Sunday, September 2, 2018

A Tired Formula (2018)

Book Review from the September 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why Bad Governments Happen to Good People. By Danny Katch (Haymarket Books, 2017.)

This is the follow-up by US satirist Danny Katch to his Socialism . . . Seriously. It is trailed as a ‘sharp-witted indictment of our broken political system and a vision for a socialist alternative that is truly by and for the people’.

This is half-true in that it is indeed perceptive and funny in parts and recognises well enough many of the issues facing a Trump-led America, issues that are replicated to varying degrees in other countries too. But the vision is blurred and is ultimately a prospectus for a state-run capitalism that aims to build on the popular support generated by Bernie Sanders, but which could be expressed through the creation of workers’ councils or soviets. This, of course, is really the tired old formula of the Bolshevik coup in Russia of 1917, a formula more long-lived than Angel Delight or Pot Noodles but ultimately less successful than either.

The problem with this political approach has essentially been twofold. Firstly, the idea that the socialist revolution can be created by a minority vanguard party of professional revolutionaries that can lead the masses to the promised land (though it is noticeable Katch goes a little light on this in full realisation that talk of people power and democratic action is likely to resonate more with his target market). 

Secondly, that what is advanced as ‘socialism’ is really a set of radical reforms of capitalism that the vanguard leadership know can never be enacted within the existing system, and which they hope will then pave the way for mass unrest and their minority coup. This then can bring about the dictatorship of the vanguard party running a nationalised ‘siege’ economy. 

Sadly, as history has shown on many occasions, there’s nothing remotely funny about that at all . . . and the anti-Trump forces in the US would have to be desperate indeed to even consider it.
Dave Perrin

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