Hal Draper is not Particularly Interesting

Socialism-from-below is a rather thin gruel

According to Hal Draper, in his 1966 booklet The Two Souls of Socialism, we should be aiming for "socialism from below". This is a view much embraced by some people, including those in the Trotskyist "International Socialists Tendency" founded by Tony Cliff. According to Draper:

Throughout the history of socialist movements and ideas, the fundamental divide is between Socialism-From-Above and Socialism-From-Below. What unites the many different forms of Socialism-from-Above is the conception that socialism (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) must be handed down to the grateful masses in one form or another, by a ruling elite which is not subject to their control in fact. The heart of Socialism-from-Below is its view that socialism can be realized only through the self-emancipation of activized masses in motion, reaching out for freedom with their own hands, mobilized "from below" in a struggle to take charge of their own destiny, as actors (not merely subjects) on the stage of history. "The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves": this is the first sentence in the Rules written for the First International by Marx, and this is the First Principle of his life-work.

After discussing various early examples of "socialism from above" such as Babeuf, Saint-Simon, Owen and Lasalle and then social democrats in the 20th century, Draper homes in on the prime example for the time when he was writing, the Soviet Union and the various derived regimes:

In another part of the world picture, there are the Communist states, whose claim to being "socialist" is based on a negative: the abolition of the capitalist private-profit system, and the fact that the class which rules does not consist of private owners of property. ...The state owns the means of production-but who "owns" the state? Certainly not the mass of workers, who are exploited, unfree, and alienated from all levers of social and political control. A new class rules, the bureaucratic bosses; it rules over a collectivist system-a bureaucratic collectivism. Unless statification is mechanically equated with "socialism," in what sense are these societies "socialist"?

I think we need to delve a lot deeper than this to understand the problem of the Soviet Union. Confronted with the fact that it was a country of peasants wanting their own land rather than proletarians gung-ho for communism, that there was not going to be a revolution in Europe, and that they had to industrialize as soon as possible to avoid being eaten by the Nazis, the Bolsheviks really had no alternative except to run the place pretty much from above. Trotsky was not very happy with all this "bureaucracy" and "socialism in one country" but I am still having trouble figuring out what he was offering as an alternative.

The problem was that rule from-above went further than was necessary and stifled rather than encouraged the progressive development of initiative from from below; and then it became ever more entrenched rather than whittled away. Those above did not see it as their role to transform the relations of production beyond state ownership and were happy to become a new bourgeoisie lording it over the masses and feathering their own nests. It reaches a stage where describing it as any kind of socialism deprives the word of any meaning.

There was a similar story in the case of the revolutions in China, Vietnam, Albania, Yugoslavia. The population were overwhelmingly peasants.

I discussed in a recent post how Mao became aware of the problem in China and attempted unsuccessfully to stem the rot. It is also worth having a look at the the 16 points that were meant to guide the Cultural Revolution; and also Mao's assessment in this 1964 newspaper editorialof what went wrong in the Soviet Union .

Draper makes a excellent point about how you need socialism from below for economic planning to work properly:

As a matter of fact, it would be important to demonstrate that the separation of planning from democratic control-from-below makes a mockery of planning itself; for the immensely complicated industrial societies of today cannot be effectively planned by an all-powerful central committee's ukases, which inhibit and terrorize the free play of initiative and correction from below. This is indeed the basic contradiction of the new type of exploiting social system represented by Soviet bureaucratic collectivism.

I discuss this issue in some detail in a paper I wrote a couple of years back called
The Absence of Communism in Soviet Economic Planning

More generally, is socialism from below a good way of capturing the task of the revolution? Draper is right in seeing that the revolution is about the self-emancipation by the working class. It is not just a matter of state ownership.

However, we don't really get to hear about the fact that we're dealing with a protracted process. A period of class struggle as we transition from capitalism to communism.

We are not talking about an unshackling where the chains are instantly cast off. Workers have to remove "the muck of the ages", They have to get rid of the old division of labor and create a new culture with new ways of thinking and behaving.

We are certainly not simply talking about workers councils and democratic decision-making, although this is important and the Paris Commune is the guide. However, democracy at the base is not a guarantee. The radicals will still have to constantly win the middle ground to push things along. If relations between people in production and society are not being sufficiently transformed, public opinion may swing to the idea that we need is "market reform", and socialism from below would then lead to the restoration of capitalism.