On the strategy of U.S. socialism (I)
This is my intervention in the current debate between Tim Horras and Chris Maisano on the strategy of U.S. socialism. Part I situates the argument historically. Part II attempts a critical synthesis and forward resolution of the controversy. My hope is that, in spite of its length and detail, young socialists — perhaps not yet well-acquainted with the history of these debates among socialists — will find these posts relevant and useful.
Revolution vs. reforms?
This round of the debate was sparked by Horras’ article “Goodbye Revolution?” (Regeneration), which was followed by Chris Maisano’s reply, “Which Way to Socialism?” (The Call). Horras is a member of Regeneration, a political formation of young Marxists who advocate immediate intellectual and material preparation for an eventual (virtually inevitable) rupture of the constitutional order in the United States in ways that do not exclude but do circumscribe the role of electoral participation and overall legal activity in socialist strategy. In Horras’ view neglecting these preparations is effectively a surrender of socialism.
Maisano is a member of the Bread and Roses’ caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an influential group in the DSA’s ranks and national political committee, and with a strong voice in Jacobin. Maisano does not discard the eventual rupture of the U.S. legal order that Horras anticipates, but it does view immediate preparations for such a situation as a perilous distraction from the socialists’ strategic focus on building up political strength within the existing legal framework. In his view, given political conditions, the preparations that Horras proposes would detach socialists from broad mass participation and invite provocation and repression.
The articles are hard on the issues but fair-minded in the argument. They address the issues in a spirit of theoretical humility, creativity, and camaraderie. Even Horras’ characterization of the dominant currents of U.S. socialism as “reformist” — to be contrasted with the “revolutionary” path that he subscribes to — is invoked in the tenor of classical political analysis rather than in the holier-than-thou posturing games of some older leftists.
Their attitude is worth the praise. We are here trying to compose the “poetry of the future” (cf. Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, ch. I), since the poetry and prose of past history are insufficient. History and the theoretical generalizations derived from it are the only guide we have, but the old debates cannot settle once and for all our present political dilemmas (cf. thesis #1). A number of complex questions that the socialist struggle raises today cannot find a proper referent in history. We are all figuring things out.
In my view, the historical record bears the prediction that, as class conflict in U.S. society sharpens, especially if accompanied by an upsurge in working-class combativeness, unity, and organization, and — along with it — the conditions for socialists to become a decisive political force in government, the ruling class will be increasingly inclined to stage provocations that push socialists to illegality and justify mass repression, and — should the provocations fail — to go rogue and ditch its own constitutional framework. The question is what we need to do now to best face such a scenario.
The rest of this post offers my idiosyncratic summary review of important parallels that help us locate the argument in history. In an upcoming post, I will address more specifically the conflicting strategic views of Horras and Maisano.
Engels (1895) on the strategy of the German social-democrats
In his 1895's introduction to Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, Engels drew a balance sheet of the political conditions facing the German social-democrats. The workers’ movement and its ambitious political expression, social-democracy, were in the upswing, expanding their influence rapidly, which translated — with some mediation — into parliamentary strength and small but significant legislative victories.
The German ruling classes —capitalists and junkers — were growing understandably nervous. Engels called the German social-democrats to stay the course and avoid provocations. Even though electoral access to executive positions was still legally foreclosed under the Hohenzollern monarchy, they were to continue expanding and upgrading their legal activity — building up trade-union strength and parliamentary presence.
Engels’ text was not an endorsement of what in the (20th-century) postwar period became attached to the European social-democratic label — a “class compromise” whereby capital ensured its rule at the expense of relatively higher tax rates, as well as some modest provision of social insurance, public services, and regulations to prevent its worst excesses. In Engels’ view, the development of the socialists’ political clout within the legal framework that enshrined the economic rule of the capitalists, though somewhat flexible, would necessarily reach a snapping point. At such point, things would come to a head. In Germany’s case, the (post-Bismarckian) Wilhelminian legal order would crack under the growing intellectual, moral, and political weight of socialism.
The radically democratic cooperative society — of, by, and for the direct producers — that socialists fought for was fundamentally incompatible with the existing economic, legal, and political institutions of late 19th century Germany as well as of any other society dominated by capital. There was no question of whether or not the tipping point would be reached, but only of when exactly and under which particular circumstances it would happen.
The scenario of the German ruling class passively accepting the abolition of its privileged social position, peacefully giving up its power, was — in practice — all but out of the question. Most likely, electorally crushed and pushed against the wall by legislative changes that diminished their control over the nation’s productive wealth, the rulers would jettison their own legal order. However, in Engels’ view, it was crucially important that the socialists emerged from this political collision as the defenders of law, order, and civilization in the face of reactionary barbarism.
The social composition and strict hierarchical organization of the state would make some of its institutions — most particularly its police, military, and top bureaucracy — less permeable to the influence of socialism. Reactionary attempts to subvert the legal order could find a willing base of support among the higher ranks, officer classes, and even the mid bureaucracy.
However, the rank-and-file soldiers, cops, and state employees — connected in myriad ways to and sharing to a large extent the living and working conditions of regular workers — were most susceptible to the widespread spiritual and organizational influence of socialism, and under conditions of mass struggle they would be likely to disobey their bosses. If they refused to enable a reactionary coup, they would effectively deactivate it or make it short lived. In sum, with the mass of the population behind, firmly holding the moral and political high ground, social-democrats would have a fair shot in any frontal collision forced by the reaction.
This path was not without hazards, but the alternative of prematurely engaging in conspiratorial or — worse — militaristic approaches, sectarian adventures, or social eruptions prompted by spontaneous mass indignation in the face of injustice, would only alienate the bulk of the class, facilitate repression, and derail the steady progress of socialism.
Now, if and once the legal order were effectively overturned by the ruling class, the social-democrats would then switch strategy and tactics altogether, and confront the reaction with legitimate force, with the solid majoritarian support of the German working class and sufficient moral and political solvency. Again, while dangerous, especially because the German social-democrats would require superb strategic and tactical flexibility in the midst of political turbulence, this scenario would hand the social-democrats the most advantageous position — a position of spiritual, moral, and political dominance in German society — to navigate the rupture and restore the legal order on an entirely new foundation.
Engels’ expectations did not pan out. In 1914, when World War I erupted, the German social-democrats — who had by then become the leading national force in international socialism, betrayed their commitment to international class solidarity and supported (or refused to condemn) their own states in the imperialist war. In the conditions of an inter-imperialist world war, the mainstream of the European social-democracy suffered irreparable discredit in the eyes of those who continued to conceive socialism as a universally humanist movement, the herald of a global workers’ sister- and brotherhood.
In 1895, Engels did not warn about the dangerous inertial tendencies to which the workers’ organizations were exposed under conditions of relative civil peace, stability, and rapidly growing parliamentary influence: the corruption, bureaucratization, cushy accommodation to the status quo by union and party bosses. History showed that the transition to a completely new strategic and tactical stance in the face of rapidly changing political conditions was not to be taken for granted.
1917 Russia, the 1920’s Comintern’s United Front, and 1921 Russia’s NEP
Under different historical circumstances, socialists encountered again and again analogous dilemmas.
In Russia, the 1917 February revolution caused the collapse of the autocracy and led to the formation of a provisional government dominated by social-revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and kadets. Once the allied victory was secured, the Mensheviks anticipated in Russia a relatively protracted period of bourgeois political rule — cloaked as a formally-democratic, European style, constitutional republic — during which the vestiges of feudalism would dissolve and capital’s economic dominance would be established. The mission of the provisional government was to, simply, facilitate this new political and legal framework. Along with the upcoming capitalist development, the modern working class would grow substantially at the expense of the rural and urban petite bourgeoisie (e.g. the peasants), who would shrink as a fraction of the population. Then the time of socialism would arrive.
The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, were convinced that the Russian bourgeoisie could not be relied on to uproot the remnants of feudal imperial Russia and establish a stable democratic republic. To see to it that the classical historical tasks of the liberal bourgeoisie were carried out to their bitter end, the workers themselves, under Bolshevik guidance, would need to impose and organize their own political rule in Russia—political rule that was already latent in their spontaneously formed soviet organizations. To the extent and for as long as capital remained an economic necessity in Russia, the soviets in power would keep it on a very short leash. In coordination with a series of virtually inevitable working-class revolutions in the richer European capitalist countries, the Russian workers could then proceed to build a proper socialist society.
In the fluid interregnum that followed the February revolution, the Bolsheviks were strategically positioned to seize power. In April 1917, Lenin announced publicly their intent. However, the Bolsheviks’ approach was not immediately insurrectionary. On the contrary, Lenin urged the Bolsheviks to devote their energy to the work of propaganda and agitation within the soviets — “patiently explaining” to workers, soldiers, and peasants that the provisional government had become the chief obstacle to attaining any social normalcy let alone progress (“peace, bread, and land”), and that the impasse between provisional government and soviets (“power duality”) had to be resolved in favor of the latter (“all power to the soviets”). Even though war and economic dislocation had accelerated the political tempo, turning people more receptive to the Bolshevik program, a significant amount of suasion was still viewed as the necessary prerequisite to their becoming a political force apt to seize power.
In other words, the main task of the Bolsheviks during the summer of 1917 was to win the hearts and minds of solid majorities in the soviets. It was not until they had secured such majorities, and mass repression and monarchical restoration via a coup d’etat against the provisional government by general Kornilov became imminent, that the Bolsheviks —urged by Lenin —decisively switched their strategy and tactics, and embarked in preparing and carrying out a direct assault on power.
Later on, in the earlier years of Soviet Russia (1920–1921), in the heat of a bloody civil war and in the aftermath of world-war devastation in Europe, after sensing an inflection in the international political climate, the Bolshevik-led Communist International switched its international strategic stance from one of directly seeking political power to a “united front,” under which Communists would pivot instead to patient propaganda and agitation among workers, who were still largely organized in non-Communist, social-democratic parties (the parties that had sided with their own ruling classes during the imperialist war betraying the principles of international working-class solidarity), seeking unity with them around the concrete defense of the workers’ basic economic and legal conquests.
The Comintern’s “united front” strategy was often undermined by impatient attempts by some Communists to denounce the social-democrats as class traitors, break up with them over secondary issues, and prematurely switch to the direct assault on power. So much so that Lenin felt compelled to harshly admonish the Communists thus inclined in his famous pamphlet on “left-wing communism,” which he derided as the Communists’ “infantile disease.”
Domestically, once the Soviets prevailed in the civil war, Lenin also called for a slowdown in the pace of socio-economic change, rolling back the emergency measures of “war communism” and introducing the New Economic Policy (NEP) to restore economic normalcy — permitting the expansion of private ownership and capitalist production (private and state-sponsored) — and solidify the alliance with the Russian peasantry (the bulk of the population) that had recently benefited from land redistribution into small private holdings.
Though the Left Opposition would later argue that the intent of Lenin’s NEP was that of a short temporary tactical retreat to recover from the chaos and devastation of the civil war, but that once some normalcy was restored an impetuous program of industrialization and economic socialization would ensue, it is much more likely that Lenin envisioned the “workers-peasant” alliance, state capitalism, and some revised and augmented version of the NEP as characteristic of a prolonged stage of development of the preconditions for proper socialist construction — a program that, in some sense (I know this is problematic!), appears as an anticipation of the Deng reforms in 1970s China.
The thin and relatively fragile legal and political superstructure of mid 19th century capitalist societies that Marx and Engels had witnessed — and largely as a consequence of workers’ militancy and the powerful thrust of late 19th-century socialism inspired by their very ideas — had since grown much thicker and robust. Building on the examples of earlier poverty legislation with which the English parliamentary monarchy had tried to confront the social dislocations unleashed by the Industrial Revolution, in response to a vigorously growing socialist movement in 1870s Germany, Otto von Bismarck had introduced a proto “welfare state.”
Similar legislative initiatives were tried in other European nations. Even in 1906–1911 Russia, the Stolypin reforms (a sort of watered-down version of the Bismarckian social program, though without any constitutional framework to check the autocrat’s whims) had tried to follow the German blueprint. The reforms went nowhere, in part because Nicholas II, the hyper-conservative nobility, and the emergent bourgeoisie sabotaged them while peasants and workers were unmoved after having had their hopes crushed many times over by the regime. In any case, Russia’s inability to modernize its state and adapt it to the predominance of modern private capital sealed the fate of the autocracy.
Gramsci (1929–1935) on the switch to a prolonged war-of-maneuver or hegemony building strategy
From a Mussolini prison in Italy, Antonio Gramsci had the occasion to ponder and register these shifts which, in light of his own penetrating assessment of local and international political circumstances, he regarded as requiring a much longer and more patient approach to socialist construction than the Comintern itself had ever contemplated — especially under Stalin, who had already discarded the NEP and the united front strategy of the Comintern. One may discuss the necessity, the hows and whens, of Stalin’s push for rapid industrialization and forced collectivization, but Stalin’s careening from extremism to conservatism in his internal and international stances highlights the unsettled and unsettling character of these issues.
Gramsci’s perspective has been aptly praised. In any modern capitalist society with a well developed, sophisticated state, the entire superstructure — i.e. from media, universities, and centers of culture to more or less formally established democratic constitutional forms of government — operates to dissipate social discontent and buffer the rule of capital from direct revolutionary incursions. In Gramsci’s eyes, the conquest of power would have to involve a much more protracted and multifaceted process of hegemony building. Political hegemony required establishing sufficient intellectual, moral, and then organizational credit, not just to conquer but to sustain political power in the longer run — and not at any cost or for its own sake, but as a viable instrument to the orderly construction of socialism.
Existing institutions that, under an easy reading of the Russian revolutionary experience, appeared to be simple instruments of class rule had to be viewed as — yes! — instruments of class rule, but by no means simple. The mediations that accounted for their relative autonomy from class rule had to be recognized, and practical (organizational and programmatic) consequences had to follow from such recognition.
To create conditions for socialist building, Communists would have to engage in a very patient and systematic campaign to penetrate, conquer, and (in a Sisyphean torturous effort) remake each of these institutions — or at least the most important among them— from the inside out. Following Gramsci’s lead, the class struggle that would prepare the workers to build world communism would have to take a much more complex and variegated pattern of advancement. Marx had expressed his conviction that building communism would require “a whole series of revolutions” in the social relations. However, the temporal span that he and Engels had entertained was modest when compared to how temporally and spatially expansive the task appeared in the run-up to World War II.
To be sure, a somber recognition of the length of the historical period required to build socialism did not mean giving up on the goal. The assumption continued to be that socialism was fundamentally incompatible with the social structures of modern capitalist societies. Building socialism represented a radical transformation of social life. It also presumed that the capitalists would resist this transformation as the existential threat it represented, resorting to systematic violence (at an ever terrifying scale enabled by the development of technology) and thus eroding their own legitimacy and legal patrimony whenever they deemed it necessary or expedient.
But the activity of Communists would now have to entail a much more prolonged, patient, and disciplined process of relatively gradual development of the spiritual, moral, and then political foundations for socialism; conquering the key spheres of social life one inch at a time if necessary. The process would be relatively gradual, but never too smooth, since sudden occasional ruptures in the various areas of the social order were to be expected and Communists would have to adapt to them with due agility. In any case, the process was nothing like the more direct path to revolution and socialism that a facile reading of prior history had led some people to anticipate.
Present strategic dilemmas
Today, in light of the evolution of socialism in the 20th century postwar, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the economic reforms and rapid industrialization of China, the recent swell of globalization, the global economic crisis unleashed by the 2008 financial panic, the rapidly worsening environmental crisis, the dazzling demographic and cultural complexity of modern societies, the wave of new technologies, etc., the Gramscian argument seems understated.
The fragmentation, incoherence, and vices of the actually-existing workers’ movement in the world today (under its various and complex modalities, not always easy to recognize) and the historical fragility and limitations exhibited by the various practical experiments in socialism, radical or not — from the Paris Commune and the October revolution to the Scandinavian social-democratic welfare states and to Chavez’s “21st Century Socialism” — should makes us all very circumspect. These conditions are the obverse side of the remarkable historical resilience of capital’s rule — all the most puzzling in light of the enormous social dislocations (most recently, those triggered by the 2008 financial panic and the subsequent global economic crisis), catastrophic civil and international conflicts, and the raging environmental crisis that it has unchained.
What are U.S. socialists to do in the light of this complex almost two-century history of international socialism under the influence of Marxism? How should we weigh Horras and Maisano’s interventions on the issue? These are the questions that I intend to answer in part II of this note.
