On the strategy of U.S. socialism (II)

This is the second and last part of my intervention in the Tim Horras-Chris Maisano debate on the strategy of socialism. (Here’s the first part.)

I had difficulty deciding on the proper mode of presentation. At the end, to keep the discussion focused on substance, I decided to enumerate my views on the issues raised by Horras and Maisano, stating them positively, rather than polemically. In this spirit, direct references are kept to a minimum. The articles are all linked. All comments, especially critical ones, will be welcomed.

Regarding terminology, the category of revolution denotes here the historical, global and inter-generational, series of struggles required to uproot capitalist and other exploitative social relations and construct socialist relations in their place. Thus, socialism is viewed as a revolution or a revolutionary process, entailing the most profound and radical social transformation ever conceived in history. The term rupture designates a de-facto breach of the existing legal order. It may be partial if it only affects non-essential parts of the legal framework or total if it involves a breakup of the entire constitutional order or at least of its essential components. A rupture can be local (if it involves a town or state) or general (if it involves the nation). The rupture can be revolutionary, if the existing legal order excludes formal democracy and the rupture seeks to introduce a new and democratic legal order. Or the rupture can be reactionary if it is to curtail democratic rights. What Horras calls a “revolutionary strategy,” I rather designate as a strategy that seeks to directly seize political power by forceful means (or some similar expression), i.e. it is an assault from outside of the constitutional framework. This strategic approach is to be contrasted with one that seeks political power through electoral processes, i.e. from inside the constitutional framework, perhaps in close concert with a workers’ mass movement. Reliance on a strategy of direct and forceful seizure of political power may perhaps result from the prior reactionary rupture of the constitutional order or, if electoral processes are present, from their becoming so biased or fraudulent as to suffer massive public discredit. Thus, I avoid the classical opposition between “reforms” (partial changes within the constitutional order that seek to improve the social conditions of workers) and “revolution” (a rupture in the legal order as a result of a direct and forceful seizure of political power, accompanied by a “smashing” or dissolution of the old state institutions and their replacement with new ones), which — in my view — are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

1. The path to socialism is the construction of working-class unity in and through the struggles for radical democracy and against all forms of exploitation. These struggles, when regarded in their totality, amount to a radical revolution. Obviously, the process starts here and now, under existing conditions, from within the existing social order — in opposition to it. (For more on this, see my presentation slides on the reproductive structure of socialism at the 2019 Left Forum.)
2. The radical expansion of democracy requires that workers today fight for partial changes in the various structures of society, reforms that in and by themselves cannot abolish the dominance of capital over social life, but that can (under favorable circumstances) ameliorate its worst effects on the workers’ living and laboring conditions, permitting them to expand and develop their movement further. In the conditions of the U.S., this struggle requires substantive engagement in electoral politics, because it is by electing socialists into office that legislation, governance, enforcement, and adjudication can be changed in favor of working people. The struggle for reforms is indispensable for the working class to unite and build its hegemony. The ultimate character of these reforms — whether they become diversions that pacify and demobilize the workers, maintaining and even reinforcing their subservience to capital, or instead they become platforms for greater combativeness and unity, inspiring them to redouble their commitment to overthrow capital and build socialism — cannot be entirely determined a priori on the basis of some ingenious ideological pledge, programmatic element (e.g. publicly declared strategy and/or tactics), or organizational setup.
3. However, these elements (ideas, program, and organization) are the only variables that socialists directly influence or manage through their actions here and now. Carefully pondered, chosen, and designed,these elements can help to minimize the dangers of passive accommodation to the social order and other forms of political degeneration. The essential question is how, under shifting concrete social conditions, these elements may enable or restrict the workers own political activity. This is because, though there is no fail-safe vaccine against the dangers of political degeneration (be it by excess or defect or some desirable political quality), persistent and growing mass activity is the only factor that minimizes these dangers in the longer run.
4. Because capitalist societies are intrinsically turbulent (economic and political conditions are in flux and subject to drastic swings) and class conflict is inherently disruptive, the path to socialism will be — with virtual certainty — punctuated by ruptures in parts and the entirety of the legal and constitutional order. To reduce the human cost of these ruptures, in each particular battle, the workers need to resolutely bring to bear overwhelming intellectual, moral, and political hegemony so that the exploiters be forced to retreat and accept defeat with least resistance. These ruptures in the legal order — local, partial, and then general — cannot be avoided; they will not be avoided; and, provided reasonable preparation precedes them (risk cannot be eliminated, but only managed), they should not be avoided — because it is by confronting them judiciously but decisively that the working class will become the hegemonic force that it needs to be to build socialism.
5. As a general rule, socialists should not pursue as a strategic goal the rupture of the constitutional order by forceful means. In the U.S. context, as an intermediate step in the process of class unity and socialist construction, socialists must explicitly demand and fight for a substantive democratic reform of the constitutional order, because in its current configuration— mainly, as a result of the states’ representation in the senate, the states’ control over federal elections, and the electoral college — it stands in the way of greater democratic participation, even if Citizens United were to be repealed and voter suppression kept to a minimum. The construction of socialism is impossible without a new constitutional order on whose basis the workers’ radical democratic movement can develop. Whether or not, or the extent to which this new constitutional order can emerge gradually and relatively peacefully by a progressive but profound modification of the existing order is not predetermined. That will depend on concrete conditions. But the general rule is that, only when the ruling class moves to subvert its own constitutional order, impose diktat, and abrogate basic political freedoms, socialists can acquire the requisite moral and political solvency, and summon the necessary following and mass support, to advocate outright force in restoring the democratic institutions of government, restructuring them to deepen and expand mass democratic activity, and furthering the construction of socialism.
6. The conquest of class unity through the struggle entails of necessity the sharpening of class conflict. As the workers’ struggle broadens, and becomes more organized and militant, the ruling class will not just let political power slip off their hands but will rely increasingly on extreme, repressive, dictatorial methods to maintain its rule. Though Vivek Chibber’s call (“Our Road to Power,” Jacobin, 12/05/2017) for socialists to “replant” their activity in the day-to-day struggles of the workers is welcomed, his argument is fatally compromised by his strong suggestion that the unfolding workers’ struggle will confront the “political stability of the state” as a constant parameter; his assumption that, in the fluid conditions of sharpening class conflict, only the most repugnant aspects of capitalist society are at stake (“neoliberalism”) and not its very foundations. In fact, the political stability of the state in a capitalist society can only be premised on a large measure of subordination and passivity of the working class. As soon as the working class takes the initiative to fight back and organize in mass, and to that very extent, the political stability of the state ceases to exist.
7. In fairness, democratic socialism as understood by Chris Maisano and Vivek Chibber (and Bhaskar Sunkara), should not be conflated with social democracy in the European mold. Modern social democracy as a political formation has renounced socialism as its goal, accepting as its historical horizon a capitalist society, and seeking political power in order to manage it, i.e. to stabilize it by smoothing out its rougher edges. While Chibber and Sunkara — and correctly so — demand that socialists study and learn from the European social-democratic experience in the postwar, they explicitly reject it as a path to socialism. Their conception, at least as Sunkara presents it in his Socialist Manifesto, does not rule out the rupture in the constitutional order. However, these authors do place front and center in their current strategy, particularly in the U.S., the legal and electoral struggles. This, in my view, is correct. Their true deficiency is in their refusal to recognize the fact that, under existing U.S. conditions, the strengthening of socialism cannot reduce but actually increases political instability, a fact from which any responsible political agent should derive adequate practical conclusions.
8. Awareness of the impending dangers of such a rupture in the U.S. constitutional order is not unique to radical Marxists. Prominent politicians, such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are warning publicly against the threat of authoritarianism posed by Donald Trump. Even if we ignore the military projection of U.S. state power across the world and limit the scope to its domestic conduct, it is a fact that the U.S. state already operates as a rogue, arbitrary force vis-à-vis large sections of the working class; as demonstrated by the abuse and mistreatment of immigrants and asylum seekers (thumbing their noses at any serious oversight by congress), the prison population, black and Latinx people by police, and the working poor in large parts of the country— conditions that did not suddenly begin with Trump. In any case, the threat is undeniable. In his speech on democratic socialism at George Washington University on 6/12/2019, Sanders drew a compelling historical parallel between the present and the run-up to Nazis’ rise in Germany and the subsequent conflagration of World War II. One may question the particulars of Sanders’ thesis (e.g. the lack of explicit connection of this trend with capitalist relations, the inclusion of China — and the omission of India — as representative of this trend), but he is on solid grounds arguing that, on the wake of the global economic devastation triggered by the 2008 financial panics, authoritarianism is in fact a dangerous worldwide phenomenon. Should socialists not ponder seriously the range of potential consequences that flow from this threat?
9. To repeat, the real problem in these warnings and statements is that neither Sanders, nor AOC — let alone the DSA or Jacobin — appear to be reckoning with the fact that the progress of socialism in the electoral arena and in the social movements is not likely to strengthen but actually to make the legal, constitutional order more unstable and fragile. Thus, by demanding that the practical consequences of an impending rupture in the legal order be seriously and transparently discussed, Horras is doing all socialists and workers a favor. Denial of real possibilities is not an option and the discussion of a dire yet increasingly probable political contingency should not be viewed as a political provocation. That said, the discussion and general attitude toward the threat of constitutional rupture should be measured and calm in tone, never alarmist or overwrought.
10. Let me turn now to one of Horras’ chief arguments in pushing back against a strategic reliance on the alleged democratic character of existing states (e.g. in the U.S.): “Is the capitalist regime actually democratic in any meaningful sense? Does the capitalist state command legitimacy among the working masses? If so, is this legitimacy a permanent feature of working class consciousness? Or is it rather provisional and enforced with periodic bloodshed?” Horras suggests that the answers to the first two questions are noes and yeses to the answers to the last two. If he implies here that the main or only valid reason preventing socialists from undertaking a frontal assault against the constitutional order, to seize political power and proceed to socialist construction, is the legitimacy of the state before the working masses, I believe that he is mistaken. There is an entire array of super-structural conditions (ideological, moral, and political) that make a state less susceptible to direct and forceful attempts to conquer political power— and not just to any attempts of the kind, but to those more conducive to building socialism. It is not only legitimacy or the widespread belief among working people that the social order includes them or at least does not unfairly excludes them. Also, if the state commands a mixture of awe and fear, if people perceive it as a durable and robust institution, as a juggernaut, if there is a massive ideological and moral scaffolding (e.g. the media, academic institutions, influential think tanks, etc.) that supports the broader political parameters on which the state stands, mass activity will be discouraged.
11. This array of super-structural conditions includes not only the perceived solidity of the state, but also lack of collective self confidence among the workers, distrust in their own collective power, in the strength and judiciousness of their organizations and political representatives. Even when working people suffer acute desperation, their inclination may be to shrink, grow passive, or seek individual “solutions,” even indulging in self destructive behaviors, rather than to fight and take collective action.
12. An obstacle that stands in the way of mass action has been well studied in academic circles under the rubrics of “collective action paradox,” “bandwagon effect,” and “self-reinforcing feedback-loop dynamics.” In fact, mass political activity is one particular instance of the general self-referential — and therefore fundamentally indeterminate — character of every and each form of human association or cooperation. As mathematicians and physicists have determined, self-reference makes the dynamics of any system extremely complex. Mass activity is inherently an extremely complex social phenomenon. In politics, for example, an individual decides to join a struggle in earnest, not only when she’s deeply motivated or aggrieved, but also when and if she sees large groups of other individuals already engaged in the struggle — especially if the perceived quality of these individuals is high in terms of their goals/means clarity, passion, skill, etc. It is easy to see the chicken-and-egg quality of this phenomenon. People take part if people take part. People withdraw if people withdraw. As a consequence, at any given time, political processes are less likely to be stationary or stagnant than to be following either a virtuous spiral of growth or vicious spiral of decay — slow at first but then explosive in its tempo. For organizations and individuals, timing this type of social dynamics is devilishly hard, which means that socialists have to deal with the corresponding uncertainty and risk. The political stability of the state is definitely not simply a problem of its legitimacy.
13. It is interesting to note here that Elinor Ostrom received her 2009 economics Nobel award for working out abstract models of collective action or civic cooperation premised on the absence of coercion by a centralized state. These are highly idealized models, but they do contribute to rationalize the difficulty inherent to any sustained mass activity, which accounts for the egregious fact that, so far in history, we observe working people irrupting in mass episodically in the political life of a nation. In all cases, Ostrom’s models have to rely on the activity of a sort of Leninist cadre organization willing to sacrifice individual self regard for the sake of prompting mass cooperative action. However, the presence of selfless cadres is not a sufficient condition for cooperation in these models, as they tend to display multiple dynamic “equilibria” with cooperation ensuing only when certain “parameters” exceed some “tipping-point” values.
14. Aside from these and other theoretical exercises, history is rather conclusive. Consider broadly the case of Latin America. It may seem apparent that states in this region have suffered enormous discredit at least since the mid to late 1970s as a result of their checkered economic records (dismal indices of poverty, inequality, unemployment, underemployment, and social marginalization), corruption, tight nexus with the U.S. imperial state, and trigger-happy propensity to repress mass discontent and outlaw the left. Under these circumstances, a strategy of seizing political power by force would appear as a “natural” route. Why work on the Sisyphean task of erecting democratic institutions on top of botched capitalist experiments — undeveloped and highly subordinated to U.S. imperialism? The triumph of the Fidel Castro-led rebel army in 1959 Cuba seemed to settle the argument. However, the fate of the guerrillas in Latin America that tried to follow on the example of the Cuban revolution is well known. Forceful attempts by small groups of rebels to seize political power by forceful means wound up in failures (with the temporary Sandinista exception in Nicaragua), and this can barely be attributed to the intrusive role of U.S. imperialism, the lack of international support, or to the absence of genuine efforts to connect with the organizations and day-to-day activity of the working masses. The lesson here is that the strategic priorities of a successful socialist movement should not be calibrated to the ideology and political perception of cadres, but rather to the mass dynamics of the class struggle. If a small political formation, small given its relative isolation from the mass, undertakes a military assault trying to attract the masses to their side, but the masses stand apart, their assault has a slim chance of success. Witness the assault to the Moncada army quarters in 1953 Cuba. It is important to note that the armed struggle appeared to a young generation of rebels as the proper and legitimate way to remove a dictator (Fulgencio Batista) from power, because his 1952 coup had discredited his regime, demonstrating in practice (not once, but several times) that the electoral path was not viable in pursuit of a popular agenda. It was not until Fidel, and the political formation that jelled after the failed Moncada attack, formulated and publicized a sharp program of radical social and economic reforms that popular support grew and the armed struggle gained plausibility. It still took a long series of social, economic, political, and military failures (and deft programmatic, political, and military adjustments of the rebel forces) for the regime to collapse.
15. The recent reemergence of socialism supplies an at-home illustration of the phenomenon. The DSA and other socialist formations existed in the margins of U.S. political life in the late 1990s. However, during the long lull that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the wave of capitalist globalization and the economic boom of the 1990s, these formations stagnated. The catalytic role in the reemergence of socialism was played by the anti-globalization movement (1999–2002), the dot-com bubble crash (2000–2001), the anti-war movement (2002–2006), the financial panics and subsequent U.S. Great Recession and global economic crisis (2008-present), the Obama election (2008), the Wisconsin public-worker uprising (2011), Occupy Wall Street (2013), and — very significantly — Bernie Sanders campaigns and organizations (2016-present).
16. Now, it should be clear that the ascendancy of socialism in the U.S., especially among the youth, will lead to greater political instability. How could, concretely, socialists prepare to face an increasingly likely rupture in the constitutional order? How concretely can socialists get ready to confront such increasingly probable scenario? The timing and form of the preparation poses significant practical difficulties. But socialists need to build in its programmatic and organizational DNA large measures of strategic and tactical flexibility or adaptability to face the kitchen sink if it comes to that.
17. As a result of my professional bias as a financial economist (do not hate!), I tend to think of socialism as holding, at any given time, a diversified “portfolio” of active tactical instruments — programmatic and organizational. The composition of this “portfolio” — the weight that each particular tactical instrument (e.g. electoral activism, propaganda, formation of legal cadres, etc.) is to have in the whole — depends on the evaluation of present and prospective political conditions. The components of this “portfolio” have to be rebalanced — their weights have to be adjusted — whenever political conditions shift significantly. Prepare too soon a tactical instrument suitable for (say) civil war conditions, and one risks — as Maisano properly warns — easier isolation from mass activity, thus turning oneself into an easy target for repression. Prepare too late, and a coup will catch us unprepared, easy to wipe out. The dangers to the continuity of socialism cannot be exaggerated.
18. What are the elements in this political “portfolio” relevant to an increasingly likely rupture in the U.S. constitutional order? I believe that, in the present conditions, the chief element is propaganda among the masses. Again, I agree that the focus of current activity should be on combining electoral politics with mass movements in the direction of class unity. The term propaganda is used here in the classical sense of prompting socialists and working people to study, reflect on, and assimilate day-to-day experience and past history, to theoretically generalize and socialize the results of this study and reflection. Propaganda is required to dissipate any illusion about what history clearly teaches us regarding the absolute lack of scruples, the infinite cruelty and savagery of the rich and powerful when their interests are at stake. The history of the formation of the United States, the brutal exercise of its postwar imperialist hegemony (from Hiroshima to Fallujah), its current military (nuclear!) superiority and constant brinkmanship, its support of hideous repressive regimes (e.g. Pinochet’s Chile, Somoza’s Nicaragua, Israel, Saudi Arabia, etc.), its reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, its spooky surveillance powers, its ruthless persecution of whistle-blowers, etc. supply sufficient evidence regarding the willingness of the state to resort to extreme violence and repression in pursuit of its goals. The workers of the world must absorb these lessons, including those workers currently serving in the various branches of the state — especially veterans and those active in enforcement, surveillance, and war making. Whistle blowers, public employees willing to endure extreme personal sacrifice to maintain people informed about illegal activity by the state apparatus and hold top state officials and structures somewhat accountable to public pressure are indicative of the extent to which the broader shifts in public opinion and morality, mass political activity, and the appeal of socialism exercise positive influence on these layers of the working class. Workers and socialists need full consciousness of the irreducibility of the class antagonism; full consciousness that —unless the extent of the spiritual, moral, and political strength of socialism is crushingly superior — the capitalists will not be disposed to surrender their privileges and power without the most vicious fight. Again, the only way to minimize their willingness to fight is by building and concentrating overwhelming force to such an extent that their resistance proves futile and their reactionary, counterrevolutionary backlash can be dissolved into scattered individual, illicit actions such that legal institutions vested with legitimate powers and mass democratic support can easily pick them out in a manner consistent with our humanist socialist values of justice.
19. I am not particularly knowledgeable of this, but it seems to me that, existing law provides space for the workers’ movement to develop a lawful security apparatus occupied in ensuring the safety of personal, property, and digital data, as well as in tasks of legally permitted forms of research and intelligence. That existing law offers this space is shown by the proliferation of private, for-profit “security” outfits, mercenary groups, etc. A security apparatus in the socialist movement would be “private” under the law, but in fact a very public force of, by, and for the workers, people willing and properly trained to defend and protect workers and socialists engaged in the struggles, and their assets. Needless to say, the members of this apparatus would have to be well vetted socialists, and their conduct would have to be impeccable, always strictly accountable to the movement. The members of this apparatus would have to comport themselves in exemplary fashion, abiding by the highest ethical and political norms. The rule is that more is demanded from those who have greater power. (How these formations can spin out of control or fall into provocation is also clear in the historical record. Socialists have to be ready to disown and dissolve them if they fail to abide by these constraints. There are no foolproof formulas to eliminate the risks entirely. Again, the only relative safeguard is the growing conscious activity and engagement of the working masses.) These structures have to be particularly keen in staying within the confines of the law, conducting themselves with absolute professionalism and discretion, sinning by omission rather than excess, avoiding provocations and entrapment, and — again — conducting themselves with high transparency and accountability with respect to the movement. Needless to say, legal access to military hardware has to be either avoided or highly controlled. Their protocols for the use of force are to be particularly exacting. Basically, they have to be trained as social workers and psychologists first and only when everything else fails to judiciously use legitimate and legal force. This is the embryo of the future socialist armed forces and police. Their conduct has to prefigure the qualities that we envision in a legal and absolutely legitimate and accountable public force set up to recoil and dissolve gradually as social conditions in general and collective morality in particular make it unnecessary. Socialists also need to develop a solid legal and paralegal team, not only technically qualified in legal matters, but also (obviously) fully committed to socialism. First priority in their training and development is to support the needs of the movement, to assist workers and socialists in judicial litigation resulting from their mass struggles. This is the embryo of the socialist justice ministry of the future.
20. Finally, the formation (recruitment, training, preparation for combat, etc.) of extra legal structures (and/or the disposition of the legal structures of force to switch to extra legal work) is to be strictly avoided, until the imminence of an illegitimate rupture of the constitutional order (followed by the credible threat of mass repression) is sufficiently clear. The decision process to take this momentous step has to be subject to the highest degree of political accountability under the critical circumstances in which it may arise. It is difficult to estimate in advance the degree of risk that socialists and workers are to take in terms of the possibility of mass repression under an impending rupture of the constitutional order. This decision will be prompted by circumstances that socialists will need to evaluate very carefully in due time.