An important debate on revolutionary strategy

There is a great deal of talk about the need for debate and discussion on the left. However, very little of it ever actually takes place. This is why the July 27 Haymarket Books online debate on “The Relevance of the Russian Revolution Today” was so important. The purpose of this article is first to report on the meeting itself and then to comment on two of the main issues posed by the discussion.

The background to the debate

First, we should put the debate into context. For over a century, the socialist movement has been deeply divided. On one side, there are those who believe that the existing state apparatus can be used to implement a long term process of slow incremental social change. The European social democratic parties have been the most prominent example of this trend. On the other side are those who see the self-activity and organization of the working class as the vehicle of social change. These socialists see developing workers struggle, leading to a decisive confrontation with the bourgeois state—and a socialist revolution leading to a society based on workers councils and control. Obviously, Lenin, Trotsky, and Rosa Luxemburg were the most famous leaders of this wing of the socialist movement.

The fortunes of the revolutionary left wing have been closely tied to the ups and downs of working-class struggle. Therefore, the upsurges of the 1960s and early 1970s led to a massive growth of far-left organizations around the world.

The end of the 1970s era struggles ushered in more than four decades of working-class defeat,characterized by austerity for workers and further enrichment for the corporate class. The years that began with the defeat of the 1981 PATCO strike—crushed by Ronald Reagan—and the 1984-85 British miner’s strike—routed by Margaret Thatcher—have not been kind to the revolutionary left. The desire to be “the left wing of the possible” has drowned Marxist aspirations. The political pendulum swung to the right inside the socialist movement during this long and difficult period.

This process has gone into overdrive in the United States in the past several years. The Bernie Sanders campaign and the growth of the Democratic Socialists of American has led to a veritable exodus from revolutionary organizations into the ranks of social democracy and “socialism from above.” Revolutionaries have had little success confronting this tide. The Haymarket debate gave Marxists a welcome chance to push back.

The July 27 meeting

The debate pitted excellent representatives of the two viewpoints. The social democratic side was represented by Eric Blanc. Eric is one of the best known writers arguing today against Leninist ideas and for more traditional left social democratic ideas. The revolutionary left was represented by two speakers from Socialist Alternative (SA): Kshama Sawant, the prominent Marxist city council member from Seattle, and Bryan Koulouris, a SA leader.

The format of the meeting itself was straight forward. It was an hour and half online meeting. It was chaired by Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin. Eric spoke first and the two Socialist Alternative speakers divided their time between them. After the initial presentations, Bhaskar chaired a panel discussion in which he questioned the speakers. There was no possibility for speakers from the floor, although a couple of questions were taken from the chat section.Finally, both sides made concluding comments. It’s not possible to know how many people attended the event. There were about 300 logins for the paid event, but the debate was also on Facebook and there were watch parties, so the attendance was certainly in the hundreds.

Eric Blanc’s viewpoint

Eric spoke first. After noting areas of agreement, he turned to his main points. The big danger is an over-generalization from the October Revolution. The fundamental flaw of Leninism is the belief that the model of October 1917 can be applied to democracies. Leninists do not see the crucial difference between democracy and autocracy. It’s wrong to project overthrowing the entire existing state even when a democratic parliament exists. We should carefully study the Finnish example, where a strategy different from that of Bolsheviks was used. The assumption that the working class will behave just as it did in the Russian Revolution has led to false theories of “betrayal” when the preconception does not take place in reality.

Perhaps Eric’s central strategic formula was that the working class should leverage the democratic aspects of the state apparatus to undermine the undemocratic ones. We will discuss this point in more depth later on. Eric concluded by saying that we should not concentrate exclusively on the Russian experience. Instead, we should look at other examples of social advance, such as Sweden.

Eric’s view can be summarized as using democratic aspects of the state, such as elected parliaments and voting, to tame or control the undemocratic aspects, such as the army and police. Universal suffrage needs to be given a mandate. This approach has a far better chance of socialist success than a fantasy of reliving the Bolshevik experience.

Socialist Alternative’s viewpoint

It will come as no surprise to readers of this website to hear that I thought Kshama and Bryangave superb presentations. They defended the overall perspectives of revolutionary Marxism on the key issue of the meeting- the nature of the state and how the capitalist state could be challenged.

Kshama started off by saying that today’s world situation demands a Marxist interpretation. A key part of that interpretation is understanding the brutal nature of all parts of the capitalist state. The democratic republic represents the best shell for the capitalist system. Socialism can not be built without the working class confronting the kernel of the state, the special bodies of armed men, in Engels’ famous words.

Kshama rebutted, in some detail, Eric points on the Finnish revolution of 1919. She argued that dual power would never be tolerated by the capitalist class. The overthrow of the Allende regime in Chile in September of 1973 shows how the ruling class will treat gradual, electoral roads to social change. The great strikes in India show that mass struggle is possible in today’s world. For struggles to find the path to victory, a revolutionary party is needed. Real democratic centralism has nothing in common with Stalinist tyranny. It is more akin to collective decision making during a strike.

Bryan focused his remarks on the concept of transitional demands. This is the approach outlined in Trotsky’s famous 1938 Transitional Program. It involves finding the demands and slogans, relevant to the current situation and the contemporary state of mass working class consciousness, that when implanted in their totality break up the power of the capitalist state.

Overall, the basic view of the Socialist Alternative speakers was that the Russian Revolution continues to be relevant today. This is not because we are in identical circumstances, but because the capitalist state is still a violent obstacle to social change, working class activity remains the crucial means of achieving that change, and a mass revolutionary party is necessary to guide the road to working class power.

The Achille’s heel of left social democracy

There’s a fatal weakness in Eric’s main argument. He argues that we can use the democratic components of the state to undermine the reactionary undemocratic components. Let’s ask the most basic questions of all: how would this process work in the United States today? It’s easy to locate the reactionary aspects of the contemporary state apparatus. Examples are the military, especially its hard cadre core (SEALs, Rangers, Airborne Cavalry, etc.), local law enforcement, the grotesquely misnamed “intelligence” community, ICE, and so on and so forth.

We can also see some of the results of past struggles for democratic rights: universal suffrage, elected legislatures, election of some judges, trial by jury, and First Amendment rights.

Concretely, how could the democratic institutions possibly enforce their rule over the undemocratic ones? How could they counter the sabotage of their decisions?

What means would they have of disciplining and controlling the institutions which have the capability of violently blocking them?

We’ve seen a hundred times in history how the violent core of the state has resisted attempts at social change. We should therefore ask the question: what is it about the contemporary US state apparatus that makes this failed strategy more likely to work here?

It’s really pushing the limits of credulity to suggest that the institutions of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, of renditions and black sites, of military policing against Black Lives Matter demonstrations, and of the Iraq war, are going to submit to progressive control and subordination.

It just is not a plausible scenario. There is simply no factual evidence to support the thesis that the central violent kernel of the state apparatus will be defeated by other components of that same apparatus.

What has Bolshevism ever done for you?

Eric asked an important question during the debate. In his first rebuttal, he asked where are the successes of Bolshevism? Outside of Russia in 1917, has Leninism ever had any successes?

In order to answer this question, we have to first look at the crux of Leninism, the “Bolshevik Scenario”. The basic premise here is that a rising wave of working class struggles will create new organized forms of class power, workers councils. These councils will confront capitalist power through mass and general strikes leading to a proletarian insurrection. This insurrection will bring to power a new order based on workers democracy and council rule. A well-organized revolutionary party will present to the rest of the working class its proposals on how to move forward at every point. It will fight inside of the organizations of workers democracy for its views.

The question then becomes is there any factual evidence that any of this could ever actually happen in the real world? Was Russia the only place this ever took place?

Let’s look at situations, other than Russia, where working class struggle has posed a real threat to the continued rule of the capitalists and bureaucrats. We have the following examples:

Germany 1919-23
Italy at the end of World War One, particularly the Northern factory occupations
France in 1936
The Spanish Civil War
The potential for uprising of communist partisans in France, Italy, and Greece at the end of World War Two
The 1956 Hungarian revolution, including the Budapest workers councils
May- June 1968 in France
The Italian Hot Autumn of 1969
Portugal April 1974- November 1975
Solidarnosc in Poland

More examples could be given, but the point is clear. Working class upsurge is not an example of wishful thinking or a pipe dream. It’s occurred before and will occur again.

We can turn now to the second part of the scenario: the presence of a revolutionary organization sufficiently implanted and organized to impact the course of national politics in its country. Is this a possibility? The road to building revolutionary socialist parties has been long and winding.There have certainly been setbacks and failures. But that does mean that the project is impossible and could never happen. In fact, on a number of occasions, revolutionary organizations have played a real role.Here are a few examples:

The role of the French Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire in the May-June 1968 struggle in France.
The work of the Socialist Workers Party in the US anti-Vietnam war movement.
The activity of the British SWP both in the late 1970s Anti-Nazi League, which marginalized the fascist National Front, and the Stop the War Coalition, which organized the biggest demonstration in British history at the beginning of the Iraq war.
The campaign of the British Militant Tendency against Margaret Thatcher’s hated Poll Tax, a campaign which played an important role in bringing down her government.
The present day Argentinian Marxist organizations in the Workers Left Front which plays a real role in parliament and the political life of the country.

These are enough examples to prove that the building of a strong revolutionary Marxist organization is not a Camelot that only appeared once in Petrograd in 1917 and then vanished forever. It’s been done before and can be done again.

Socialist activists today should ask themselves the question: what seems a better course of action—using the democratic parts of the state to control the undemocratic parts or building a rising working-class movement and a Marxist organization? The revolutionary socialist answer seems compelling.