Reply to Joanne Barkan

...Unfortunately, however, what is available is merely a laundry list of disconnected (if worthy) reforms...

...In the midst of an extraordinary economic crisis that has discredited free-market ideology to an extent impossible to imagine even a year ago, a Democratic president has been elected with an explicit mandate to stop the bleeding and make things right...

...Barkan is bothered by my linkage of Michael Harrington's work, and American politics more generally, to older European political debates...

...Barkan agrees that Harrington's vision of post-capitalist democratic socialism was "vague" and "unconvincing," but says this "didn't matter" because "his theorizing didn't detract from his important practical political work and other writings...

...The key to the Swedish social democrats' success was in deciding that the future lay through capitalism rather than beyond it—and that it was the Left's task to figure out how to maximize markets' benefits while limiting their costs...

...For others, it was because reforms alone came to be seen as enough...

...Bernstein, and those who followed in his footsteps, believed that separating theory and praxis was unwise and impractical...

...This is the tradition that I think Harrington belongs to, and I agree that it has diminished in power and significance over the last several decades (although it continues to live on in parts of the anti-globalization movement and elsewhere...

...This need—for a realistic, coherent, and distinctively left strategy—is not, as Barkan seems to think, unimportant...

...By the time the Great Depression hit, they had at hand a powerful and coherent ideology and set of policies that they could sell to a desperate public...

...This attitude made it difficult for the German Social Democratic Party to devise a practical strategy for using state power to transform Germany's political economy—and as a result the SPD, along with other similarly burdened parties, dithered during Europe's crises from 1918 to 1933...

...During the late twentieth century, the Left stopped thinking practically about long-term strategy and transformation...

...Sweden's Social Democratic Party (SAP) eventually became the standard-bearer for this camp...

...And this is at least partly due, I believe, to the Left's loss of appreciation for social democracy's original insights: that capitalism is the only economic game in town...

...Despite the shocking conservatism of its senior economic appointments, the Obama administration may surprise us by using its brief moment in the sun to accomplish many things the Left has long desired...

...Opposed to the democratic socialists stood what I have called early social democrats, such as Eduard Bernstein...

...Let me start by reiterating some key points...

...On many points we agree, but on several big ones we do not— about the distinctiveness of the social democratic tradition, its superiority to other traditions on the democratic Left, and the requirements for the Left's success today and in the future...

...This dithering, in turn, contributed to the Left's losing out to bolder and cannier political groups that were able to offer voters explanations for and answers to their problems...

...It is what makes some movements optimistic and dynamic and others defensive and past their prime...

...As I argued in my original essay (and in my book The Primacy of Politics), in the late nineteenth century the democratic Left split into two camps over how to think about capitalism and reform work...

...So what relevance, if any, does this ancient European history have for the United States today...

...Any successes, therefore, are less likely to be attributed to the Left or seen as a vindication of the need for a renewed taming of capitalism and restructuring of its relationship to the state, but instead viewed as a vindication that all that was needed was some tinkering and a reigning in of excesses...

...But this, I think, is terribly wrong and a key difference between Barkan and me...

...and that reforms should not be viewed merely as ameliorative or in a piecemeal fashion, but must instead be explicitly integrated into a larger economic and political strategy...

...The original democratic socialists believed that capitalism was fundamentally evil and that so long as it existed one might be able to improve living conditions somewhat but could not create a truly better world...

...Across the United States, Europe, and much of the rest of the world, people have again begun to recognize that governments should not be merely "night watchmen" and that when markets are left to their own devices the results can be disastrous...

...On one side stood what we might now call democratic socialists, such as Karl Kautsky...

...The SAP started thinking seriously along these lines as early as the first decade of the twentieth century...

...it is central to the Left's future as it has been to its past...

...And for that, despite his many and remarkable virtues, Michael Harrington and the tradition he embodied are partly responsible...

...It was precisely such a split between theory and praxis that helped doom the SPD and other parties to oblivion during the interwar years, and it has had a similar (if obviously less dangerous) impact in our own time...

...This is precisely the moment that leftists have spent generations waiting for, and a serious social democratic movement would be ready for it with well-considered plans not simply to get the economy going again but to rewrite the rules of capitalist political economies in a progressive spirit...

...This was the key to their great electoral victory in 1932 and the foundation upon which their future political dominance was built...

...But as the Left dithered, the Right was active, and the mantle of transformation passed from one to the other...

...But neither he nor his followers connected such reforms to the achievement of the Left's ultimate goals...

...For some, like Harrington, this was because fundamental transformation required the elimination of capitalism...

...Kautsky, like Harrington later on, cared deeply about workers and the underprivileged and supported practical reforms to alleviate their suffering...

...Today the European and American Lefts are again facing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity...

...Note the contrast: while the Left was agitating for reforms, the right was developing an ideology and associated political movement...

...that the Left's energies, both intellectual and practical, should be devoted to taming and restructuring it...

...A lot...

...They saw reforms as not merely ameliorative measures, capable of easing suffering while people waited around for the end of capitalism, but rather as the stuff of socialism itself—the means that would be used to transform the existing world...

...But that was precisely the topic the editors of Dissent asked me to address—and it was a challenge I accepted because I do believe there are striking similarities between the two and that the older stories I tell have contemporary relevance and, in Barkan's words, "apply to the Western world in general...

...Barkan contrasts the rise of "free market ideology" during the 1980s with the "scores of books leftists [wrote] on reforms...

...Although Bernstein and Kautsky had once worked closely together, they came to differ greatly over the correct path forward for the Left...

...But if the administration does so, it will be thanks largely to the chance appearance and smart choices of a uniquely charismatic and skilled leader, not to the intellectual and political groundwork prepared by the democratic Left in the United States and elsewhere...

...I don't want to belittle reform work, which is obviously crucial, but it was precisely the Right's larger vision and strategy for economic, social, and political transformation that helped it shift the world's political economy in a market-fundamentalist direction and put the Left on the defensive during the late twentieth century...