Socialism 101?

[bloodygranuaile]

For the non-DSA political book club, folks were interested in learning a thing or two about socialism, because it's so hot right now. I am trying to read a lot of super intro-y stuff to socialism so I've got something to point people to when they show up to meetings or email the working group account asking for somewhere to start, because "Start with Das Kapital and then continue to read 100 years of primary sources" is usually not what people are interested in when they just want to get a little bit situated. Therefore, we landed on a book that has been recommended around a bit, Danny Katch's Socialism... Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation. This is, inexplicably, the second book I've read about socialism this year that uses ellipses in the title, which I can't help but be bugged by even if both ellipses are more or less grammatically correct. 

 

Socialism... Seriously clocks in at about 150 pages, which makes it a bit more substantial than The ABCs of Socialism, but still quite bite-sized. A good deal of the page space is taken up by jokes, and while it is up to the taste of the reader whether they are good jokes or bad jokes (they tend to be very dad jokes), I think they are generally fairly illustrative. Katch also has a specific argument about why he makes so many jokes, which is essentially that jokes are necessary to not drive yourself nuts when thinking seriously about capitalism. In this, I agree with him fully.

 

The book is split into four parts, each of two or three chapters. The first two chapters are a sort of "Why might you want to read this book" sort of recap of the way socialism has been portrayed in U.S. political discourse and why people might be interested in it anyway, especially following the 2008 financial crash. The second part is called "Capitalism," and mainly gives a brief Marxist analysis of how capitalism functions -- and dysfunctions. It also gives some very 101-level intros to Marxist class theory and critique of the bourgeois state. 

 

Section 3 is called "Socialism," which is where things really get interesting. Katch kicks off this section with a thought experiment about what an ordinary bad day would be like in a socialist future. I think this might be one of the strongest parts of the book, since it ditches the soaring rhetoric and acknowledges that everyday life will still be quotidian, full of regular human messiness and pettiness, while still showcasing how much better things could be if we weren't buried under the highly specific and somewhat absurd constraints of capital. It also acknowledges that doing democracy all the time can be pretty exhausting. There is also a chapter on revolution, which blessedly skips much of the waffling about what "revolution" means that I've seen other writers engage in (he doesn't define it at any point, but he at least seems to be writing from the idea that revolution is in fact what most people think it is, instead of bait-and-switching repeatedly between the normal definition of "regime change brought about by popular action" and the super special socialist definition about the fundamentalness levels of change). Then there is chapter 9, "What's in a name?" which is, broadly, about the different tendencies and strains of thought within the socialist movement. I will come back to that in a minute because I have Many Very Large Problems with this section.

 

Section 4 is a couple of odd-out essays, one of which is about why socialism is not a religion. Honestly, this section feels a bit tacked on and doesn't really flow. But I suppose it's informative if you were wondering whether or not socialism is a religion. The book concludes with a short but very, very on-point advice section called "The 5 Habits of Relatively Undamaged Socialists." 

 

While overall I do like this book, I do have three small nitpicks, which perhaps loom larger than they would otherwise if the book were not so short. Seriously, a book this short should have zero fuckups in it.

 

Fuckup one: In his litany of complaints against the Democratic Party, Katch lists stuff by pre-Southern Strategy segregationists, who were, at the time, southern Democrats. This is true in a very technical way that's going to tank the speaker's credibility with the sort of dissatisfied progressives who might be interested in this whole socialism thing in the first place. There's plenty of real stuff to dunk on the Democrats for without playing dumb about the most significant shift in modern U.S. party politics, and pulling out disingenuous right-wing talking points is a very counterproductive thing to do unless your goal is to cause embittered left-Democrats to rediscover their partisan loyalties. Are there no editors at Haymarket who retain any contact with mainstream progressives in their lives? Rookie mistake.

 

Fuckup two: "Socialists should be romantics." If you want to build a mass movement you might want to stay away from telling people what kind of personalities to have? Considering that any future socialist society will still have optimists and pessimists, romantics and cynics, introverts and extroverts, what have you. Just a thought.

 

Fuckup three: Katch's explanations of the various socialist tendencies are... lacking. He basically says there are three: Trotskyists, Stalinists, and social democrats (anarchists exist but have apparently never done anything and have nothing to do with socialism; also, he misdefines anarchism in the one sentence he dedicates to it). Katch is a member of the ISO, which is a Trotskyist organization, and perhaps if you're in a dedicated Trotskyist organization, you only need to know three things: Who's us, who's more Soviet than us, and who's less Soviet than us. I, however, am in DSA and in the middle of attempting to put together a project on different socialist tendencies, and so my reaction to this section was roughly "HOLY HELL NO WAIT STOP DON'T SAY THAT". I want to be able to recommend this book to new members who are just trying to find their feet, and "Everyone who isn't a Trotskyist is either a Stalinist or a social democrat" is N O T the sort of thing I could in good conscience allow anybody to tell an unsuspecting DSA newbie like it was some sort of uncontested factual claim. Almost all of the probably 95% of DSA members who aren't Trotskyists don't identify as either Stalinists or social democrats. The more-pro-Soviet-than-Trotskyists people call themselves Marxist-Leninists; the democratic socialists draw a distinction between democratic socialists and social democrats -- and the distinction is that a social democrat is someone whose political end-goal is to build social democracy, so being called a social democrat is means being accused of not wanting to build socialism at all and is therefore fightin' words; anarcho-socialists are a thing (and they have a whole fuckin' caucus). Literally just this one section on explaining tendencies is, at four pages, misleadingly sectarian enough for me to entirely reconsider whether I should recommend this book to new folks. I mean, I probably will but just with a BIG OLD CAVEAT not to go around uncritically repeating what it says about tendencies to other people.

 

These three gripes aside (and yes, I know I got heated about those three gripes, I like griping), it's a pretty decent primer on That Thing All The Kids Are Into These Days.