DSA's Options and the Socialist International DSA Internationalism

DSA’s Options and the Socialist International DSA Internationalism Committee April 2017 At the last national convention DSA committed itself to holding an organizational discussion on its relationship to the Socialist International leading up to the 2017 convention. The structure of this mandatory discussion was left to DSA’s internationalism committee. The following sheet contains information on the Socialist International, DSA’s involvement with it, the options facing DSA, and arguments in favor of downgrading to observer status and withdrawing completely. A. History of the Socialist International and DSA The Socialist International (SI) has its political and intellectual origins in the nineteenth century socialist movement. Its predecessors were the First International (1864-1876), of which Karl Marx was a leader, and the Second International (1889-1916). In the period of the Second International, the great socialist parties of Europe (particularly the British Labour Party, German Social Democratic Party, and the French Section of the Workers International) formed and became major electoral forces in their countries, advancing ideologies heavily influenced by Marx and political programs calling for the abolition of capitalism and the creation of new systems of worker democracy. The Second International collapsed when nearly all of its member parties, breaking their promise not to go to war against other working people, rallied to their respective governments in the First World War. The Socialist Party of America (SPA)—DSA’s predecessor—was one of the very few member parties to oppose the war. Many of the factions that opposed the war and supported the Bolshevik Revolution came together to form the Communist International in 1919, which over the course of the 1920s became dominated by Moscow and by the 1930s had become a tool of Soviet foreign policy and a purveyor of Stalinist orthodoxy. In 1923 the Second International was reconstituted as the Labour and Socialist International (with the SPA as an affiliate), but this ceased to function with the outbreak of the Second World War. Meanwhile, the victories of Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, Franco in Spain, plus rightwing authoritarian regimes in most of Eastern Europe had destroyed most of the European working class socialist movement by the time World War II began. During the 1930s and ‘40s, the Communist Party USA was much larger and more successful in American politics and the labor movement than the SPA was. Post-War Europe At the end of the war the socialist parties in the part of Europe that had been under Fascist/Nazi domination rebuilt themselves and became a major factor in European politics. The reconstituted European social democratic parties tended in the late 1940s and early 1950s to have memberships which, having experienced the horrors of the Great Depression, fascism, and war, demanded far-reaching economic and social reforms on the way to a transformation to a socialist society. In 1951 the European social democratic parties came together to establish the Socialist International (again, with the SPA as a member) and 1 issued the Frankfurt Declaration, which declared its opposition to capitalism (as well as to authoritarian Communism) and stated its goal to be the creation of a socialist society. At the same time the parties of the Socialist International had begun to become regular loyal, parliamentary parties with reform agendas within the capitalist states of Western Europe. They found it hard to reject the American Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which in effect meant accepting US hegemony over European capitalism. Yet within this context, these parties began to initiate far-reaching reforms. The British Labour Party in particular created an extensive social democratic state by nationalizing much of heavy industry and establishing the National Health Service, a system of socialized medicine. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, many of the socialist parties had begun to move in a more explicitly conservative direction. The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) adopted the Godesberg Program in 1959, which turned away from its Marxist tradition and the notion of class struggle, and abandoned the goal of socialism for that of simply reforming capitalism. A similar reorientation occurred in the British Labor Party and others. The question of colonialism was another weak point. The French party, in power, began the French war against Algerian independence. Similarly in Britain the Labour Party in government for the most part continued the United Kingdom’s imperialist policies around the world. The social democratic parties tended in most countries to be based on powerful industrial labor unions which in some nations had become highly integrated into both government and the corporations. For example in Germany, the unions joined corporate boards to participate in Mitbestimmung (codetermination of corporate decisions). The unions and the socialist parties’ objective was to ensure that the workers in their home countries enjoyed a share in the increase of wealth created by the postwar boom of the global capitalist economy. The social democratic parties secured such benefits through social welfare programs: universal health care, universal education, workers’ compensation, unemployment benefits, and health and safety programs, and so forth. These programs gave the Western European people the highest standard of living and the best lives in terms of health (infant mortality, longevity, etc.) of any region on earth. Of course the wealth of these countries, which made these systems possible, was based on the global system of capitalism and imperialism. The leadership of the social democratic parties of the SI had reconciled themselves with capitalism and the governments in which they had become partners, content to give up on the idea of a movement toward socialism and instead to manage capitalism in ways that improved the lives of the workers they represented. Not all members were satisfied with this reconciliation, and Marxist thought and democratic socialist tendencies remained within these parties. The New Left: 1960s and 1970s In the 1960s young people in the advanced capitalist countries drew inspiration from the revolutions in Vietnam (1945), China (1949), Cuba (1959) and Algeria (1962), leading to new political tendencies on the left, both in the Socialist and Communist parties and beyond. The student movement of that era and the revival of labor militancy were accompanied by the 2 growth of far-left socialist organizations, mostly Maoists and Trotskyists, but also saw a strengthening of the left wings of the SI parties. Within the SI there was a renewed interest in Marxism and in socialism especially among the young. Then in the late 1960s, the world capitalist system entered a prolonged crisis that undermined the stability that had provided the basis for social democratic reforms. The social explosion in France in May 1968 signaled the opening of a new era as capitalism entered into a new period of instability. In the 1970s, left parties of various sorts in countries around the world affiliated with the SI, which for the first time became truly global in its membership, rather than predominantly European. Yet some of these parties seemed to have little to do with socialism, such as the corrupt, authoritarian, and violent Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) of Mexico and the dictator Mubarak’s National Democratic Party in Egypt (which ruled until toppled by the Arab Spring revolution in 2011). After a major struggle, DSOC, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, was admitted to the SI at its 1976 Congress in Geneva. Social Democrats USA (SDUSA) lobbied strongly against DSOC’s membership, arguing that DSOC had no relationship to the US trade union movement. DSOC’s roster of vice-chairs which included the UAW’s Victor Reuther and Meat Cutters Ralph Helstein, who were well known in Europe, however, undercut that argument. At that same Congress, the German social democratic politician Willy Brandt was elected SI President and Bernt Carlsson from the Swedish Social Democrats became General Secretary. The Swedes were particularly active in the anti-apartheid movement, solidarity with third world movements in general and had also strongly opposed the war in Vietnam. DSA, formed in 1982 as the merger between DSOC and the New American Movement, continued membership in the SI. European social democracy reached a high point in the 1970s when the parties’ social welfare agenda became modified by feminism, environmentalism, and a new spirit of internationalism. The Swedish “Meidner Plan” and Francois Mitterrand’s victory in France in 1981, could be seen as the political expression of that moment—both were victories of an explicitly socialist tendency within major SI parties, offering programs of a democratic transition from capitalism to socialism. The Mitterand’s government in summer 1981 nationalized 25% of French industry and enacted reforms greatly enhancing workers’ collective bargaining power. The Meidner Plan would have socialized ownership over most Swedish firms over a twenty year period by taxing corporate profits to create worker-and-consumer controlled “wage-earner funds.” But capitalist and middle-class interests mounted fierce resistance to this radical program and in 1978 the Swedish Social Democrats lost its first election in fifty years. In France, capitalists went on

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