes about the relevance of this or that strand of socialist thinking, with Judis coming down firmly in the camp that rejects "orthodox Marxism". He does, however, seem to have a warm spot for "social democracy" which is good thing. It would be useful in these kinds of discussions to get beyond the tired Scandinavian examples that are always cited and to look at some more radical socialist experiments that managed to remain democratic, including both the kibbutz movement in Israel and the short-lived Georgian Democratic Republic of 1918-21, which was led by the Mensheviks.Judis inserts a chapter about Corbynism which is largely correct and adequate. But he completely misses the significance of the debate about the rise of anti-Semitism on the British Left. He notes in passing that "Corbyn was plagued by accusations of anti-Semitism" and concedes that "some of which were justified". Judis' book was written long before Corbyn was suspended by his own party -- an event unprecedented in British political history. This had everything to do with the "accusations" of anti-Semitism. The book would have been a better one, I think, had it stayed more focussed on U.S. politics, which Judis understands very well.
    • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
      4/5
      Is socialism the flavor of the moment, picked up by a younger generation that has no clue how horrific it would be? John Judis, whose life has been socialism, says it is far more than that. In The Socialist Awakening, he shows that today’s vision of socialism is far different. This is not your great grandfather’s socialism. It has been molded and adapted for the 21st century by thinkers who are witnessing the horrors of an unfettered and corrupt market economy. Socialism is primed to be a major factor in national politics for the foreseeable future. There might actually be a choice between the two parties going forward.First, how do Millennials not cringe at the word? For one thing, no one is seriously talking about a takeover. There will be no glorious revolution. Millennials can plainly see socialism working beautifully with in the capitalist system, without destroying what has been positive. Judis says “They see socialism as developing within capitalism, the way capitalism developed within feudalism. Socialism creates institutions and laws that fulfill the ethical ideals of liberty, equality, justice, democracy, and social solidarity.” And when the young advance guard talks about socialism, it is not defensive, but analytical. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says “When Millennials talk about socialism, we’re talking about countries and systems that already exist that have already proven to be successful in the modern world. We’re talking about single-payer healthcare that has already been successful in in many different models, from Finland to Canada to the UK.” So the dreaded socialism does not raise panic among Millennials. It is closer to jealousy, as America fails to deliver on dream after dream for its own citizens.The book is compact and compressed and easy to digest. Judis quickly reviews the various stages socialism has evolved through, from purist Marxism, to various colors of populism, through its all but total disappearance (in the USA), to its evident resurgence. It is a valuable overview. It’s good to know where all this came from and why what is being proposed today is a far better, more reasonable and achievable version of an idea that has kept changing without boundaries. Principles, sure. But not boundaries. Socialism, like every political force, has been all over the place, and Judis has collected it in tight paragraphs for all to see and understand.This is the final book of a trilogy, the others being devoted to populism and nationalism. But socialism is the most controversial, and for many, especially the older generations, the most fearsome. The very word alone is enough to stir fury among the boomers, because it is somehow the opposite of total freedom. There is nothing about it that could possibly be of benefit to Americans, and they dismiss anything that smacks of it before it can be discussed.For Millennials, membership should have its privileges. If the USA is the most advanced and the richest nation, why is there so much misery, poverty, sickness, debt and self-destruction? There doesn’t have to be, and the evidence is just across borders. They see it as insanity that the US is so far behind.The lightning rod has been Bernie Sanders. Judis says Sanders is the most important (American) figure in socialism since Eugene Debs, who ran for president numerous times and brought socialism from church-like clubs and assemblies to a nationally-recognized political force.In the 2016 primaries, Sanders got more votes from 18-29 year olds than Clinton and Trump combined. By January 2020, polls were showing that well over 2/3 think government should be doing more to solve problems. The catalysts, Judis says, were the financial crisis, climate change, and Trump. The result is an insurgence within the Democratic Party (it couldn’t possibly happen in today’s Republican Party), clearly favored by the young.Even though Sanders didn’t get the nomination, he has clearly moved the goalposts to the left. The Democratic Party now talks in Sanders’ terms, nothing like what it was like under Obama or Clinton or Carter. Biden has asked Sanders to put his people in Biden’s taskforces looking at issues and policies. This alone has changed the political dynamic in the USA.Judis draws clear lines among socialism, populism and nationalism. But he insists socialism needs nationalism to work. The long-held belief of socialists that everything should be universal, that everyone should help everyone and love everyone – stops at the border for Judis. He says it can’t work if people can move to the USA and leave at will. The USA can’t provide jobs to all comers. Free healthcare can’t simply be offered to everyone who seeks it from anywhere in the world. He says nationalism is a key component to making it work within capitalism. And it needs to be within the borders of the nation-state.We’re nowhere near that point.In a chapter on British socialism, Judis traces its more successful trail, with all its ups and downs. It is very real, and there are lessons to be found if Americans want to look. Much as Trump is obsessed with dismantling everything ever achieved by Obama, so Thatcher was obsessed with dismantling everything ever achieved by Labour. It has tortured the British economy and society ever since. Judis dismisses political compromises like British Labour’s “Third Way” under Blair as misguided, ineffective and unworkable. A third way is nothing to vote for.In Judis’ view, capitalism is not going away. It is too well entrenched and has too many accomplishments going for it to just be tossed aside. Millennials see that. They are not about overthrow. They do not have manifestos, militias or martyrs on offer. What socialism means to them is greater equality and enhanced social services. To them, Trump has pushed the pendulum about as far to the right as it can go. The time has come for it to swing back. And he, the pandemic, the recession and climate change have primed it to do so.David Wineberg

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    The Socialist Awakening - John B. Judis

    Socialism Old and New

    The philosopher Fredric Jameson once wrote, It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Jameson, hardly known as a staunch defender of capitalism (he’s perhaps the world’s foremost Marxist literary critic), didn’t write this generations ago, but in 2003. In March 2020, as the novel coronavirus outbreak was putting millions of Americans under stay-at-home orders, and as Congress and the Federal Reserve had begun pouring trillions of dollars into the economy to soften the blow of a coming depression, Vox editor Dylan Matthews quipped: The end of the world is making it easier to imagine the end of capitalism.

    The coronavirus pandemic came barely five years after the United States and Western Europe were finally recovering from the Great Recession of 2008. It has not, and will not, spell the end of the world or of capitalism, but it has put the final nail in the coffin of the laissez-faire, globalized capitalism that prevailed since the days of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and that was perpetuated, wittingly or not, by their successors. The era of big government, which Bill Clinton claimed was over under his watch, is back with a vengeance; and so is the attention of politicians, if only for the time being, to the welfare of the many, not just the few.

    The politics and political economy in the United States and Europe (not to mention elsewhere) are entering a new era, just as it happened in the early 1930s, after World War II, and then again in the early 1980s. In the early 1930s, faced with the breakdown of the gold-based international monetary system and of untamed capitalism at home, the countries of the West went in very different directions. The United States went toward Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal; Central and Southern Europe went toward Nazism and fascism. Both alternatives, as socialist theorist Karl Polanyi described them in The Great Transformation, were attempts to use the power of government to protect the populace against the vicissitudes of the market.

    The failure of market capitalism has been heightened by the threat posed by the novel coronavirus. All the weaknesses of the previous era—from the over-reliance on global supply chains to underfunded social services; from tax avoidance by the wealthy and large corporations to the immiseration of what are known as essential workers—have been laid bare. And after the threat of the virus recedes, the countries of the world will still face steep unemployment and a daunting task of economic reconstruction, along with the growing threat of climate change, that will require major public initiatives. These failures and weaknesses can be, as they were in the United States in the 1930s, the basis for a traditional leftwing alliance of the bottom and the middle of society against the very top. Or they can feed rightwing attempts to divide the middle and bottom through scapegoating.

    Even before the current pandemic and depression, the breakdown in the older economic consensus had resulted in new and sometimes unforeseen political eruptions. Many of these occurred on the right, through the rise of a toxic us vs. them nationalist politics in the United States and Europe, and the move toward authoritarianism in Eastern Europe, Turkey, and India and toward a new cyber-totalitarianism in China. There have also, however, been unexpected flare-ups on the political left and center-left. These include a leftwing populism in Southern Europe, the rise of the Greens on the European continent, the attempt by Britain’s Labour Party to revive its commitment to socialism, and the awakening in the United States, the bastion of Cold War anti-communism, of a new socialist politics.

    The principal subject of this book is the rise of a socialist politics in the United States and the failed attempt to revive socialism in Great Britain. Like my previous books on populism and nationalism, I will try to describe and explain these political phenomena. But as a longtime leftist who labored unsuccessfully decades ago trying to create a socialist movement in the United States, and whose hopes for a socialist politics have been rekindled by the Bernie Sanders campaigns, I have definite views on what socialists should and should not do to build a viable movement.

    In the United States, the revival of interest in socialism has been due to Sanders, who, when he began running for president in 2015, was little known except in Vermont and on the left, and was disdained by some of his colleagues in Congress. Running as a democratic socialist, he almost won against prohibitive favorite Hillary Clinton. Four years later, Sanders again came in second, consistently winning the greatest share of voters under age forty-five—voters who hadn’t grown up in the shadow of the Cold War and with the identification of socialism with Soviet communism. In an October 2019 YouGov poll, 70 percent of millennials (ages 23–38) said they were extremely or somewhat likely to vote for a socialist.

    Sanders’s failure to win the nomination was predictable, as there are still too many older Americans who associate socialism with the Soviet Union. But Sanders’s campaigns had a dramatic influence on the Democratic Party’s agenda. A host of Democrats embraced his plan for a single-payer healthcare system and his proposal to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, not known as a democratic socialist, embraced Sanders’s plan to put workers on corporate boards. And Joe Biden, who bested Sanders for the nomination, gave key Sanders supporters prominent places on his policy task forces and crafted a campaign platform that reflected Sanders’s influence.

    The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has grown rapidly. In 2015, DSA had 6,000 members. A year after Sand-ers’s campaign, DSA’s membership had quintupled. After DSA member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s election to Congress in 2018, it rose to 56,000, making it the largest democratic socialist organization since the pre–World War I Socialist Party. In the wake of the pandemic and depression, it has grown to 70,000. DSA also boasts over a hundred officeholders. If the United States had a multi-party system with proportional voting, a democratic socialist party might command a very respectable 15 to 20 percent of the vote.

    The young people who have taken a positive view of socialism don’t necessarily have a worked-out theory of socialism or socialist politics. In the United States, they often identify socialism with Scandinavian countries, and with public control of healthcare, education, and energy. They condemn the growing inequality of wealth and power and want a society based on cooperation rather than on cutthroat competition and on sexual and racial equality. They don’t envisage the government owning Apple or Microsoft. Sanders’s own explanation of democratic socialism runs along these same lines.

    Some commentators have insisted that neither Sanders nor his young supporters are really socialists. To be a socialist, columnist Eric Levitz wrote in New York, is to advocate the abolition of profit or worker ownership of the means of production. Paul Krugman defined socialists as people who want to nationalize our major industries and replace markets with central planning. But that is not what the rising popular sympathy for democratic socialism is about. Socialism is coming back in a form that is different not only from the Soviet Union’s or Cuba’s communism, but from what socialists who consider themselves to be Marxists have envisaged. And it could play an important role in shaping voters’ reaction to what has been the greatest threat to Americans’ well-being since the Great Depression and World War II.

    The Varieties of Socialist Experience

    Just as there is no exclusive definition of populism, liberalism, or conservatism, there is no singular definition of socialism. According to Marxist theorist Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, the term socialism first appeared in English in the 1820s and its French counterpart, socialisme, in the 1830s. Some thinkers were described as socialists who merely concerned themselves with social matters, similar to what a sociologist would do today. But in its critical use, it referred to thinkers who rejected the competitive individualism of industrial capitalism. Socialism was paired against individualism; cooperation against competition; altruism against selfishness. It was initially inspired by the spirit of the American Revolution (all men are created equal) and the French Revolution (Liberty, equality, fraternity) and by the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. Over the subsequent centuries, it has taken at least five different forms, only one of which comes directly out of the work of Karl Marx.

    Utopian Socialism: In the first half of the nineteenth century, Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, Pierre Joseph-Proudhon, and Henri de Saint-Simon were all described as socialists primarily on the basis of their rejection of competitive individualism. In his New Christianity, Saint-Simon advocated a spirit of association and obligation toward the poor. Owen, a Welsh textile manufacturer, sought to replace the prevailing factory system with a communal system, which he called villages of cooperation, where workers would live and be fed and have their children educated. Fourier advocated communes called phalansteries. Proudhon backed workers’ cooperatives and a philosophy he called mutualism. Fourier, Owen, and Saint-Simon hoped to spread socialism by example. Industrialists and workers would see that cooperative production was not only morally superior, but more efficient.

    Christian or Ethical Socialism: The Utopian Socialists like Saint-Simon were influenced by Christian ideals, but there were a host of Christian socialists in the mid-nineteenth century who traced their views directly to the gospel. They included Philippe Buchez, who was a member of the Saint-Simon Society, and Anglo-Indian lawyer John Malcolm Ludlow, who founded a Christian Socialist movement in England in the late 1840s that advocated giving the kingdom of Christ … the true authority over the realms of industry and trade and for socialism its true character as the great Christian revolution. In the United States, Walter Rauschenbusch and a young Reinhold Niebuhr played prominent roles in promoting Christian socialism. Like Marxist socialism, it had an apocalyptic, millennial element, expressed in the idea of creating the Kingdom

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