Wars of Position
Thoughts on "Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000" by Geoff Eley
In his 2002 book Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000, British historian Geoff Eley takes on the project of narrating and analyzing the origins, rise and fall of socialist politics and the post-’68 rise of a new configuration of left politics based on the ‘new social movements’ and what Eley characterizes as a ‘democratic’ project distinct from socialism. It’s nothing if not an extremely ambitious book; I don’t know of any other attempt to tell this story with this scope and comprehensiveness and it’s worth reading for that reason alone. What follows are some reflections part way through my own reading.
There’s a familiar pattern in histories of the Left, which are of course usually written by people with personal investment in leftist politics of one kind or another: the author imagines their ideal version of a party of the Left and judges the historically existing movements against this ideal. Quite frequently, the implied comparison is an idealized notion of the Bolsheviks in 1917. The various revolutionary defeats of European history since World War I are then laid at the feet of the way the dominant forces of the workers’ movement deviated from the author’s ideal. Communists lament German Social Democracy’s betrayal in 1918, Trotskyists add Italian or French Communism in 1944-45, anarchists denounce Bolshevik perfidy in Ukraine in 1921 and Spain in 1936-7. In the introduction to Forging Democracy, Eley explicitly disavows shaping his narrative around “a chronology of revolutionary failures.” But rather than fully transcend these conventional framings, he arguably only manages to reverse them.
I think it can be said without falling into sectarian pigeonholing that the strengths and weaknesses of Forging Democracy are those of the politics that animates it. This is a kind of ‘British Gramscianism,’ heavily influenced by the work of Stuart Hall, as well as Eric Hobsbawm and other thinkers on what’s typically called the ‘Eurocommunist’ wing of the British Communist Party in the 1980s. To put it extremely schematically, this politics took the Labour Party’s electoral failures as evidence for the crisis of ‘class politics,’ advocating expanded electoral coalitions based on downplaying specifically working-class demands and socialist goals (all well-worn Popular Front arguments), coupled with a new emphasis on building a popular consensus behind the left, a new ‘common sense,’ by engaging on the terrains of culture, daily life and existing popular ideas. Eley’s version of this politics is more distinctly inflected with feminism than others. The way this politics is reflected in Forging Democracy is, again, both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, paying close attention the ‘cultural’ terrain broadly conceived produces some of the book’s most important insights. On the other, the idea that the traditional conception of taking state power and carrying out socialist transformation is simply an anachronistic fetish leads to jarring misunderstanding of moments when this concept shaped the choices of historical actors.
Eley’s emphasis on the politics of culture, daily life and the domestic sphere opened up by feminism produces some of the book’s strongest elements. The chapters and sections detailing the historical failures of social democracy and Communism to understand or address women’s situations and interests and on the various ways, successful and not, that left parties sought to promote a progressive working-class culture are full of insights. (Even here, though, he sometimes overstates his arguments. Chapter 12 examines the gender politics of the Left during the 1920s. In the midst of a sharp critique of the limitations of Communist politics on “the woman question” comes the recognition that the nascent Soviet state proclaimed “Western feminism’s maximum program, to which no government in the West ever came close to agreeing,” that the PCF “consistently advocated women’s suffrage” and “championed the cause of birth control and abortion reform,” and that the KPD, for all its “assumptions about ‘women’s backwardness,’” nonetheless had “the strongest program of women’s liberation” of any force in German politics. Eley evaluates these movements through the lens of a later feminist politics, which is legitimate, but for my money this recognition of where they stood in the spectrum of available options at the time deserves more weight than he grants it.)
The weaknesses of Eley’s framework emerge most clearly in his discussion of the post-World War I revolutionary wave and its defeat, centering on Germany and Italy. Whether socialist revolution could have succeeded in these countries in 1918-20 has of course been the subject of extensive and heated debate. Eley eloquently portrays the mass radicalization that spread across Central Europe in this moment, reflected in everything from workers’ councils, general strikes and factory occupations to socialist local government across a swathe of Italy and repeated armed insurrections in parts of Germany. But jarringly, he then declares the entire debate about the revolutionary possibilities of this conjuncture out of order. While the “abstract merits” of socialist revolution Germany can be “endlessly debated,” he argues, it’s not worth serious consideration because it would have required “a long and bloody civil war.” This being the case, he can only criticize the SPD for failing to pursue democratic reform more extensively. In Italy, despite the explicit parallels he draws with Russia and the avowed revolutionary aspirations of the PSI, he makes a similar flat declaration that “an Italian October was unlikely.”
What else, then, should the SPD and PSI have done, if not try to initiate a transition to socialism? Eley argues that the Left’s “best hope” was “in joining—and helping to shape—a broader democratic bloc,” which would carry out “further-reaching socioeconomic reforms” and, once the forces of reaction recovered, “enable democratic defense.” There you have it: at the one moment when he considers a pan-European challenge to capitalism to have been even potentially on the agenda, Eley argues that the Left should have invented the Popular Front fifteen years in advance rather than making any vain attempts at realizing that possibility. Eley’s ideal concept of a left party emerges here, by implication: it is not, of course, a replica of the Bolsheviks, nor the kind of party of “revolutionary reformism” advocated by many seekers after paths towards socialism in liberal-democratic conditions. It is rather a ‘democratic’ party that would resemble Popular Front Communism or post-1945 social democracy in its rejection of any specificially socialist goals and its willingness to reach out to non-working class forces, while differing from them in taking on a politics of culture and daily life informed by feminism. In the translation from political argument to historical evaluation (which again, is hardly unique to Eley’s account) Eley has effectively projected the non-viability of a revolutionary transition in Western Europe backwards in time, to the one historical moment when it’s least clear whether this applies.
In his excellent essay assessing the work of Tony Judt, Dylan Riley points out the contradictions in Judt’s argument that the French left had ‘failed’ to produce a ‘normal’ social democratic party for most of the 20th century. Given that the expressed aspirations of French Socialists in the historical period Judt studied were not reformist but revolutionary, Riley points out:
the historical question is not: why did the SFIO fail to act as a reformist social-democratic party, but rather: why did the SFIO fail to live up to its own self-understanding and act as a revolutionary party? Judt had evidently registered this problem in his first book, admitting that, in the 1920s, a programme of revolutionary transformation ‘did not lack plausibility’; but he characteristically dismissed this line of thinking, on the grounds that even to ask such questions would be to apply a ‘logical’ rather than a historical standard Historiographically, of course, the reverse is the case: Judt himself was applying an abstracted ‘logical’ standard, in judging the inter-war SFIO from the perspective of post-war social democracy.
Something similar can be said of Eley, except that the imposed standard is not the prosaic one of actually-existing social democracy (of which he has his criticisms) but the more flexible, more intelligent, more feminist social democracy of his ideals.