Hal Draper - Socialism from Below

The US Marxist Hal Draper is perhaps best remembered for his monumental, multivolume study of the revolutionary thought of Karl Marx. But socialists usually first encounter him in a less grandious way by reading his well known pamphlet The Two Souls of Socialism. That pamphlet, and the work is was originally based on, where an attempt by Draper to grapple with the "crisis" of socialism in the period after World War Two. Then, Stalinism was triumphant, poisoning the very idea of Communism by become stipping it of any sense of revolution from below. As Draper explains:

The crisis of socialism and socialist ideas today, brought about by the aftermath of the Second World War and the rise of Stalinism against the background of the decay of world capitalism, has pinpointed one fact without possibility of dispute: The basic question for socialists is precisely this one of the conception of socialism.

Socialism from Below is a collection of Draper's essays (together with one criticial essay) that explore these crucial concepts. The first essay is the aforementioned Two Souls, which serves as a jumping off point for the discussion, even though most of the other essays have no direct connection in terms of publications. The opening essays explore the arguments of several US thinkers against socialism as a emancipatory mass strategy. These criticisms come in a variety of forms, but the dominant ones for Draper writing in the 1960s were "state control" of the means of production and managerialism. He writes of the US socialist and academic, Maynard C. Krueger that he "equates tendencies toward socialism with any tendency toward increased state controls". Draper's criticisms of these arguments are important because they have their parallels with arguments today, though modern readers will rarely have heard of some of those he is critiquing.

As with Draper's other writing, one of the things that shines through is his deep knowledge of the lives and work of Marx and Engels. In his discussion of Karl Marx and Simon Bolivar, for instance, he explores precisely how Marx and Engels understood Bolivar through a discussion of them writing a encyclopedic entry on the South American radical. He notes that unlike many radicals of the time, and indeed of today, Marx and Engels did not accept Bolivar's strategy, or the vision of some who supported him at the time and later, that the masses had to fight for a dictatorship that could then gradually introduce democracy at some later point, when the masses "were ready". As Draper says, "[Marx] does not accept the rationalisations for dictatorship" and continues:

There seems to be a contradiction: if there is no way for people to become 'ready' for democracy except by fighting for democracy, then it follows they must begin fighting for it before they are certified to be 'ready.' And in historical fact, this is the only way in which democracy has advanced in the world. The continuous solution to the contradiction lies in the process of revolution itself. This is a dialectic which will always be jeered at by those mentalities which know how to celebrate revoluitonary struggles only after they have been straijacketed by a new oppressive establishment.

If Draper here draws on lessons from the 19th century about revolution and the fight for liberation. Modern readers can draw on Draper's lessons from the struggles he was involved in. These include the radical years in the 1960s at Berkeley in California, when Draper was part of student struggles for democracy and against corporate influence on campus. Draper has written elsewhere of these in detail. But what again shines through is his commitment to struggle from below, and a sharp analysis of the limits of movements that do not put their trust in the masses.

A later essay explores the role of trade unions. This was an educational for socialists that Draper spoke at, to encourage a non-sectarian approach to trade union work, inspired by his idea of socialism from below. In it he explores what a trade union is, its limits and its potential and encourages the idea that socialists would be active within such a body. While socialists in Britain today might be frustrated by our union leaders, Draper has to engage with a much more right-wing, corporate trade union burearcacy. Nonetheless he does not right off these unions. I do think that here he gets it slightly wrong however. For Draper the union leaders are figures who can be pulled by mass action from below. He argues, "One function of the union leadership is to provide the organisational leadership of our class." [Draper's emphasis]. This, I think, is mistaken. It is better to understand the TU leaders, as Tony Cliff did, as a class of themselves, positioned between the workers and the bosses, and pulled by their own interests. Cliff's analysis arose out of his understanding of the economic seperation of the TU bureacrats from the shop-floor. 

Draper's position muddies his understanding of the role of revolutionaries within the trade unions. It is, he writes, "their specialfunction to organise that other pressure against the leadership". The idea of "disciplining" the trade union leaders by rank and file feels like a self-limiter on the movement itself. Surely the idea is that revolutionaries should be developing rank and file leaders to provide an alternative source of power to the trade union bureacrats. Consequently in this essay I wasn't convinced of Draper's criticisms of Rosa Luxemburg and the German Spartakist League towards the Revolutionary Shop Stewards during the German Revolution. Draper seems to think that Luxemburg should have abandoned the Spartakists for the RSS which seems to ignore the very constraained position her and Liebknecht found themselves in as counter-revolution raised its head.

Draper can be forgiven these errors in my opinion, because they do stem from having the right original position - the belief that workers action is key to their self emancipation. Indeed, the collection of essays in Socialist from Below, is a detailed reminder of what is lacking on the US left in general. Draper himself is a brilliant writer and polemist. His essays are barbed and full of humour, as his essay Vladimir Ilyich Jefferson and Thomas Lenin brilliantly demonstrates. 

But, as the world faces Trump's second rise, and the US left lacks a serious revolutionary organisation. New generations ought to dig out Hal Draper's work. This collection is expensive and academic, and the editor ought to have put more notes to give context to the articles (such as dates!) and so on. But there's a lot here the left desperately need to relearn. As Draper points out, "Marxism, as the theory and practice of the proletarian revolution, therefore also had to be the theory and practice of the self-emancipation of the proletariat. Its essential orginality flows from this source."

Related Reviews

Draper - Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution Volume 1: State & Bureaucracy
Draper - Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution Volume 2: The Politics of Social Classes
Draper - Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution Volume 3: The 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat'
Draper - Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution Volume 4: Critique of Other Socialisms
Draper & Haberkern - Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution Volume 5: War & Revolution
Draper - The Dictatorship of the Proletariat from Marx to Lenin