‘Social Democracy and the Aristocracy’’s insufficient attention to race

Social Democracy and the Aristocracy, by the late John Kautsky and originally published in the late 1960s, is an interesting read especially with later additions but is severely flawed by failing to seriously discuss questions concerning race, religion and resource endowment

In recent days I have looked at one book originally published as early as the late 1960s but comprehensively revised in the early 2000s — John H. Kautsky’s Social Democracy and the Aristocracy: Why Socialist Labor Movements Developed in Some Countries and Not in Others.

Social Democracy and the Aristocracy, in the plainest and simplest terms, argues that the social democratic movements of Western Europe and Japan occurred because of struggles, not against the capitalist ruling classes, but against the aristocratic landowning ruling classes. It argues that in North America, and in many modern emerging economies like Brazil, post-Stalinist Russia, Mexico and India, social democratic movements cannot emerge because old ruling aristocracies had been largely eliminated by earlier revolutions.

Kautsky’s idea is interesting and certainly does make some sense. The hostility of the socialist working classes of Europe was always directed more at the traditional churches than at the capitalists, even if this was because they understood that Christianity was inherently opposed to rights for workers and served a critical role protecting private property. Kautsky demonstrates that the churches did nothing whatsoever to cater to the workers and this left them without the sense of belonging to a community they possessed as peasants. This led the workers of Europe to form socialist parties dedicated to radical social change, especially the overthrow of the old aristocracy.

Contrariwise, Social Democracy and the Aristocracy argues that in societies that were “modernised from above” — which encompasses all of Africa, Asia and Latin America except Japan, and also all (ex)-Stalinist nations — the absence of an aristocracy meant that workers identified themselves with the modernising regimes. Kautsky also argues that globalisation — which has made capital mobile without increasing the mobility of labour — means it is unlikely that socialist parties can achieve what they did in Europe during the first two thirds of the twentieth century.

Kautsky argues that an aristocracy was also absent in the United States and Canada, but he lets himself down here. Many writers since Charles Beard a century and a decade ago have recognised the United States as a fundamentally aristocratic society, albeit one where the white workers were (or merely saw themselves as) part of the aristocracy. Under this condition, the white workers allied themselves with the ruling class against the black minority. Because the ruling classes knew very well that having white workers as allies would both permit much greater exploitation of blacks and protect against the dangers free blacks have always been seen (and still are) as posing the US capitalist system. Plainly said, if free blacks are excluded from (almost) every job, political activism becomes the logical alternative, and having the white masses as allies constitutes perfect insurance against this threat. In Canada and Australia race was also undoubtedly important in limiting radical politics. Until the 1960s Canada and Australia (alongside the Midwest and Northwest of the United States) were Herrenvolk democracies that excluded non-whites from settlement or (with remaining native peoples) political participation. In a Herrenvolk state, genuine socialism ipso facto reduces the social status of the electorate so will invariably be rejected. Nevertheless, Social Democracy and the Aristocracy never considers this, nor any other racial questions.

Social Democracy and the Aristocracy can also be flawed for its limited focus on religion. One can deduce that the radical anti-religion attitudes of European working classes were critical in developing mass socialist labor parties, for the simple reason that traditional religions invariably used the ruling classes to legitimise them. Ireland — the one northern or western European nation without a mass social democratic labour party — demonstrates conclusively that where religion possesses a critical role in a nation’s founding, the lower classes will support that religion and consequently cannot develop a socialist labour party. The same argument can be applied to the United States and Canada, where many communities were created by religious groups fleeing persecution in Europe. The hypothesis that anti-religious lower classes are critical for social democratic labor parties is supported even more firmly by the Gulf States, which have experienced no democratisation movement whatsoever. These states were modernised from within by Muslim royal ruling classes, who made their citizen populations into a privileged caste segregated from an expatriate (mainly South and East Asian) underclass and a highly skilled Western expatriate middle class. This three-way division of the nonelites in the Gulf States, alongside the deep religious attachment of their citizen populations, has allowed their ruling classes to give capital essentially unlimited power over labour. In exceptionally resource-rich lands that without absolute rule of capital over labour would have probably the highest wages in the world, unions and strikes are completely forbidden and expatriate workers can be fired without restrictions. This unlimited power of capital has created societies powerful enough to severely reduce the global power of labour and immune to externally-driven political challenges.

Another problem with Social Democracy and the Aristocracy is the absence of discussion of resources. It has long occurred to me that the ability of Europe, Japan and New Zealand to develop social democracy could be caused by their poverty in natural resources. Owing to the impact of the orogeny of the Alps in the south and repeated glaciations in the north and the Alps, Europe has been stripped of almost all critical mineral resources. Similar analyses apply to Japan and New Zealand. This is most especially true of the high-technology lithophile elements that a preindustrial society is incapable of using and exhausting — the mineral resources that do exist in young, glaciated landscapes are precisely those which a preindustrial society can exploit, but which are most easily exhausted. Especially since reading Aaron Brenner’s review of Michael Goldfield’s The Color of Politics, I have imagined that, in opposition to Brenner’s quote that

“...race becomes the deus ex machina that floats through history explaining the successive failures of working-class struggle. He [Michael Goldfield] is forced into this largely because he dismisses all the other explanations for American exceptionalism offered by the left since Marx. While some may be worthy of dismissal, others are not: the historic strength of American capital, the social and political force of agrarians...”

natural resource poverty might be what permitted strong social democratic movements in Europe, Japan and New Zealand. Lack of the illiquid, geographically fixed wealth provided by minerals should undoubtedly limit the power of capital and prevent it from dividing labour as it can so easily do in the United States. The absence of social democratic labour parties anywhere in the tropics or arid subtropics is fully in accord with this view because those regions have been too hot for glacial stripping of their minerals, although one might note that there are a number of genuinely resource-poor low-latitude nations that have been modernised from without, like Hong Kong and Taiwan. (One could argue that the modernisation of the “Asian Tigers” was deliberately done in such a manner to prevent powerful socialist labor parties developing).

A fourth fault is that Kautsky sees Leninism and the Russian Revolution as wholly irrelevant to social democracy in industrialised nations, but ignores the internationalism of the Russian Revolution entirely, and also the close connection between the social democratic parties and revolutionary workers’ parties. The workers who would later support social democratic parties frequently supported the extension of the Russian Revolution to Germany and beyond, and almost all admired the Bolsheviks for their ostensible prioritisation of the welfare of the lower classes.

All these features seriously flaw Social Democracy and the Aristocracy, although I found it very much worth the read I gave it in the State Library of Victoria.