I’ve been happy to read another educational exchange from Cosmonaut, this time between Renzo Llorente and Gil Schaeffer (beginning with Llorente’s Contradictions, Schaeffer’s reply, and Llorente’s reply to the reply). Schaeffer characterizes his article as picking up the ball after Llores’s fumble. To mix sports metaphors, it looks to me like Llorente got a base hit and Schaeffer hit a flyout that let Llorente steal second. While there is much in both to discuss I’ll try to keep this letter focused on one aspect.
I wish to point out what I think is an overlooked distinction: Constitutional versus extra-Constitutional socialism. This is in part a legacy of the Cold War, but also a division that will necessarily exist so long as socialists vie for power in elected positions.
Extra-Constitutional socialism has no issue imagining a scenario where the U.S. Constitution is either made irrelevant by crisis or discarded by the movement of the vast majority. It is thus incompatible with the Constitutional path that democratic socialists like Sanders and the Squad necessarily espouse. They have taken solemn vows of loyalty to that Constitution and cannot practice a politics that does not presume it exists in perpetuity. The only Constitutional path for socialist revolution (in this schema, a dramatic amending of the Constitution) is the Article V Convention of States, itself an undemocratic process.
In my reading Schaeffer is in alignment with this Constitutional socialism, despite the repeated denunciation of the Constitution as undemocratic. This (I think) is the source of his emphasis on the Civil War and Reconstruction as an example where Constitutional legitimacy was wielded by a progressive bloc and the rights of reactionaries curtailed.
What I think Schaeffer neglects about this period is that it was ultimately a failure, and a failure because of the concern for liberal democracy and Constitutionalism. White democratic rights were at odds with Black democratic rights, and the former tragically won out. In this same way socialist democracy will be at odds with liberal democracy, the rights of proletarians at odds with the rights of ex-capitalists and their allies.
Schaeffer is dead wrong that “it wasn’t freedom of speech and the freedom to organize political parties that gave them [ex-slaveholders] power”. It was exactly those freedoms that allowed Lost Cause propaganda to be spread, allowed lies about unruly Black mobs to dominate the news, and allowed ex-Confederate officers to return to Congress. The lesson of Reconstruction is that the Union took their boot off the neck of the defeated slave power before its death throes were finished, and it was motivated in great part to do this by the scruples of liberal democracy and adherence to the Constitutional path.
Solidarity,
Abner Dalrymple
