Against Tony Judt (and for Dresden Antifa)

Back in December, the New York Review of Books published an essay by Tony Judt with the title “What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy?” based on a lecture he delivered in October 2009.

You may have read it. Bit.ly tells me that over 2,200 people have clicked on one of their links for it.

I think it sucks.

Here’s why.

“A social democracy of fear”—this is not something to fight for, this is something to fight against.

Tony Judt raises the spectre of social democracy as the force of Keynes and of postwar Britain: the NHS, social housing, a wealth gap between rich and poor that was decreasing, not increasing.

That’s lovely. I want all that. I want all of that. I want national single-payer healthcare, I want access to good quality housing for all, and I definitely want to reverse the trend of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

But Judt invokes this vision along with another—he invokes it as a response to the fear of fascism:

Thus Keynes sought an increased role for the social security state, including but not confined to countercyclical economic intervention. Hayek proposed the opposite. In his 1944 classic, The Road to Serfdom, he wrote:

No description in general terms can give an adequate idea of the similarity of much of current English political literature to the works which destroyed the belief in Western civilization in Germany, and created the state of mind in which naziism could become successful.

In other words, Hayek explicitly projected a fascist outcome should Labour win power in England. And indeed, Labour did win. But it went on to implement policies many of which were directly identified with Keynes. For the next three decades, Great Britain (like much of the Western world) was governed in the light of Keynes’s concerns.

Since then, as we know, the Austrians have had their revenge.

Judt then goes on to suggest that, in fact, social democracy is what prevents the emergence of fascism. That a state that reduces the wealth gap, that offers the poor “social services as of right” rather than as a handout will be investing in and invested in social conditions that prevent a fascist mindset from taking hold.

This account, however, seems to willfully ignore key reasons why social democracy found so little purchase in Weimar Germany.

Of all the proponents of the rhetoric of social democracy in history, it is harder to find stronger advocates for it than those of the SPD at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The SPD of the time was a mass workers’ party (much like Labour) that had decided to pursue social democracy as its tool for social transformation.

Yet where did these advocates lead the people? Into the jaws of death, into another imperial war. The social democrats, fearing to lose their place at the table revealed themselves to be just another tool of the elite who didn’t give a damn about the people.

The rise of Nazism in Germany didn’t just come out of a state indifferent to the effects of mounting inequalities—it also came out of crises in which it became quite apparent to the people how little the official social democratic party had to offer them. Chief among these crises were the World War, the Inflation, and the Depression.

I wish I could applaud Tony Judt for addressing the failings and dangers of neoliberalism, but his approach to these is backwards. He asks:

But what if we treated humiliation itself as a cost, a charge to society? What if we decided to “quantify” the harm done when people are shamed by their fellow citizens before receiving the mere necessities of life? In other words, what if we factored into our estimates of productivity, efficiency, or well-being the difference between a humiliating handout and a benefit as of right? We might conclude that the provision of universal social services, public health insurance, or subsidized public transportation was actually a cost-effective way to achieve our common objectives. Such an exercise is inherently contentious: How do we quantify “humiliation”?

How do we quantify the humiliation of being told that we should not argue directly that housing is a human right, but rather that we should try to measure how miserable we all feel when we face situations like barely being able to afford the rent, or struggling to pay the mortgage, or having lost homes to foreclosure?

Is Tony Judt willing to ask Lenise Forrest to quantify how humiliated she felt when she was evicted from public housing in Chicago a few weeks ago?

When we demand housing as a right, we demand it as a right, not “as of” right and not “as if” it were a right, but because it already is a right. Just one that is denied and unmet.

Many left progressives in the United States have a great love for the idea of a British-style social democracy. They dreamed that Obama would bring us another New Deal, another attempt at the Great Society, in short a social democracy of hope. (And change.)

I hate Sarah Palin, but when she asks “How’s that hopey-changey stuff going for you?” it has a resonance, and we all know why.

But the answer isn’t some “social democracy of fear.” How could a social democracy of fear address the issues that drew the Left to Obama in the first place?

How could a “social democracy of fear” prevent Guantánamo? How could a “social democracy of fear” prevent the PATRIOT act? How could a “social democracy of fear” prevent another illegal, stupid war whipped together with fears of terrorism and fears of all those strange other people that are coded as a threat to “our” existence?

(Rather than as people deserving of that same right to housing, that same right to healthcare, that same right to an education, that same right to a decent quality of life, that same right to have a say and a force in the situations of that life.)

How could such a “social democracy of fear,” constituted in fear for the existence of a civil society, and only willing to fight for services “as of right” in order to preserve social stability, really stand up for our rights, really prevent such racist and fascist fear-mongering and what it entails?

In Dresden today, for the first time in years, the annual Neonazi march through the city on the anniversary of the firebombing was prevented. It was stopped.

And it wasn’t stopped by the forces presenting themselves as “civil society”:

Their “human chain” action in the “old city” doesn’t actually compare to the action taken by about 12,000 leftist antifa supporters who held massive sit-in blockades of all the major marching routes that had been announced across town, near the train station.

The mayor of the city called the officially endorsed hand-holding symbolism a sign that made the city a “fortress against intolerance and stupidity” (eine Festung gegen Intoleranz und Dummheit).

But it’s not a sign from civil society against intolerance that stopped the Nazis this year—it was the intolerance of the left to letting the Nazis have their regular spectacle. It was direct action under the slogan ¡No Pasarán! (They shall not pass!)

While the mayor, Helma Orosz of the CDU, the Ministerpresident of Saxony, Stanislaw Tillich, and representatives of the public museums, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, all took part in the human chain that wound its way through the center of old Dresden, across the river Elbe, Antifa blocked not only the streets surrounding the main train station but also the train tracks themselves at some platforms.

Although the BBC and others are now claiming that stopping the march was a victory for civil society, civil society went as far as to call the posters of one of the main organizing groups a call to violence and to confiscate 5,000 of them in the weeks leading up to the sit-in. The police also tried intimidate private bus companies that had been hired to help antifa protesters. Meanwhile, only a few weeks ago, when antifa in Vienna protested against the annual ball of the far-right wing Burschenschaften (dueling fraternities) held in the halls of the republic in the Hofburg, the protest was first legally forbidden and then violently suppressed.

So, no, Tony Judt, I don’t think that your “social democracy of fear” is something to fight for. I think it’s another name for “civil society” and such civil societies can tolerate torture, they can tolerate slavery, they can tolerate fabricated wars, they can tolerate punitive occupations, they can tolerate colonialism, they can tolerate genocide, and they can certainly find it in themselves to tolerate a little fascism, when it serves them.

But it doesn’t serve us.