Donald Sassoon's One Hundred Years of Socialism

...In 1976, another Labour government, this one headed by James Callaghan, was similarly compelled by a run on the pound to make far more draconian cuts than Wilson's had ever contemplated...

...With decreasing frequency, this tendency recurred across the decades...

...At best, these interwar left governments expanded the welfare state and worker rights (Leon Blum in France...

...Relocating a factory to a distant land in search of cheaper labor was now an option, as it had not been in the fifties, and management feared that any level of worker control of capital could thwart this option, or at least put the company at a competitive disadvantage to its counterparts in countries with no equivalent strictures...

...This entire scene is, alas, the exception rather than the rule in One Hundred Years, which is an analytical history otherwise almost entirely devoid of scenes...

...His short takes on socialist leaders and parties are frequently devastating...

...This often insouciant absence of a longterm strategic perspective rankles Sassoonwho is a historian in, as well as of, the socialist tradition...

...It's easy to see why Sassoon hasn't had much competition...

...By the time parties of the Left returned to power at the conclusion of the Second World War, the equation of socialist power with the abolition of private capital was fast becoming a holy relic to be waved about on ceremonial occasions only...

...As promulgated by Karl Kautsky, the most influential socialist theorist in the years preceding World War I, one of the two central tasks of a socialist party was to wait for the revolutionary moment that would dump a transformed society into its lap...

...When Kautsky's longtime collaborator, Eduard Bernstein, sought to dispell the confusion by propounding that task one was a chimera and task two was all that mattered, revisionism was born...

...Here is Italian Communist leader Enrico Berlinguer, endeavoring to recreate his party as a genuine social democratic alternative to Italy's Christian Democratic kleptocracy, defending social justice in a time of austerity: "Economic development based on a constant and artificial expansion of consumption, declared Berlinguer to the left-wing intellectuals assembled in Rome (most of whom appeared never to have neglected an opportunity to consume), was in direct conflict with the needs and exigencies of the Third World...

...It most certainly was not to hasten that moment through adventurous insurrections and the like...

...of this and that period or problem in social democracy...

...BUT THERE is, of course, a broader narrative here, and when Belgian side-trips don't get in the way, Sassoon relates it in ultimately compelling fashion...

...The sheer volume of party platforms and programs, campaign speeches, movement manifestos, economic plans, journalistic accounts, ministerial memoirs, and dissident critiques —published, of course, in a multiplicity of tongues—would daunt all but the most obsessive of historians, and social democracy isn't one of those subjects to which obsessives tend to gravitate...

...But the very authoritativeness of this account turns history's express train into a local: after we learn how the German and Scandinavian social democrats, the French and Italian socialists and communists, and the British Laborites each reacted to the challenge of the sixties left, we then visit the question yet again, in the Belgian context...

...And yet, if any form of socialism is going to shape the next century, it is the reformist socialism that was developed and continually revised in western Europe...

...just one small step toward the creation of a common identity...

...To date, that revisionism has entailed scaling back the welfare state, selling off stateowned industries, and abandoning attempts to reduce massive unemployment by creating public-sector jobs...

...British Prime Minister Harold Wilson was recounting the events of 1964 when he recalled in his memoirs how "a newly elected government with a mandate from the people was being told . . . by international speculators, that the policies on which we had fought the election could not be implemented, that the Government was to be forced into the adoption of Tory policies to which it was fundamentally opposed...

...In 1981, Francois Mitterrand returned the left to power in France, seeking to stimulate the economy in Keynesian fashion and nationalize a number of major economic institutions, in what Sassoon terms "an attempt to repeat the [immediate postwar British Labour] Atlee experiment in far less conducive economic and political circumstances...

...For such as Weimar's Social Democrats and Ramsey MacDonald's Labourites, who came to power in the pit of the Great Depression, "it was as if they felt History had somehow cheated them by giving them power prematurely, when they still had little idea of what should be done...

...The prospect of a run on the currency—the malady that today plagues the developing nations of Asia—was an impediment to the Keynesian designs of the European left over thirty years ago...

...One Hundred Years of Socialism is a work of immense scholarship and, just as rare, sound historical judgment...

...Indeed, it is as a chronicler of socialist shortcomings that Sassoon most clearly finds his voice...

...how the parties throughout Europe gradually absorbed the student leftists of the sixties...

...It is a saga that we may already know in its broadest strokes, but Sassoon makes it far clearer why the rise and—more important—why the fall...

...The narrative, like social democracy itself, is continually fragmented by national particularities...

...at worst, they followed deflationary orthodoxy that just made the depression worse (MacDonald in Britain...

...Faced with the double whammy of inflation and capital flight, Mitterrand reversed course—as had Callaghan before him, as had Helmut Schmidt when he'd been unable to persuade 108 DISSENT / Winter 1999 the Bundesbank to fund new jobs, as did the Scandinavians compelled to let their currencies float and their unemployment rates rise into double digits...

...Depending on how exactly you measure such things, twentieth-century Europe has never been more— or less—socialist...

...More national economic planning, he notes, was under way in such nonsocialist bastions as Japan's trade and industrial ministry and Jean Monnet's coal and steel union than in the offices of Europe's socialist governments...

...Just as postwar voters deemed the left the natural party of government to create mixed economies on the national level, so voters today have tapped the parties of the left to guide the transition to multinational mixed economies...

...It will be simply —simply!—European...

...No such movement is remotely detectable among Europe's political parties—but among Europe's unions, there are some hopeful signs...

...But the Kautsky Curse also struck more 106 DISSENT / Winter 1999 mainstream parties that were swept into power before capitalism was ready to fall...

...Even in their glory years, Sassoon reminds us, the most successful European social democratic economies succeeded precisely because they weren't autarchic, because they factored in a degree of international interdependence...

...Yet plainly Sassoon remained undaunted...

...Sassoon will have none of this...

...To the contrary, the parties' epochal achievement, in which Britain's Labour government led the way, was to create a universal welfare state within a capitalist economy...

...Guy Mollet, who led the postwar French socialists in support of the Algerian intervention, and toward ultimate electoral oblivion, was a leader "without either the ethical dimensions of Leon Blum or the shrewdness of Francois Mitterrand...

...and who, at century's end, see their handiwork at least partially dismantled—and are even compelled to take part in the dismantling themselves—as capitalism becomes global...

...One Hundred Years of Socialism pays for its virtues: it is a work as definitive as the Oxford English Dictionary—and, at times, with about as much narrative thrust...

...But the creation of a social Europe, and of the political Europe that must precede it, must both await the creation of yet another Europe—a Europe of cross-border civil institutions...

...The literature on social democracy is skimpier— understandably so...

...In the years between the two World Wars, it was Kautskyism rather than Bernsteinism that crippled the western European left...

...One Hundred Years of Socialism is the first work of its kind...

...who come to power in mid-century and, while abandoning the pretense of overthrowing capitalism, build thriving and humane societies throughout western Europe...

...Sassoon diagnoses two distinct strains of misapplied orthodoxy...

...The more serious problem has been the difficulties confronting the parties of the Euro-left in attempting to build new power centers to regulate those global markets...

...Though neoliberal capitalism is the ideology of the age, it is the socialists, confounding all prophecy, who head the governments in thirteen of the fifteen nations of the European Union...

...In one sense, One Hundred Years of Socialism tells the story of one hundred years of revisionism...

...As SASSOON tells it—and he tells in the most minute and convincing detail— the decline of the nation-state and the decline of social democracy are essentially the same story...

...global markets, he insists, may not be nice but they are certainly real...

...It is the stuff of epics, filled with heroic sacrifices, tragic betrayals, vast calamities, unimaginable evil...

...At bottom, the socialists who presided over the great postwar boom assumed that capitalism, subjected to social democratic and Keynesian fine-tuning, would continue to produce the full employment that made the welfare state possible...

...Yet it is the kind of step that social democracy desperately needs to take...

...But socialist parties "derive their legitimacy from nationally-based electorates"—who are hardly clamoring for continental government...

...There have been numerous studies of the individual western European labor, socialist, communist, and social democratic parties...

...This was merely an announcement, of course, not a fact...

...As to the iconic potential of social democracy —well, let's just say that I went through the late sixties at Columbia, with numerous side trips to Berkeley, without ever once seeing a wall poster of Eduard Bernstein...

...What the connection was between task one—abolishing capitalism when the time was right—and task two—enacting those political and social reforms—was utterly unclear...

...The first was peculiar to parties that fell prey to the cult of total transformation...

...But Sassoon reserves his most withering blast for many of the social democratic leaders of the past quarter century, who could not disenthrall themselves from narrowly national politics even as the power of the nation-state to control its own economy was in terminal decline...

...The very idea of socialists trying to modify capitalism was as alien to proper Labourites as it was to scheming Bolshevists...

...If European socialism is to have a second hundred years, it won't be as British, French, Swedish, Austrian, German, or Italian socialism...

...It is this socialism—the only socialism that matters to any future endeavors to build a world not entirely in the image of the markets —that historian Donald Sassoon chronicles in this magisterial volume...

...Indeed, it is only when Sassoon turns to Italy, on which he is a specialist, that he depicts the social scenes behind the political controversies with more than a cursory sketch...

...He is appalled when socialist parties and leaders leave economic restructuring to the market rather than modernize their economies themselves, or when, by clinging thoughtlessly to dogma, they exile themselves to political irrelevance...

...If it is not, finally, a great DISSENT / Winter 1999 105 history—more nearly, perhaps, a great reference book—the problem at least in part is that it mirrors the strengths and defects of the movement whose story it tells: it is unfailingly sober, relentlessly realistic, and a little dull...

...But until Sassoon came along, no one had attempted to write an authoritative history of the western European left and, accordingly, of social democracy— though social democracy has unarguably been one of the dominant forces shaping the century, and, somewhat more arguably, is one of only two global ideologies still standing at century's end...

...To create European institutions and norms, replacing those of each nation-state, will be a momentous enterprise whose outcome is uncertain," Sassoon writes...

...Weekly...

...Prodded by the impending shift to a common currency, the European Metalworkers Federation announced this November a plan "to establish a pan-European wage and collective bargaining strategy," which, it said, would include coordinated wage claims and the possibility of cross-border strikes...

...As yet unable to build the trans-European political structures required to regulate a trans-European economy, social democratic parties and governments in the individual European states have only demonstrated the impotence of national policy...

...No left party had extensive plans for nationalizing the means of production...

...The genius of the Swedish system, as developed by labor economists Gosta Rehn and Rudolf Meidner in the 1950s, was that it promoted not only egalitarian full employment but global competitiveness as well—leveling wages upward but holding them to a fixed level no matter how successful the company, so that its wages and prices would not rise above that of the foreign competition...

...It is the story of outcasts who organize themselves to overthrow capitalism as the century begins...

...Twenty-five years later, when Meidner proposed setting aside a portion of companies' profits into worker-controlled funds for reinvestment, however, Swedish industry balked...

...Thus, all one needed to decide was whether the time was ripe...

...there have been biographies aplenty of socialist leaders...

...It wasn't just Marx who was mum on the topic...

...HAROLD MEYERSON is executive editor of L.A...

...The occasions when Sassoon feels compelled to praise are fewer, but no less heartfelt...

...A political tendency that had relied upon national government to regulate the economy was compelled, when the economy outran the regulatory capacities of national government, to revise many of its core principles...

...In London, Paris, Bonn, and Rome, socialist administrations try to fathom how to preserve the social democratic heritage at a transnational level...

...Clearly, the author feels DISSENT / Winter 1999 107 at home here, pausing, like Dante, to tell us which Italian pols belong on which circles of hell...

...Sassoon last spots it among the Portuguese communists of the late seventies, still hoping for a left-military coup...

...The party's other task was to press for political and social reforms: full suffrage, equal rights for all, universal social rights (to health care, to education, to a unionized workplace), and legislated regulations of working conditions...

...Throughout the seventies and eighties, a drumbeat of criticism from the Labour left and other bastions of rectitude insisted that the rightward drift of left-wing governments reflected little more than a weakness of will...

...Its conflicts are not final but quotidian...

...There were nationalizations here and there, but Sassoon faults Labour for nationalizing industries for political reasons only, with no strategic economic goal in mind...

...None of them except the Swedes crossed the Rubicon of actually attempting to direct their nation's capitalist economy—in the Swedes' case, with expansionist policies...

...National autonomy, Sassoon reminds us, has been eroding for quite some time...

...It could hardly be otherwise: nothing in classic socialist doctrine prepared socialists to exercise power...

...Indeed, not just socialism in one country but simple Keynesian expansion proved to be impossible...

...In spite of all the words and work spent on discussing international and European integration," Sassoon thunders, "in spite of the fact that the negative lessons of the protectionist 1930s had been regularly taught in schools and universities, in spite of the endless charade of expensive summits where politicians, goaded by the mass media, paraded with characteristic pomposity, masquerading as world statesmen while at the mercy of forces they were unable to understand . . . the strategy of the coordination of national economies remained adrift in the high seas of pious wishes...

...The chief effect of this insular vigilance was to remove the communists from the broader forces of the left and the daily struggles to preserve the republic...

...I wonder," Sassoon continues, "whether this diffident Sardinian haut bourgeois, whose integrity was doubted only by those who had none, was hopelessly out of touch with the vulgar and coarse society surrounding him, or whether he was simply too much in advance of his age...

...AND YET—since Sassoon completed his monumental survey, parties of the left have come to power in every major western European capital...

...On Europe's business side, such institutions are popping up almost daily, with companies, banks, and stock exchanges merging across borders at a frightening pace...

...Good historian that he is, Sassoon is ever uncovering broader patterns in the hitherto discrete histories of left parties and governments —how the administrations of Francois Mitterrand and James Callaghan, say, ran smack into the same economic constraints...

...Across the continent, voters have entrusted the decisions on how exactly to cut back the welfare state almost exclusively to social-democratic ministers...

...From 1882 to 1914, Neue Zeit, the journal of the German social democrats, ran exactly one story that dealt with what a socialist society would be like, what a socialist government should do...

...The insurrectionary tradition could produce such hopelessly romantic icons as Che Guevara (all the more iconic for being so hopelessly romantic...

...One Hundred Years of Socialism takes as its subject the major left parties in fourteen separate countries and the governments they formed or participated in during the course of the past century, not to mention the union movements, and more recently the environmental, feminist, and peace movements...

...its protagonists lack the sense of historic anointment that sent Bolshevik leaders charging across history's stage...

...There was no such silence as to what a socialist party should do, but there was a good deal of conflicting counsel...

...Sassoon applauds the Swedes and the Austrians for consciously and consistently prodding their economies toward full employment...

...The new governments in Bonn, Paris, and Rome, at least, are campaigning for a "social Europe," a Europe where some international entity, as yet uncreated, will have the authority, say, to undertake the public-works programs that each of these national governments is by itself unable —by terms of the Maastricht Treaty—to undertake...

...DISSENT / Winter 1999 109...

...Of the intellectually calcified French Communist Party in the late seventies, around which Mitterrand was running circles in his successful attempt to build up his own Parti socialiste, Sassoon writes, "Seldom has the refusal to think become so distinguishing a characteristic of a political party...

...It is a classic saga of rise and fall, and it ends with its somewhat dazed protagonists beginning to sketch new designs, transnational plans, for rebuilding the smashed edifice of social democracy...

...For Weimar communists, Sassoon writes, "all issues were subsumed by the overarching belief that the road to revolution was an insurrectionary one...