By Gavin Mendel-Gleason & James O’Brien

TheNorthStar.info

January 1, 2014

(Part I of II, for Part II see: ‘The Strategy of Attrition:
Conquest or Destruction of the State?’ further down)

Introduction

Right from its beginnings in early 19th century, socialism has been bedevilled by debates over strategy in a way that right-wing ideologies have not. Would salvation come, as Fourier dreamed, from wealthy benefactors funding new communist colonies or maybe, as Proudhon envisaged, through workers founding their own mutualist enterprises and bypassing politics altogether? Or perhaps a more aggressive stance was necessary, as advocated by the proto-syndicalist wing of the British Chartist movement in the 1830s, who even then were cognisant of workers’ leverage at the point of production and supported the use of a Grand National Holiday — aka a general strike. Or was the mainstream Chartist emphasis on political action, i.e. taking control of state-power after having won universal suffrage be the centre of socialist activity the best way forward.

These strands and more were already manifest in England, then the most advanced capitalist country, in the 1830s — a long time ago. And they remain with us to this day because the problem to which they attempted to solve, namely minority rule, remains very much with us. The various tendencies correspond to available oppositional niches in a society dominated by capitalist production and therefore elite influence.

It seems obvious that an adroit mixture of the strategies, one which combined the strength of labour, the potential wealth of co-ops and the leverage of mass parties, is the goldilocks of political strategies and indeed that is the position we advocate. However, once we get into the details the obvious quickly becomes very blurry indeed. It’s hardly surprising that socialists have lacked the clarity of the right-wing since they, unlike us, are in driving seat and don’t need to change a whole lot while we are searching for a way to achieve our goals.

And it turns out that a combined arms strategy of unions, co-ops, and political party is not, in fact, the dominant orientation on the radical left, and has not been since 1917, at least in the English speaking world. There are, for example, proponents of an exclusively non-state orientation and there are supporters of political means, but who both deny that co-operatives can play a meaningful role before the working class has seized power and that tightly knit revolutionary groups are the key to success.

In this essay we are going to focus on the political arena and make case for a robust mass party strategy that aims to win political power via democratic elections, and only touch upon the role of trade unions and co-ops.

The Democratic Road

The case for choosing the democratic road is best teased out in comparison with alternative approaches, which for our purposes is going to mostly be the strategy of insurrection pursued by Anarchists and Trotskyists that is common amongst the revolutionary groups in the Anglo-phone world.

If the basic strategic choices first emerged in the 1830s, they became permanent features of the political landscape in the era of the First International (1864 – 1873) when the Anarchists and the Marxists parted ways replete with their own theoretical justifications. The Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, which saw the emergence of workers’ councils, moved the debate from being one that separated Anarchists and Marxists and landed it into the heart of Marxism itself.

Let us lay our cards on the table at the outset: the political strategy advocated here involves attempting to win state power in the advanced capitalist countries through legal means, taking the democratic road if you will. In practice, this involves winning a majority through competition in elections which are broadly considered free and fair.

However, a simple description of this approach isn’t sufficient. In order to evaluate its worth, we need to compare it to alternatives, of which there is no shortage, from anti-consumerism, to back to nature primitivism, NGO lobbying, Third Worldism, and Occupyesque protesting to name some of the lesser lights. For reasons of space, we’re going to limit the alternative to the principal one offered by revolutionary socialists since 1917: the smashing of the existing state and its replacement by participatory workers councils, i.e. the primary strategy offered by both the Trotskyists and the Anarchists. Moreover, we need a way of choosing between the alternatives. As the debate between them has gone on since the days of the First International, it seems likely that both sides have valid points to make. For instance, James Bierly, in a recent article on the North Star catalogued the many practical advantages of electoralism, such as the opportunities to engage with regular people that simply aren’t there when you are hawking the Socialist Worker at a demonstration. On the other hand, the anti-parliamentary left highlights the limitations of parliament in being able to bring capital under control given the strength of the unelected bureaucracy.

The problem with these arguments is not that they are not true. Quite the opposite: the problem is that they are true, i.e. both the pro and anti parliamentary strategies have valid arguments for their respective points of view. This makes it hard to decide in favour of one or the other strategy.

The pro and anti-electoral arguments pass each other like ships in the night because they are embedded in different theoretical frameworks. The anti-electoralist position of the Anarchists, for example, is not a stand alone affair but one that follows ineluctably from their opposition to hierarchies and representation. Similarly, the Leninist view that the positive use of electoralism is confined to more or less propaganda opportunities is derived from their view of the state as a capitalist entity which cannot be wielded by the working class for their own liberation. Rather it must be smashed and, as with the Anarchists, replaced with a form more appropriate to workers’ self-emancipation. [Note: in this essay, rather than constantly write “the Anarchists and the Leninists”, we're going to describe their common position of smashing the state as "insurrectionary" or, more rarely, as "revolutionary".]

So, the question as to whether socialists should put effort into running for elections and, if so, how much, can’t just be answered by listing the positive aspects of participating in elections because that case doesn’t address the issue of the state form being inherently capitalist, nor the issue of representation giving rise to oppressive hierarchies. The revolutionary opponents, or at least the more thoughtful elements, of the strategy already know those positive aspects. It’s just that in their framework these factors are outweighed by the counter-tendencies. Such a list serves a useful function in confirming the faith of the already converted, but does little to expand the coterie of modern day centrists.

Now, it isn’t possible to exhaustively deal with all the points, even in a fairly lengthy article like this one. Rather, we want to make explicit the theoretical framework in which electoralism is embedded. It is the entirety of the strategy that needs to be weighed against the entirety of the insurrectionary approach, not just electoralism per se, although that is our focus here. First let’s turn to the underlying logic of the anti-parliamentary left.

Revolution and the State

This need to smash the state, which is the core strategic aim of so many radical left groups, chimes with the language of the 19th century socialist movement, from which the modern insurrectionary groups are descended. There were no shortage of revolutions from the period 1789 to 1936 in Europe and the concept became very firmly embedded in their DNA.

But revolution can mean different things: e.g. it’s sometimes used in general way to describe deep change in the social structure, e.g. the women’s revolution or industrial revolution both of which involved a decades long project.

Then there is the concept of revolution as a new class coming to power, such as the rise to dominance of the bourgeoisie in France through the revolutionary 1790s. But a transfer of class power can occur in a lot of different ways, e.g. in France in the Great Revolution it was sudden and bloody, but in many countries, like Sweden or Denmark, the bourgeoise came to power peacefully and gradually. And it’s worth remembering that countries like Sweden were aristocracies from which the bourgeoisie were excluded from exercising state power and that it took decades of struggle before they were given the keys to government.

There is also a more directly political but nonetheless metaphorical use of the term, as when Mélenchon, one of the leaders of the the Left Front in France, issues a ringing call for a citizen’s revolution or when Syriza’s Tspiras likewise calls for ‘peaceful revolution’. In this case, while they are looking to greatly extend democracy and engage in structural reform of the state apparatus, they are not calling for it to be smashed and replaced with new organs of democracy.

And it is this ruptural meaning of revolution as an extra-legal seizure of power, not necessarily by coup d’état, but by perhaps by street demonstrations such as we saw in Eastern Europe in 1989 or in St Petersburg in 1917, and the destruction of the administrative apparatus that gives rise to a hostility to socialist electoralism. Attempting to win power, let alone win power democratically, to an entity you intend to abolish is clearly not going to be a high priority.

The attractiveness of conquering or destroying state power depends on our conception of the state. For those firmly situated in the Anarchist or Leninist traditions, the modern state is a capitalist one and cannot, therefore, be wielded by the working class for their own liberation. Instead it must be smashed and new, participatory organs put in its place. The reasoning underlying the need to smash it is that the state is ultimately the guarantor of capitalist domination and capitalists aren’t likely to be too accommodating in giving up their control of investment simply because a socialist party attains a majority. The putsch in Chile in 1973 is the favourite example of what the right-wing will resort to if their control of property is called into question, but there are no shortage of others: Spain 1936 is another big one. Indeed, European fascism is hard to understand without an appreciation of the fear that the elites had of a growing socialist-labour movement taking power democratically. Moreover, for the insurrectionaries, democracy in the advanced capitalist countries is a sham, with the resources available to the pro-capitalist media and politicians ensuring that the right-wing are always strong enough to win enough support to prevent the socialists from implementing their programme.

Thus, destruction of the state is the order of the day, with the point of note being the sequence: first, the state, as the godfather of capital, must be taken out of the equation; only then can the working class organise, through new forms such as workers’ councils, the mass participation in public life necessary to the complete the journey to socialism. In the absence of its protector, capital itself is vulnerable to expropriation by the masses, and so the revolution can move in a radical direction very quickly.

Like all good theories it carries with it some clear implications for current political activity in that the form of organisations that we aim to build are designed with the insurrectionary scenario in mind. Until a revolutionary situation arises in which the state can be smashed there are limits to what can be achieved on a mass scale since it is the process of revolution itself that draws the masses into public life.1 When revolution finally does break out, the new organs of democracy, the councils, will be the vehicle of mass participation.

The consequences for a socialist electoralism follows the chain of logic: since the state is capitalist, it cannot be a vehicle for socialist transformation and since it’s is not a vehicle for socialist transformation, elections to gain power is a non-sensical strategy. And since insurrectionary socialists have no interest in winning state power via elections, they have no need to construct political organisations that are capable of doing so. Instead, they seek to create political organisations suited to their fundamental theoretical understanding of what socialist transformation should look like, i.e. mass participatory councils with a revolutionary party as an aide.

The political position in favour of a revolutionary party coupled with mass assemblies is dual organisationalist. The compliment of mass councils is the need for an explicitly revolutionary party that interacts with the masses during the revolutionary process and is the repository of the historical mission in less propitious times. But the revolutionary party itself has a different role than the workers councils and remains separate from them and pre-revolutionary mass organisations. By separate we mean institutionally distinct, not that they never try to influence them. Although naturally a pro-insurrectionary party would like to grow, it doesn’t aim to win a majority support for itself, as an organisation, but instead view the emergence of councils as the entrance of the masses onto the stage of history.

That, in summary form, is what we’d call the classic view of the primacy of insurrection, one that was described as ‘strategy of overthrow’ in the debates of the early 20th Century and subsequently became dominant in the Anglo-sphere far left, primarily through the proliferation of Trotskyist parties, but also in substantially the same, if less irritating, form of class struggle Anarchist groups.

The Capitalist State

If an insurrectionary political strategy rests upon the state as an inherently capitalist force, then it also falls if the state doesn’t match that premise. The record of the state protecting private property in the means of production has provoked a long-running debate within Marxism about the relationship between the state and capitalism, with views ranging from seeing it as a good old fashioned executive committee of the bourgeoisie to emphasising its relative autonomy from the capitalist class.

At the more simple end of the spectrum, then, Marxists see the state as a form of class rule. It is not a free floating entity above the messy reality of class conflict but rather a tool for suppressing the exploited, that is, an organisational tool of those in control of the means of production. For much of history, this is essentially an accurate description and it remains fundamentally true to this day. In Ireland alone, the continuous and truly massive transfer of wealth from workers to capitalists arising from the latter’s losses in property speculation is a graphic illustration of the balance of class power. There is no question of a transfer of wealth in the other direction.

But modern society is more complicated than pre-capitalist social formations. The exploited are not as powerless and thus have gained a measure of influence over the state itself, the degree of which depends on the balance of class forces at any given juncture. The strength of the working class in Europe over the 20th century is reflected in the significant gains that it made, winning concessions on everything from maternity pay to lower retirement, from national health services to a reduction in militarism.

The western state is open to influence by other sectors. That is, it is dominated by capitalists and will, when push comes to shove, tend to favour their interests rather than those of other sectors. That tendency, however, demonstrates not that the state is intrinsically structured to deliver capitalism but that the social dominance of the capitalists manifests itself in the political choices made by those who control the state. Capitalist control of the investment process is key because most states are dependent on capitalists for a functioning economy, which itself is necessary to keep its population relatively satisfied and to generate income via taxation.

The state’s own capacity to reproduce itself, then, is dependent on capitalist investment but importantly it is not itself a capitalist formation as is proven by the existence of non-capitalist sovereign powers throughout history. The state, as a powerful entity with a distinct history and a degree of freedom regarding accruing resources, could attempt to usurp the capitalist position by supplanting its role in the investment process. Indeed, that is what we largely advocate. But the current configuration of power within the state apparatus more or less accurately reflects capitalist power in society at large and a process of democratisation of the state is best seen as a parallel process to democratising the ownership of capital itself, rather than as either as a precursor or a successor to it. Until that balance of power is altered there is little reason to expect the state to escape its subservience to the needs of capitalists.

The state, in other words, does not operate on capitalist lines. It operates in a capitalist context. The mode of production is king not because every activity becomes capitalist (or feudal or whatever) — a position which would see it expand like a rogue Agent Smith in the Matrix films and become everything and therefore lose all explanatory power — but because it exerts the decisive selective pressure on all other social forms, including the state itself. If any social group wishes to prosper it needs to bring its behaviour into line with the dominant mode of production. Thus, non-capitalist groups, such as amateur sports clubs, often go cap in hand to capitalist corporations for sponsorship while many scientific researchers depend on them for funding.2 Because capitalism remains the strongest method of producing, those states which remain hostile to it will be deprived of investment and are placed at a disadvantage in inter-state competition, especially if they are coming late to the industrialisation. They will tend to become poorer relative to their capitalist neighbours, leading to increasing internal dissatisfaction, fracturing of elites, and their likely overthrow by either internal or external foes.

The state is not, then, an eternal verity destined to contaminate all those who touch it but rather a site of struggle that reflects the balance of forces in wider society. It is a tool whose usefulness depends very much on who is wielding it and for what purpose. And like any technology, it has evolved in response to the external pressures applied to it so that in our era it both retains a similarity to its initial function (bash heads and extract the surplus) while accruing new functions and being significantly altered by these functions and the pressures which necessitated them.

Bourgeois Democracy

But even if the premise of the state as an intrinsically capitalist one does not hold up, there is the further issue of whether its form in the advanced capitalist countries is so antithetical to socialism that it is of little use in the project of socialist transformation. But what is this form? Leninist critics often describe it as ‘bourgeois democracy’ and therefore not a real form of democracy at all. If that view is correct, then the case for insurrection is more or less made, with only the tactical question of whether an insurrection can be carried off at a given juncture being at issue.

But is that view correct?

Socialism arose as a political doctrine in the 19th Century, a period in which there weren’t any democracies by today’s standards of universal suffrage and freedom to organise. Indeed the most advanced democratic country, the United States, was engaged in mopping up its anti-indigenous cleansing operations and still had slavery until the 1860s, followed by another century of legal discrimination. In Europe, the situation was different, but not much better. The Continent was dominated by monarchical governments and the major powers, Prussia, Austria, and Russia were governed by absolutist regimes that were removed from democratic influence. Even France, the centre of revolutionary hope for most of the this period, was governed by monarchical and imperial regimes for the bulk of the century. The other major power, England, while more liberal was not much more democratic. Apart from the obvious and still remembered exclusion of women, workers were denied participation in the political process in the 1830s and did not begin to make headway against this legal discrimination until 1867 and there were still restrictions against them as late as 1918.

Under those conditions, the right of workers to organise themselves was highly circumscribed. In England, the Combination Acts legally restricted the ability to organise, although by the 1870s momentum was turning in the trade unions’ favour. Not to be outdone, France under Louis Napoleon clamped down on worker organisations, enabling the anti-union philosophy of Proudhon to gain a foothold. The situation was naturally worse in less developed Germany, with the Social Democratic Party itself being banned by Bismarck in 1878 until his fall from power in the early 1890s while a thoroughly rigged electoral system persisted in Prussia right up until the revolution of 1918. The restrictions in Czarist Russia are widely known: suffice it to say that it was so antiquated and that freedom of organisation was so restricted by its decaying feudal regime that even large sections of the bourgeoisie were revolutionary.

And these were just the overt, publicly declared discriminations against workers. There are many more instances of the state simply backing employers in labour disputes even to the extent of shooting at mass demonstrations. So, throughout the period in which modern socialism was emerging there were legal restrictions, even in otherwise fairly liberal countries, on the right of workers to organise and, consequently, their ability to win political power. Workers could hardly gain a majority in parliament when they were denied the vote.

The absence of democracy cannot be overcome by purely democratic means if only because of the absence of those means. The origins of modern socialism in an era of undemocratic states ensured that, just like many of the nationalist movements that arose at that time, they tended to be revolutionary. Given that there was no democratic way to bring the regimes to heel, some sort of revolution was going to be needed to overthrow them.

The disdain for ‘bourgeois’ democracy, although inherent in the original Anarchist position, became widespread amongst revolutionary socialists in the wake of the Lenin’s break with the Marxist Centre through his gigantic gamble on the soviet horse and the resulting flood of Bolshevik polemics.

But the whole depiction of democracy as ‘bourgeois’ is entirely unhelpful, not to mention inaccurate. So-called bourgeois or formal democracy consists of universal suffrage, the rule of law, civic equality, the freedom to organise, elementary civil liberties and so forth. Essential as democracy is to socialism, it’s not a purely socialist demand. Lots of other groups in society have an interest in the progressive democratisation of society, including minority groups, females, and even the bourgeoisie and capitalists, whose freedom to accumulate is severely constrained if the state is strong enough to operate the law in an arbitrary fashion.

For socialists, however, the importance of democracy goes further: apart from being intrinsically desirable in themselves, democratic freedoms are necessary if we are to organise large organisations at all because millions of people cannot unite as members of free institutions unless there is the ability to democratically set the fundamental policy (the constitution, the core programme), elect, supervise and if necessary hold its leadership to account; if we cannot organise to propagate new ideas and fresh criticism and finally if there are legal restrictions on their right to do so in the first place. Democratic rights are a precondition – the light and air, as the orthodox Marxists put it – for a successful mass socialist movement to exist at all. Socialism is a project of collective emancipation and this requires the support and participation of those who are to be liberated.

The elementary rights of freedom of association, organisation and so forth are therefore not bugs in the capitalist system but features of any socially advanced society, which includes but is not limited to countries in which the capitalist mode of production is dominant.

The argument that democracy is a rigged game because of the preponderance of wealth that the capitalist class can throw onto the scales is true but vacuous. That is a problem of capital ownership, not a problem of democracy. The cultural influence of capital doesn’t just vanish if an electoral system based on representative democracy is replaced by some alternative form of democracy as is shown by both the strange street revolutions occurring in the Ukraine or the victory of the nationalist leadership of the SPD in the workers’ councils elections in Germany in 1918.

If it is a problem of democracy, let us not shrink from the logical conclusion: since the vast majority of the population are workers, the very same distorting affect of wealth will intrude on the purity of the democratic process irrespective of the form used in that process, irrespective of whether we call it a state or a federation of workers councils or grassroots assemblies. A temporary dictatorship will be necessary to bridge the gap between the collapse of capitalist political power and the institution of a new mode of production, a gap that may well last some decades. Trotsky, at least in the early to mid 1920s, was honest enough to to accept the logical endpoint of his insurrectionary strategy but modern insurrectionaries are not so forthright, no doubt because they believe that the process of revolution itself radicalises the population to such a degree that the muck of capitalist propaganda is purged from their minds.

Rapture by Rupture

The problem is not with democracy, it’s with the fact that we’re not winning the battle of democracy. Since we are not legally prevented from winning, as the early socialists were, insurrection is a solution to the wrong problem. The real problems of the disparity of resources thrown into the cultural battle to gain majority support and the structural dependence of the state — and labour for that matter — on continuing capitalist investment, require quite a different solution.

Insurrectionary socialists place themselves in a bind: democracy is a fraud because of the unequal distribution of wealth in capitalist societies and the socialisation of wealth is impossible because democracy is a fraud. Their solution is the catastrophic collapse of capitalism leading to the rapid destruction of the existing political system and the swift expropriation of private property. This is simply a modern, secular, version of the rapture in which the real problem of ownership of capital is solved by pushing it into an imaginary future in which the working class, deified as the risen Messiah, delivers salvation to humanity. Ironically, it was this very approach to which Marxism — aka scientific socialism — arose in opposition. After all, there were no shortage of socialist predecessors and competitors to Marxism, and many of them, such as syndicalism, had quite the following at one stage.

Subordination not smashing is the order of the day

A further reason for not smashing the existing state is that we need it. The early 20th century state was already an old, complex bureaucratic entity, stretching back centuries and conquering it rather than destroying it was the aim of the European Socialist parties; indeed it was the divisive issue between them and the Anarchists. The modern state is needed for the simple reason that it performs socially necessary functions without which a technologically advanced, densely populated society would collapse. And compared to the pre WW I state, today’s one runs vastly more essential services like healthcare, education, food and pharmaceutical safety regulation, environmental controls, provision of infrastructure, and a civil and criminal justice system.

If those functions go unfulfilled by a future socialist polity, the day-to-day experience of life for everyone will quickly degrade leading to an erosion of support for the socialist government (or polity). Court summonses for drink driving, to take just one example, will have to be issued under a socialist administration just as much as they would under a capitalist one. In theory, the state justice system can be replaced by popular tribunals but rules of procedure, expertise in summarising and arguing the law, administrative clerks and the like cannot just be recreated at will. The legal norms are the product of a long, messy, and less than edifying social evolutionary process. Limited as they may be, they have the under-appreciated virtue of actually existing — not a trivial accomplishment. The difficulties which recently cropped up in English Trotskyism have given rise to much comment about the inadequacies of the left in dealing with sexual assault cases. But they also point to the sheer difficulty of developing a viable alternative to the state justice system. Popular tribunals must fulfil those legal functions better than the old legal system if the new system is to secure legitimacy. In practice, that is extremely hard to accomplish and it is worth asking, does each administrative function need to be recreated from scratch? The question becomes all the more urgent when asked in the midst of an intense confrontation with the ruling class.

A better approach is to think about how the existing systems can be improved, principally through the extension of democracy into the apparatus, e.g. by removing the veto power of the Supreme Court or making their terms of definite duration and subject to the democratic wishes as expressed by the various political parties. Rather than destroying a useful machine we want to subordinate it for our purposes.

Learning to guide a large bureaucracy into a democratic mode of operation is a herculean task and not one that can be learned on the fly over a few weeks or months of insurrection. It takes years if not decades. In times past, the trade unions were a vital source of practical knowledge in administration but these have significantly less reach than they used to. It’s not a question of workers’ capability but of organisation, because it is only in certain forms of organisation and under certain conditions that their capacity is actually realised.

A strategy of extending democracy under the auspices of the political party reduces the level of social reorganisation that has to occur simultaneously if a confrontation with the capitalist class ever comes to a head. A large bureaucracy is a very complex machine and complex machines are far easier to break than to improve; the latter requires knowledge that tells us in advance that the change to be made is likely to increase the performance of the machine. Without such foreknowledge, any change is essentially random, and since there are vastly more ways for changes to degrade, if not wreck, the machine, changes which haven’t been carefully thought through in advance can quickly lead to severe social crisis.

The State and Socialisation

But extending democratisation within the state is only part of the party’s mission. It is of no use to have an unblemished tool which is admired but not used. As well as being the indispensable core of administering collective decision making, the state is a tool in the socialisation process. The most vital change is the co-ordination of investment. With the division of labour becoming ever more international the need for ever more intricate co-ordination arises, and the more complex that co-ordination the less able institutional forms — let alone consciously anti-institutional forms— that emerge spontaneously in the revolutionary process will be capable of mastering it. The resulting break in the chain of production will see a severe decline in living standards and an immediate, perhaps irrevocable, plummeting of political support for seeing the transition out.

The precise form that socialisation takes will vary according to circumstance, but in all cases the state, as both the overall sovereign authority and the vehicle for democratic participation must be at its centre. This does not necessarily entail an all pervasive level of control. For example, the state could mandate various banks to invest according to certain criteria which have won support through the majority socialist party.

It can also create, by using its legislative and judicial functions in a pro-labour way, a context which promotes workers’ self-activity. The dead hand of state compulsion has been a longstanding worry amongst socialists and the economic stagnation of the USSR indicates it has a real basis in fact. How then can state involvement with socialisation be coupled with self-activity? By tilting the playing field in favour of workers activity, e.g. by specifying a legal right to the products of their labour3 or by permitting businesses to be transformed into co-operatives with public financing if a majority of workers vote for it, the state makes it in workers’ own material interest to aggressively pursue socialisation rather than stop at a welfare-state type solution.

In the first example above, workers would not be handed the products; the socialist militants would still have to persuade the workers in each enterprise to seek their legal right. Independent jury tribunals can decide in these and other cases between employers and worker. Assuming the juries are randomly selected, as they are now, then the working class will make up its majority, thereby facilitating pro-labour judgements. Of course, if the tribunals were to return consistently anti-labour decisions, we would have good evidence that support for socialisation was waning and that a change in strategy is required. In any case, socialisation is not being imposed from above against the wishes of the majority. Emanating from a democratically elected party and dependent on the daily support of workers to further the process, the development of a co-operative economy would rest on a very solid foundation of mass support. It can assume the burden of providing collective goods so that workers co-ops can operate at much lower cost level and therefore compete with capitalist companies.

Capitalist Reaction and The Security State

The public sector is not populated by ogres, who become instruments of capital simply because of their role in the bureaucracy or due to some as yet unknown consequences of its particular form. Their specific role depends on a host of factors, not least the requirements of its own reproduction. To the extent that the apparatus depends on continued investment by capitalists in the economy, it has no choice but to align its interests with that of the capitalist class. But should another mode of production — producer co-operatives — begin to appear as a threatening cloud on the horizon, the apparatus has no intrinsic loyalty to capitalism for it is not itself a capitalist entity. To be sure, there will be personal loyalties, especially at the higher echelons who, having gone to the same posh schools, will be horrified at the thought of the plebs taking over. Should they begin to disrupt the socialisation policy of democratically chosen socialist party they will have to be neutralised and replaced by more well disposed individuals. What is of more importance is that the vast bulk of public sector workers, including the administrative workers in the Civil Service, are onside with a policy of socialisation. Only a mass party with roots throughout the community, with an organisational reach comparable to the Catholic Church of old, can hope to win the active and passive support from the bureaucracy which is necessary to carry through socialisation measures.

Nevertheless, it would hardly be surprising if elements within the apparatus attempt to disrupt the necessary structural reforms, e.g. taking control of credit, altering labour legislation in favour of trade unions and co-operatives etc. As it is, the bureaucracy stymies existing pro-capitalist governments all the time. We can expect degrees of co-operation within the state apparatus which itself will not be unaffected by the balance of forces in society generally. A rise in support for the socialist party and the increasing competitiveness of worker co-ops will enable sympathetic tendencies within the apparatus to be more vocal and to push those sitting on the fence to co-operate while resisting the disruptive efforts of the recalcitrants. But the sympathetic tendency requires direction from a legitimate government sanctioned by a democracy.

By winning the battle for democracy, we make it harder for the holdouts in the state to organise resistance. Reactionary pro-capitalist elements that attempt to disrupt socialisation will find their options have narrowed considerably once they find they have lost the co-operation of great swathes of the administrative apparatus itself while legitimacy and sheer numbers enhances the position of our allies, making it easier for them to argue for co-operation with the socialisation project. We must make it easy for them to comply with socialisation and make it costly for them to block it.

At some point the reactionaries will try to move onto more aggressive measures, including investment strikes and ultimately a coup d’état. We won’t deal with the inevitable investment pressure that will be brought to bear other than to say if the socialist movement hasn’t prepared the ground well in advance by having sufficient weight in the productive sector that it can see out such a strike, then it can simply forget about instigating any structural reforms that take us in a socialist direction.4

Should the socialist-labour movement prove too resilient to fold before the disruption aimed at fostering economic breakdown, the doomsday weapon of violent reaction, whether through the mobilisation of a mass fascist movement or via a straight-forward coup d’état always looms over its head, ready to detonate. This sober fact is one of the common reasons cited by insurrectionaries when arguing for the need to smash the state itself. Unfortunately, however, while destruction may solve the problem of the military reserve option for the ruling class, it doesn’t, as we argued above, solve the problem of being able to transition to a socialist mode of production.

And nor is it the best to counter the possibility of violent reaction. Just as democratic legitimacy is a counter to the recalcitrant bureaucracy within the civil service, it is also a weapon against those sections of the state, i.e. the security state (the political police, the intelligence agencies, the officer corps). Again, it enhances the possibility of a split within the ranks of larger security agencies, i.e. those with lots of members with ordinary functions. Many of the great revolutionary events in history, including decisive movements in the French and Russian Revolutions, were settled by the refusal of the rank and file soldiers to fire on protestors. The more we have legitimacy the easier we make it for them to disobey their reactionary officers, especially as there will likely splits within the security state, with some of their leaders having internalised the values of liberal democracy, will maintain their loyalty to the legitimate line of authority.

Of course, should the democratic process itself come under attack, either through a frontal coup d’état or through a prolonged form of technocratic government installed by the IMF or the ECB, then an old-fashioned street revolution becomes not only desirable but inevitable. Until that scenario occurs, however, we need to approach the question of revolution from a defensive standpoint. As Engels put it, it’s tactically in our interests to put the ruling class in the position of having to shoot first as they would have to bear the burden of responsibility for being anti-democratic, while socialists get to be defenders of not only egalitarianism but of democracy too, thereby making it easier to split potential allies, such as small businesses, off from the right-wing. As the experience of the last century has shown the far left, it is not so easy to organise insurrection against a democratically elected government, especially in the advanced capitalist countries.

Nor is revolution itself an inherently positive development. A fair proportion of history’s revolutions have had little progressive content, e.g. the anti-French revolt of the Spanish in the revolutionary era, while more modern mass protests regularly veer close to being essentially the useful idiots of the American foreign policy establishment – the anti-Chavez protests of 2002 being the clearest example. In Ireland, the grassroots Ulster Workers’ Councils of the mid-1970s, which led to the shutdown of the province, was entirely reactionary in nature.

A good example of the limited value of street insurrections as a gauge of progressive content is the enthusiasm which led the (Cliffite) SWP to both endorse the Muslim Brotherhood when it was benefitting from the overthrow of Mubarak and to oppose it when its democratically elected government was the subject of a military led street revolution. Rather than promote a long-term strategy of building organisations capable of outcompeting both the Muslim Brotherhood and the military they preferred to take the shortcut of insurrection. In the end, however, the shortcuts lead nowhere, since there is no shortcut to building up mass, popular organisations, the measure of which is victory in democratic elections. Neither the secular-liberals nor the socialists, both of whom lack institutions on the scale of the Muslim Brotherhood, are capable of mounting a challenge to win popular support on the scale of the Islamists and so street revolutions end up in the entirely reactionary laps of the military establishment.

Conclusion

Just as with a strategy of insurrection, there are political implications to attempting to conquer political power and subordinate the state to the process of socialisation. We can summarise those implications thus:

    Subordination requires support both active and passive support within the apparatus.

    Democratic legitimacy is essential to securing that support.

    Democratic legitimacy means winning power democratically and putting that legitimacy to the test repeatedly.

    Winning elections requires a mass party.

So arising from the our position on the state, a quite different conception of political strategy follows. On the one hand, insurrection with a revolutionary vanguard party and mass assemblies, on the other, mass socialist parties winning power via the existing democratic system. Or, to put the argument another way, if we don’t need an insurrection and if we don’t need an entirely new system of workers councils, we don’t require parties whose fundamental task is to promote that strategy. Because we are making socialism and not insurrection the central strategic goal, we have no need to maintain an organisationally distinct revolutionary party.

Quite the opposite. We want to merge the socialists into mass organisations so that ideologically socialist parties exist on a truly large basis over a prolonged period of time, for decades at least, for centuries if necessary.

Notes on Part One:

1. The idea is most clearly and poetically expressed by Trotsky: “the history of a revolution is for us first of all the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of their own destiny”.

2. We elaborate on this interpretation of capitalist domination in Science and Socialism.

3. These examples follow the lines of thought of Cockshott, Cottrell, & Dieterich in their Transition to 21st Century Socialism in the European Union.

4. See our article, The Transition for further argument on this point.

________________

Part II: Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus
(Outside of the Church there is no Salvation)

 

By Gavin Mendel-Gleason & James O’Brien

January 2, 2014

 

Emancipation through Organisation

In order for strategies to become more permanently established they need to be theorised. Just as the Leninists, from 1919 on, theorised the de facto dictatorship of the Bolshevik party into the theological knots of vanguardism and the Anarchists theorised the workers councils as the vehicle of liberation, Kautsky and the Marxist Centre theorised the mass socialist-labour organisations as the agents of socialist transformation. The view was brought out in the debates between Otto Bauer and Kautsky over the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s. Bauer argued that there could be a Russian road to socialism; that the backward conditions found there facilitated the crash-course of industrialisation which would pave the way for socialism in the future.

For Kautsky this was illusion. Socialism does not arise from industrialisation per se. It comes from the action of the working class, action which can only occur via their own free, independent organisations. And it was precisely these which were absent in the USSR, with only one legal political party, trade unions which were under its tutelage, and a pervasive political police.

For sure, a technically advanced country was the precondition for the very possibility of an urban working class, never mind a working class organised into its own institutions. Before capitalism the masses existed in a permanent state of subordination broken only by sporadic and doomed uprisings, inherently incapable of instituting a socialist mode of production.

The creation, through the expansion of capitalist production, of the urban working class provoked a new and qualitatively different round of the class struggle: not, this time, between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, but between capitalism’s creation, the modern proletariat, and the capitalist class itself. And it was the class struggle that arose from capitalist industrialisation that forced the working class to organise its own trade unions, its own co-operatives, and, eventually, its own political party. It was to be through these institutions — so went the narrative of Second International Marxism — that the working class would build such hegemonic influence that it could win state power and transform society by transforming the mode of production.

If a large political party is a prerequisite for gaining control of the state, large worker organisations are also a precondition of socialism. Without organisation, the working class is just an amorphous mass of individuals, at the mercy of capitalist command of resources and its torrents of propaganda. It is only through organisation that it becomes an active player. And without organisations we cannot organise labour on a mass basis. If the First International’s famous slogan proclaimed that the emancipation of the workers would the be the task of the workers themselves, the Second International’s variation amounted to “the emancipation of the workers is the task of the workers’ organisations”. Not as pithy, but more specific.

In the absence of mass socialist-labour institutions workers’ capacity for action is restricted to protest and destruction. Kautsky, in the debates with Luxemburg, was explicit about the limitations of unorganised mass actions, i.e. spontaneous actions that were not co-ordinated by specific institutions. These type of action are restricted, they’re  only defensive or destructive political actions, i.e. they could bring down a regime (as they did in February 1917) but they could not in themselves construct an alternative to the existing order except through the workers’ own political party and, critically for the project of raising a socialist mode of production to dominance, via co-ops and labour unions. Spontaneous action was by no means rendered redundant by the rise of the labour organisations; under certain conditions, essentially extremely repressive conditions such as existed in Tsarist Russia, or indeed in the final toppling of the Kaiser, it played an indispensable role. It also served to act as a reserve weapon against the capitalist class should it force the labour movement into a smaller and smaller space of legal existence.

But to go beyond the mere destruction of a conservative force, the organisations needed to exist and to exist on a mass scale while being imbued with a socialist, and preferably Marxist, ideology. To be sure, socialists could not bring about the revolution at will. There were much larger social forces at play: the erosion by industrialisation of the feudal remnants; geo-political manoeuvring; the pace of technological developments, etc. But socialists could control what they did with their own organisations. They could choose to pursue a purist revolutionary line and dispense with the mass worker organisations or they could choose to focus on direct economic action, as advocated by the syndicalists. In Kautsky’s view, they needed to prioritise the building of their own organisations and wait for the dynamics of capitalist development to deliver opportunities for winning power, an approach he called “the strategy of attrition”.

Contra Pannekoek, who viewed the strategy of attrition as in effect a form of “actionless waiting”, it was not going to be a passive affair. It involved a continuous strengthening of the movement institutions: more recruitment into the labour unions and strengthening their capacity for struggle; more and larger co-ops; increasing the membership and popularity of the party and its related cultural clubs; deepening the socialist intellectuals’ understanding of economics, the materialist conception of history, and expanding the reach of the socialist publications, etc. In sum, it involved the construction and continual expansion of a socialist ecosystem of organisations which could withstand the considerable pressure brought to bear by their capitalist and aristocratic opponents. Hence the title, the strategy of attrition.

Having outlined, nay bludgeoned, the importance of socialist organisations we are in a position to identify the role of electoralism. On their own, elections don’t put us on the road to socialism; they just do what the Trotskyists always accuse the Marxist minimum programme of doing: of making capitalism more tolerable — an under-appreciated virtue to be sure, but in any case a different one to what we are trying to achieve. It is only as a component part of the strategy of attrition that electoralism plays a critical part in moving beyond capitalism. Winning power is therefore not the only goal of electoralism; every bit as important is the role it plays in building a mass socialist party capable of winning it and of controlling the apparatus when it gets there.

For the supporters of council (soviet) democracy and the vanguard insurrectionary party, this is an entirely redundant approach. If anything the creation of permanent mass institutions becomes a fetter which prevents a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism by the treacherous actions of its bureaucratised leadership when the hour strikes. But for the Marxist Centre, as the proponents of the attrition strategy were known, the task of building up the organisations is the heart of all socialist activity. Not only should elections be seen in this light, but so too should demonstrations, leaflets, pickets, participating in single-issue campaigns and basically everything else we do.

Pannekoek and Luxemburg misjudged two factors. They overestimated the ease with which radical or direct action could escalate into revolution and they underestimated the importance of building the mass socialist-labour organisations. In a way this was understandable. Very significant gains, especially in the extension of suffrage, were being made in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and, secondly, they had come to political maturity in an environment in which mass socialist organisations were a feature of social life. They were taken for granted. The issue, from their perspective, was to set these organisations in motion. But from our perspective, a century later, and having witnessed the eclipse of all varieties of socialist parties in the advanced capitalist states, it is the absence or severe weakness of mass organisations that is the problem, not that they are too conservative. Recreating them is not a trivial problem. There are no shortage of Luxemburgist alternatives, i.e. radical attempts at street demonstrations, from the anti-WTO protests of Seattle to the Occupy movement of 2011. But they have proved to be no panacea and when capitalism tottered in September 2008 there wasn’t the slightest question that there was an alternative economic system that could step in and immediately take over. The strategy of attrition, of building up the mass socialist-labour institutions, is designed to solve that problem.

Eco-system resilience and virtuous cycles / cumulative growth

The emphasis on the long-term building of mass organisations carries with it a number of key benefits. Take media, which are indispensable if we are to compete with capitalism for ideological dominance since that is how public communication to vast numbers of people occurs. We need funds to organise media, not just newspapers but television stations, websites, iPhone apps and the like. It costs money to pay journalists, sub-editors, programmers, and designers. We lack the capital but we have the numbers, an advantage that is only realised when we are organised. The potential volume of small contributions is immense and while it may not match what is available to the capitalists, it would certainly enable us to promote a socialist worldview at a mass level and enter in serious competition with the ruling class.

The German Social Democratic party had a myriad of social clubs: it had its own media apparatus, selling a million copies a week and with many more readers. It had theoretical journals, but it also had summer camps, athletic clubs, cycling clubs, even smoking clubs. The Italian Communists existed at a similar level. What they had in effect was an entire eco-system of organisations.

These don’t necessarily lead to radicalism, but they do lead to the organisations planting deep, deep roots in society. In many ways, they created something that is closer to a secular church than to a mere political party, and they reaped the benefit of the emotional attachment that their members had for the movement so that even a prolonged period of fascist reaction could not uproot them from society.

Once socialist institutions reach a critical mass a positive feedback loop kicks in. Our media normalises the idea of a co-operative economy, which leads to passive support, more donations, more votes, and more activists which leads to an increase in services: new worker co-ops, mutual aid funds, social clubs, choirs and so on. These further project the viability of socialism as a movement and an ideology which leads to further support, more donations, the surplus from the co-ops going to fund the party, which promotes the general idea of socialism through its increasing resources and so on in a positive feedback loop. A process of ratcheting up is underway, leading to a virtuous cycle in which cumulative gains are now possible.

In contrast, insurrectionary political parties are not at all oriented to working that way. Their primary strategic approach is to engage in federalist political coalitions (sometimes over-theorised as a united front) or, more commonly, single-issue campaigns in loose alliances with other far left groups and assorted independents. Whatever the obligation to engage in single-issues campaigns — and they are just a fact of political life — these campaigns rarely get beyond that particular issue itself. So, when that campaign is over, irrespective of whether it has ended in victory or defeat, the next campaign must start from the same low basis, lacking internal infrastructure and the political equivalent of brand awareness. The co-ordinating mechanisms must be constructed from scratch. As a single-issue campaign, it must stick fairly closely to the issue at hand or risk alienating the non-political people who are just concerned about it and not the wider political situation.

But there is no cumulative benefit because the organisations are different. The supporters who engage with the issue of unfair tax might have very little interest in an oil pipeline in Alaska. In order to benefit from the cumulative process of individual campaigns, there needs to be continuity of organisation so that when the next issue comes up, we are starting from a more advanced point.

The insurrectionary strategy fails badly at this and in fact revolutionary parties are not set up to take advantage of the often trojan work they do behind the scenes in these campaigns because they don’t want to build mass non-revolutionary parties. So, for them, it’s not even a major problem as their strategy relies on an outbreak of revolutionary upheaval rather than incremental growth of organisations as the vehicle of social transformation.

Unfortunately, it’s simply not possible to get big and capable institutions in one go. Even in highly favourable circumstances, there has to be a pre-existing institution that is set up to take advantage of it, which takes time to get its internal organisational structure and external strategy into presentable shape. It is necessary, therefore, to adopt a strategy that enables cumulative growth and that entails, by definition, having institutions which persist through time. But in the vanguard model the most long-lasting organisation is the revolutionary party which is precisely the one that is least able to grow to a considerable size. It is only the ephemeral single-issue campaigns and ideologically fluffy alliances which are able to achieve major proportions and they, because of what they are, are structurally incapable of persisting through time, thereby preventing any possibility of cumulative growth. As long, therefore, as the radical left maintains its current division between revolutionary and mass organisations it will be incapable of ever attaining the strength to implement its programme of socialisation.

In contrast, the classical Marxist approach of merging the socialist intelligentsia with the mass labour movement to form a socialist-labour movement provides a way out of the inability to either never grow large enough or for the mass organisations to be bereft of a socialist ideology. This “merger formula”  is the conception that undergirds the strategy of attrition just as theory of the vanguard party fits snugly into a strategy of insurrection.

Political Consequences

Electoralism is the most important political activity in the European and North American societies and in practice it forms the centrepiece of activity for the remaining mass socialist-labour parties, such as Syriza in Greece, the French Communists and so on. Although putting the party and its programme to the test in elections is the priority it doesn’t preclude a host of other activities, including involvement in single-issue campaigns. In practice these will take up a lot of time just as they do now for the radical left. But in order to benefit from electoral work  there has to be an institutionalisation of the gains, whether through increased participation in the party or union, more subscriptions to sympathetic left-wing media, joining a co-op or simply voting for the party come election time. These and other possible methods of harvesting the labour expended in the springtime of campaigning all depend on having institutions capable of soaking up the goodwill.

Organisation enables a sort of alchemy; the transmutation of goodwill into support and practical activity over the long term. Mass parties (and associated organs, co-ops, etc.) are not just admirably suited to achieving this, they are absolutely necessary. For every cadre member who joins a revolutionary party, there will be thousands more who are sympathetic to the basic goals of socialism. An emphasis on the destructive side of socialism, i.e. one which focuses on the necessity to smash the state, makes it harder for these potential sympathisers to participate in the movement in a sustained, long-term way, if only because of its intrinsic lack of plausibility. And even where single-issue campaigns are necessary, which seems likely to be the case for a long time to come, a socialist electoral party has no need to hide its politics in the initial period and then rush to spray them all over the campaign when it looks like it’s coming to an end.

The strategy of attrition is, therefore, compatible with a type of politics that is close to where many people already are. Its radicalism lies in its goals, not in its practice and this makes it easier to interact with non-socialists on an open basis. There is no need to hide its insurrectionary orientation because it doesn’t have one. As long as the party has a programmatic commitment to a co-operative mode of production and uses other avenues, e.g. its media or its public representatives, to articulate that, its mere presence as an ally of campaigns is enough to raise awareness of its goals.

In political terms, it requires genuinely engaging in electoral politics with the aim of winning since that is both the route to democratically gaining power and the best way of achieving large size in the political realm. It’s often argued that engagement with electoralism detracts from the core message of promoting socialism, as more immediate concerns, including the need to get re-elected, crowd out the longer term vision. This is a valid insight, but the assumption that ignoring the immediate ways people interact with politics doesn’t solve it. It just results in even less opportunity to engage with folks about any sort of politics at all.

For sure, at the micro level, the focus on the day-to-day is inevitable. It is, however worth taking a broad and long, i.e. decades long, view of its function. People aren’t going to be won over to socialism from a few chats at a door or a round of public talks. Shifting people’s values, consciousness, and tribal loyalties is a complex process. But each interaction can be a contribution to a movement gaining credibility. Every iteration of positive, even neutral contact between socialists and Joe Public chips away at the negative assumptions inculcated by the wider culture. But, more than that, electoral participation and victory conveys the impression of a competent organisation and as low-level messages for socialism seep through, the idea becomes normalised. Electoral validation helps create a culture where socialism can be discussed.

Now, for micro-interactions to be a contribution, they have to be a contribution to something. And something with an ability to scale. Promulgating revolutionary insurrection, smashing the state, etc., does not at all mix with chatting to Mary about the cut to child benefit. On the other hand, where there is a pre-existing movement that projects a grander vision, then each iteration of micro-contact about non-revolutionary issues serves to normalise that movement and therefore its vision. Clearly there is a danger that the day-to-day concerns force the grand vision into the background. Such is the risk of engaging with reality. But without being able to relate the day-to-day with the longterm project, the proponents of socialism will remain very isolated intellectuals.

The more that our activists can make the connection between the two the better, but as anyone who has had experience knows, it’s damn hard to get up in a workplace staff meeting about overcrowding in the canteen and make the connection with global capitalism. The same applies for potholes on country roads or traffic calming measures in the city centre. Occasionally a gap will open and the activist can make a punt about generalising the inadequacies to the economic system itself, but usually it will make you look a bit strange, especially if that opening is forced, in which case it can actually be counter-productive (which is one reason why those American Spartacists come across as really bizarre in many of their public interventions).

The task of promoting socialism — the collectivisation of the economy, co-operatives, etc. — will be made much easier for the grassroots activists the more that our intellectuals and prominent party members (MPs, etc.) can articulate it in a defensible manner. The starting point for this cannot be the mass media, which confines you to soundbites or at most a critique bereft of the opportunity of addressing structural issues, such as the ownership of the means of production. To even utter the phrase “the means of production” would probably take up half your response time on pretty much all mainstream current affairs programmes.

That battle takes place at a different level and the MPs get a simplified message, e.g. democratic control of investment, promotion of co-ops. Even then, most of their opportunities for interaction with the public will be on non-socialist issues, corruption, waste, war, civil rights (including gender equality, solidarity with immigrants, etc.). Every time they do well on these issues they increase the probability that the economic message is taken seriously. The more that happens, the easier it is for the grassroots activists to do the leg-work because the socialist vision is animating the movement as a whole. Thus, whatever strengthens the party / movement strengthens socialism, providing of course, the party continues to place socialisation at the heart of the project.

The Costs of the Strategy of Attrition

But if the merger formula is vastly more likely to lead to success, it far from guarantees it. Although it solves the problem of never being able to get on a track of cumulative growth it does run into the very heavy problem of integration into the existing political-economic system. The fate of the German SPD and the Italian Communists is ample evidence of the seriousness of the problem. All actions have costs and the cost of a mass organisation is a bureaucracy without which it cannot be maintained for more than a few months — not long enough to get the cumulative growth we need. When radical left groups are small they can persuade themselves that a distinct apparatus is unnecessary because for them it more or less is unnecessary. But that doesn’t apply to groups with millions of members, which is the scale we need to be aiming for.

Bureaucracies may be necessary, but they are also dangerous as they have a tendency to escape the control of the membership. Their first duty is to preserve the organisation itself and this leads to a conservative mentality. Again, this is unavoidable if the organisation is to exist. A trade union which hurled its members onto the barricades at every opportunity would soon see itself reduced to a fringe group.

In addition to the natural tendency towards conservatism, mass organisations of socialist opposition will come under immense cultural pressure. Its members will be subject to pro-capitalist propaganda and won’t be immune to the effects of the wider culture, which is massively suffused with capitalist values. Indeed, if socialists provided no other service than creating media capable of competing with the propaganda machines of the right, they would render an immense service to humanity.

The pressure of the wider pro-capitalist culture combined with the tendency towards increasing conservative apparatus makes the strategy of attrition a risky one. There is a race on between the socialist organisations aiming to transform capitalist society before capitalist society transforms them. The calculation is that the socialist-labour institutions can last long enough and make socialism an attractive enough ideology so that when the cracks appear in the capitalist edifice, they will be able to sweep in and begin restructuring the economy. But there is no question that the strategy of attrition courts integration if those cracks are patched up quickly enough. If the capitalist mode of production proves to be healthy over the long-term then it is likely these organisations will suffer the fate of the SPD or the PCI. But it puts us in the game; a game we might lose, but also one that we might win. Without the mass organisations the insurrectionary groups aren’t even in the competition and so while they can’t ever lose, they can’t ever win either.

Socialists have an important role in the struggle against the domination of the apparatus of the movement itself. The battle for socialism must be won not only in wider society, but within the socialist party and within the co-operatives and trade unions, not just once, but year after year until socialism is the dominant mode of production. Encouraging the participation of the grassroots in the life of the party is also an essential feature in keeping the bureaucracy in its box. In recent years, a lot of thought has gone into new forms of democracy, e.g. liquid democracy, sociocracy, sortition, etc. While these are worth experimenting with, the chief weapons remain freedom to organise and the freedom to articulate criticism and dissent. Compared to them, the precise procedures that are used fade into second place. This freedom requires a party tolerant of diverse views and one that facilitates their expression through its own institutions, e.g. magazines, summer schools and the like. Provided the dissenters do not have an agenda of splitting the mass party, the dissent is likely to strengthen rather than weaken it.

Further, the existence of a wider eco-system of organisations promotes alternative material interests to that of the status quo. A leadership whose resources depend on funding from a vibrant co-operative or union movement will be constrained from throwing their lot in with capital.

Forms of Democracy

As this piece is centred on immediate strategy, it has focussed on the two main choices: a vanguard party or a mass party. But as we saw, there is a second part to the insurrectionary equation and that is the mass assemblies, which are usually held up as a superior form of democracy to the ‘bourgeois’ form of the parliamentary systems.

There are many varieties of both systems, but the main differentiating feature lies in the conception of the role of the party as a mediating force or promoting the direct participation in the decision making process. That is, in current democratic systems, we vote for representatives who pass laws according to the strength of the party to which they belong. The criticism levelled at this type of system is that the representatives escape the control of the electors. The alternative is based on some form of assembly democracy in which the masses can participate directly. These federate and elect delegates to co-ordinating assemblies and if they cover a large enough territory these secondary councils do the same again, thereby forming a nested pyramid structure, all supported by the base assemblies. There are lots of problems with such a complicated system as is evidenced by the rarity in which they have been capable of supporting mass institutions, let alone being the basis of any state. Even at their height in the Russian Revolution, the assemblies (or soviets) only managed to exert significant social power for about 12 to 15 months.

As is often the case, the cure of assemblies is worse than the disease of partyism. Whereas partyism accepts that differences of opinion are based on real material interests, the assembly form, especially when it uses a form of consensus decision making, assumes the fundamental identity of interest amongst all the participants. The hostility to parties makes sense for proponents of the council form if differences of opinion are based on ignorance or bad faith. And that assumption is warranted in certain conditions: in sects such as the Quakers in which the membership do have, more or less, the same worldview and the same belief in the power of supernatural inspiration it is quite workable.

In politics, however, life is more complicated. Getting past capitalism is an incredibly difficult problem to which there are often no obvious solutions. At the outbreak of mass protest or revolution this is not a problem since the issue presents itself to the opposition in a simple way, e.g. “down with the regime”, “against the 1%”, “they all must go” (Argentina 2001). Sooner or later, however, it becomes necessary to move beyond a simple formulation of the problem and to advance structural solutions. This is hard for a number reasons, not least the number of variables that have to be taken into consideration. Because of that it becomes difficult to predict the consequences of any given policy.

For instance, given the looming problem of climate change, should we develop an energy infrastructure based around nuclear power instead of wind and solar power? Nuclear could solve the energy problem once and for all, but it could also lead to a loss of social cohesion if it is unpopular due to safety concerns. Wind and Solar might not be able to solve the looming climate change problem given the relatively paltry power generation capabilities they have, but perhaps if they were made the keystone of our climate strategy, investment would flow to research and development which would lead to them catching up with nuclear. Society has only a limited capacity to invest in energy infrastructure so it has to make a choice between them. Even experts do not have a consensus around it for the simple reason it’s a tricky problem.

It is hard to predict the consequences of any given policy but the difficulty escalates exponentially when we attempt to understand the the consequences of the consequences. It’s not that nobody is thinking about it, it’s just that the only problems we can solve are the ones presented to us by the environment and since we have yet to trigger the process by implementing the first tier of solutions we have yet to be confronted by the altered environmental conditions to which they give rise, thereby making it hard to assess what issues will give rise to the new set of problems. Consciousness and science help for sure, but they do not remove this issue of ‘future blindness’.

This problem is a fundamental one and has nothing to do with direct democracy or capitalism or even human nature.

And the energy problem is a fairly simple one to solve compared to the figuring out the likely issues arising out of socialising the means of production, taking control of investment and progressively reducing co-ordination of production via the market. Inevitably there will be different views on these issues in a way that there simply isn’t regarding incontrovertible facts (the earth revolves on its axis; the Irish are drunken peasants).

We can only rely on the collective will of society as expressed, after prolonged discussion, by the majority. Irrespective of the procedural form of democracy we choose, people will come together to form coalitions around the major issues of the day as they are too important to not try and win a majority for one’s own position. These coalitions will coalesce as people of similar values and intellectual orientation will find it easier to compromise with each other and form a stable alliance. This will give that group an advantage in its struggle with other coalitions as they will be better able to mobilise more support more often to back up its position. If the other coalitions are to stand a chance of having their views listened to, they will have to similarly form a stable enough formation that can garner a competitive level of support. In other words there will be a selective pressure for unity and the ability to be permanently aligned. And with the inevitable emergence of such tendencies we are right back at, in effect, a party system.

The absence of a systemic tolerance and utilization of tendencies (or factions or parties) does not result there being no distinct factions at all. This is impossible since they reflect real differences in society. It just means that the dominant faction is the only one that is organised as such and this gives them a permanent advantage in the competition with other tendencies. If socialists refuse to organise its own organisations in a way that can outcompete the pro-capitalist parties, they will simply be swept away no matter how directly democratic the procedures are.

The assumption of underlying consensus is not just a mistake of the modern day radicals, inspired by Occupy or the 1960s New Left. Lenin, in The State and Revolution, consistently treats the working class, indeed the revolutionary population in general, as being of a unified mind. There is zero indication that he expects there to be a continual democratic struggle between tendencies for supremacy. One of the rare mentions of such a possibility is his offer prior to the October Revolution to be a sort of loyal opposition to the SRs and Mensheviks if the latter would take power via the soviets. But after that there is vanishingly little. The assumption that the councils would be of one mind and that that mind had vested the revolution to the Bolshevik Party led to, at first, intolerance of opposition — even socialist opposition — but eventually to outright repression of every organisational manifestation of opposition to the Bolshevik government.

But being of one mind is vastly unlikely when we are confronted with important issues and afflicted by future blindness. What if one tendency wants to pay compensation to the capitalists and another wants to expropriate them outright? Either the minorities can be expelled as occurred in the French and Russian Revolutions or the various tendencies can coalesce into parties, which strive to attain a majority.

If the expulsion route is followed, a major civil war is inevitable, not just between the right and the left, but within the left. The experiences of the Russian and Spanish Revolution indicates that this is a real possibility and progress to socialism will be delayed for a long time to come. Political differences are best fought out politically, in the open, and via democracy.

If there is to be democracy there will have to be periodic election to the assemblies. Those of a similar worldview will create organisations and strive to win a majority within the councils, which is what happened in Russia and everywhere else the council form broke out. If political parties are allowed, then we are essentially in the same position that we are now, albeit with a much more decentralised system, which if anything is vastly inferior for advancing towards a collectively run economy. And it is hardly worth the effort to stage an insurrection so that we can have elections to representative bodies which are dominated by political parties, when that is pretty much what we have already.¹

Worse, the promotion of the council system goes hand-in-hand with a profoundly anti-political mindset that we see in the downplaying of the role of political parties. We see this in things like the Irish Occupy stuff of a couple years back where they’d object to political party banners on their demonstrations or asking members of political parties to participate in a personal capacity only. Again, Lenin, in his weird moment of anarchism when writing State and Revolution, captures that mentality: the soviets are conceptualised as organs in which the decisions that workers have to make are administrative ones; they is no hint that there will be political decisions to be made. And with no politics, there is no need for multiple political parties.

In fact, from our point of view, we want politics to be conducted along party lines because we want there to a be an openly socialist party with the aim of a co-operative mode of production. We want people to choose socialism and to know that they are choosing socialism, which is only possible if there are other parties espousing a different goal or even just a different route. We don’t want them to fall into radicalism through engagement with street demonstrations that have snowballed into insurrection because they’ll fall out of that radicalism just as quickly. Rather, an explicit choice to vote for and/or to become an active participant in the socialist movement is a much better indication of support for the socialisation project.

Mass participation is, of course, a vital feature of any real democratic system, let alone a socialist one. But mass participation is best facilitated through organisations rather than in assemblies, especially assemblies with vague criteria for participating. The type of direct participation envisaged by the skeptics of parties and other mass organisations results in only the thinnest involvement in important decisions. The more people, the less that any one person’s input matters. In order to have substantial influence we have to organise in smaller sub-groups which leverage their collective labour. In addition, in order for the division of labour between these sub-groups to not be wasted there needs to be co-ordination between them and sovereign authority (both for society at large, but also for a particular organisation) that can make decisions when conflicts arise. Since it is important to keep the sovereign authority on a democratic leash, internal democracy — the freedom to organise, articulate criticism, change policy, replace leaders, etc. — is required. This applies to the shibboleth of the radical socialism, the recall of delegates. As we are not proposing an assembly system, we don’t wish the entirety of electorate to be able to exert a right of recall. Rather, control of the delegate should occur via the party: it should have the right of recall and if voters wish to exert that level of control, which would of course be welcome, they should join a party of a similar ideological disposition and be active within that.

There is nothing mystical about party forms of organisation which necessarily prevents the exercise of mass control over its representatives and leaderships. It mainly requires participation and the ability to dissent and there is no reason that mass organisations should be inferior to nebulous forms likes base assemblies in either of those. And the greater the degree of participation by the membership the more dependent the representatives will be on them, thus making it easier to exert control over them.

Not only is a mass party and the existing democratic system a superior strategy for dealing with the issue of the state, it also a more sustainable one democratically speaking because it is capable of lasting much longer than the initial period of revolutionary enthusiasm. The obverse of the mass participation of 1917 is the mass apathy of the 1920s, which led Trotsky to justify the dictatorship of the party.

We argued above that there is good reason to be cautious about changing extremely complex entities like a state bureaucracy. Nevertheless, it is worth considering improvements and the socialist organisations can be experimental grounds for figuring out what new procedural forms can actually function in mass institutions. So, something like sortition could be utilised for an internal party parliament which exercises oversight on the leadership between conferences.

Despite the shortcomings of parliamentary democracy, it remains the best gauge of public support for a political tendency. A socialist society depends on the support of the majority of the people, and that support needs to be publicly recognisable, i.e. it supporters and opponents alike agree that a socialist government has a mandate to implement its programme. The widespread acceptance of democracy as an organising principle gives socialism the chance of becoming the dominant political force in a country and of validating its actions in the transition. In fact, if the electoral system didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

The Coming Upheaval and Copernican Socialism

One of the elegant features of orthodox Marxism was its insight that the dynamic of capitalist expansion would lead to its eventual downfall. Capitalism, however, is still in expansionary mode, eating up the rural reserve of labour in Asia, pursuing the commodification of public services in Europe, and advancing technological development across the world. As long as it remains this dynamic it is going to be hard to surpass in productivity, especially given the level of co-operative production we are starting from. But if it is still expanding, it is also running into difficulties, as the problems in finding profitable investment opportunities over the last five years attests.

As capitalism develops and the means of production rise to ever more advanced levels, it must also must progress the automatization of the labour process, thereby squeezing the working class of its income and capitalist firms of their customers. Combined with the imminent ending of the rural reserve of labour and the increasing problems that workers, especially highly qualified ones, will have in finding opportunities for social advancement within the existing system, we can expect more and more working people to develop ideas of radical opposition.

Add in the pressure of climate change, increasing geo-political rivalry, and the severe rises in inequality it is conceivable that instability on a scale not seen since the early 20th century could return. At the very least, with transition to an information economy there will be opportunities for socialist production to demonstrate its superiority which is a precondition to winning mass support for socialism itself.

Although increased instability is likely, especially as the gross inequality of the current system leads to fragmentation within the elite itself, this does not in itself make socialism a likely outcome. This transformation to socialism can only come from the working class having a pre-existing organisational capacity to take advantage of these developments, especially in the most advanced countries, of which the United States is currently the most important. That capacity takes decades to build up and it’s not a process that can be rushed or circumvented by some clever shortcuts and nor should it be.

It is always tempting to think that we are special, that ours is a special nation or a special generation, one that could accomplish gigantic feats. But sober analysis tells us that we are more likely to be an ordinary generation located in a dynamic but ultimately fairly ordinary time.

That isn’t the end of the story however. Even if a successful insurrection is not on the horizon, it doesn’t mean that we have no role to play. Our short-term tasks do not involve overthrowing capitalism — a mode of production cannot even be overthrown — but to construct the organisations that someday will outcompete it, organisations which can survive even if the upheavals do not come soon, even if no opportunities for transition appear for years. Should we survive even that bleak a scenario with an eco-system of institutions intact, the next generation of socialists can start from a much more advanced point.

There is much in this world that is outside our influence, at least at this juncture, but institution-building is not. But it won’t be enough to try and persuade workers that a revolution or even socialism will solve their problems; rather we need to convince them that they have to do great things for the socialist organisation, that the future itself depends on us all playing our role in that great collective project, outside of which there is no salvation.

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^{1. Restricting the franchise to workers, as the Russians did, is completely unworkable for the principle organ of democracy in modern society. Likewise, the much vaunted unification of legislative and executive power is entirely counter-productive, draining the ability of the elected body to freely criticise the executive committees which must appear.↩}