Struvism is not merely a Russian, but, as recent events clearly prove, an international striving on the part of the bourgeois theoreticians to kill Marxism with “kindness,” to crush it in their embraces, kill it with a feigned acceptance of “all” the “truly scientific” aspects and elements of Marxism except its “agitational,” “demagogic,” “Blanquist-utopian” aspect. In other words, they take from Marxism all that is acceptable to the liberal bourgeoisie, including the struggle for reforms, the class struggle (without the proletarian dictatorship), the “general” recognition of “socialist ideals” and the substitution of a “new order” for capitalism; they cast aside “only” the living soul of Marxism, “only” its revolutionary content.
Marxists are typically pleased by the publication of honest, well-researched histories written by non-Marxists that seem to grasp the fundamental lines of the history they are dealing with. Carl Schorske’s masterful history, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917: The Development of the Great Schism, largely confirmed the understanding of the German SPD developed by Luxemburg, Lenin, and Trotsky after the outbreak of WWI—that it had evolved into a reformist electoral party opposed to mass action and revolution. Likewise, Alexander Rabinowitch’s The Bolsheviks Come to Power, on the role of the Bolshevik Party in the October Revolution, revealed a dynamic picture that refuted all of the myths of Lenin’s elitism and of the Party as top-down and monolithic—revealing instead a party teeming with debate, highly democratic, and responsive to shifts in mass consciousness.
Less appealing are histories that set out to prove a particular point of view or political position by cherry-picking—that is, providing misleading, or incomplete facts (often taken out of context), and piecing them together in a way that makes history do for you what you want it to do: i.e., justify your own individual political twists and turns. Of course, everyone writes with a point of view, even if they’re not fully aware of it. But that shouldn’t prevent a historical work from striving for a well-rounded and full accounting of events —at least to the best of the author’s ability.
As the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky writes in the History of the Russian Revolution about himself:
There remains the question of the political position of the author, who stands as a historian upon the same viewpoint upon which he stood as a participant in the events. The reader, of course, is not obliged to share the political views of the author, which the latter on his side has no reason to conceal. But the reader does have the right to demand that a historical work should not be the defense of a political position, but an internally well-founded portrayal of the actual process of the revolution. A historical work only then completely fulfills the mission when events unfold upon its pages in their full natural necessity.
That is why the historical excursions of the Democratic Socialist of America’s (DSA) Eric Blanc are disappointing. For Blanc, history appears not to be primarily something from which lessons can be drawn; rather it seems to be more like a high tech “smart bed” to be readjusted to suit the changed condition of his political spine. Labor historian Kim Moody once called Blanc’s efforts to find “historical precedents” [in this particular case the British labor movement running candidates inside the Liberal Party in the late 19th century] for socialists entering the Democratic Party as“Cutting history to fit a model.”
Of course, Blanc doesn’t present his revisions of history this way. He presents each bit of history he decides to research as if he is making a surprising new discovery. For example, in his most recent book, Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics Across the Russian Empire (1882-1917), published in 2022, he explains:
When I first began researching the borderland Marxists nearly ten years ago, I believed that traditional Leninist interpretations of revolutionary Russia were generally correct—my initial goal was to extend these accounts to make sense of developments in the imperial periphery. Researching and writing this book has substantially shifted my views, both historiographic and strategic, as it became increasingly clear that it was unhelpful to treat Bolshevism as a generalizable political model.
In 2014, however, Blanc was still writing historical analysis from a more revolutionary perspective:
Today, as in 1919, the political structure of capitalist rule in the United States rests on the two-party system. To successfully challenge the labor movement’s suicidal subordination to the parties of the bosses — and to prevent mass movements from continuing to succumb to the Democratic Party co-optation machine — requires that the working class form its own independent political party.
The creation of a fighting Labor Party — not just to run candidates, but to help lead mass struggles in workplaces and communities across the country — would radically alter the whole national political situation. Apathy often reigns among working people when no real alternatives are offered. The emergence of a Labor Party, starting with local labor-community candidates in cities across the country, would be a ray of hope and a point of leverage for united mobilizations around the demands of all the oppressed.
As was the case in the early 1920s, by advocating and participating in this political awakening of the working class, a revolutionary organization could quickly grow in size and influence. The struggle for a Labor Party remains a principal vehicle for workers and their unions, in alliance with the organizations of all the oppressed, to break free of the stranglehold of the capitalist parties and move forwards on the road toward a workers’ government.
Three years later, while he was still a member of the International Socialist Organization but casting his gaze toward Bernie Sanders and the DSA, he was singing a different tune. He coined the term “dirty break” in an article (“The Ballot and the Break”) about the Minnesota Farmer-Labor party, which had some early success participating in the Republican primaries and then later forming an independent third party. Here also, he presents his version of history as a “surprise” discovery he didn’t expect to make:
Eager to extract political lessons from how Minnesota’s socialists established an independent mass working-class party, I began researching the formation of the FLP [Farmer labor Party] about a year ago. My working assumption was that the experience of the North Star State would vindicate the strategy of a “clean break” with the two major parties.
But it soon became apparent to me why this history has been so widely ignored: the tactics deployed in founding the Farmer-Labor Party challenge the orientations of both major poles in the debate. To my surprise, I found that the Minnesota experience demonstrates the potential viability of what I would call a “dirty break” approach: the use of Democratic and Republican ballot lines to implode the two-party system.
If anyone cares to see how Blanc has distorted the history of the Farmer Labor Party, they can read articles by me and by Kim Moody. Here is Moody’s take:
What is clear in Blanc’s account is that the NPL’s overall “inside-outside” strategy, as some would call it today, did not work in electoral terms in Minnesota. That is, as long as it ran “inside” the major party primaries it lost elections. Furthermore, the major parties grew tired of having their primaries invaded by candidates who refused to remain loyal to the party once they lost. So, in 1921 they passed a state law prohibiting those who ran in a major party primary and lost from subsequently running as an independent or candidate of another party. The “inside-outside” strategy not only failed in Minnesota, it was foreclosed…
After the 1920 elections, as Blanc reports, socialist William Mahoney and his supporters in the unions, abandoned the failed strategy…and led the organization of an independent FLP [Farmer-Labor Party].
Blanc’s concept of a “dirty break” has provided a comforting cover for former revolutionaries to transition toward reformism, and in the particular context of the United States, toward accommodation with the Democratic Party. It allowed them to think that they weren’t really moving right at all—just making a clever tactical maneuver to gain a mass audience and become relevant again. At the “right” moment, so the reasoning went, after “dirtying” ourselves inside the Democratic Party, we will make a clean break from it. A good number of former members of the International Socialist Organization moved in this direction in the period following its dissolution. But any success inside the Party (defined as winning elections) means that the right time for the break never comes.
Two years later Blanc was all in for classically reformist social democratic politics, arguing that the “Leninist” position on “the need for an insurrection to overthrow the entire parliamentary state and to place all power into the hands of workers’ councils” was inferior to the German Socialist Karl Kautsky’s understanding of the road to socialism. Blanc wrote:
Even at his most radical, Kautsky rejected the relevance of an insurrectionary strategy within capitalist democracies. His case was simple: the majority of workers in parliamentary countries would generally seek to use legal mass movements and the existing democratic channels to advance their interests. Technological advances, in any case, had made modern armies too strong to be overthrown through uprisings on the old nineteenth-century model of barricade street fighting. For these reasons, democratically elected governments had too much legitimacy among working people and too much armed strength for an insurrectionary approach to be realistic.
History has confirmed Kautsky’s predictions.
What sets Blanc apart from Kautsky and traditional social democracy, however, is his justifications for socialists working inside the Democratic Party—one of the two ruling class parties, alongside the Republicans, that together share power over the U.S. electorate. For decades the German Social Democrats held a solid position against collaboration of any sort with capitalist parties. This position puts Blanc to the right of Kautsky.
Four years later, Blanc, not surprisingly, has decided that it would be best to drop the pretense of the dirty break altogether—for the sake of the movement, of course. As he wrote in the Socialist Call in August 2021: “Agitating today for an eventual split from the Democratic Party would stunt our power and make the formation of a mass workers’ party less likely.”
Instead of talking about breaking from the Democrats, Blanc now advises, DSA and DSA-backed candidates should run campaigns that differentiate themselves from the “Democratic Establishment,” but not from the Party itself. He concludes: “In so far as dirty break propagandism undercuts our current work to build a strong DSA — e.g. by making it more difficult for us to elect class-struggle candidates or for them to effectively fight for workers’ demands once in office — it actually undercuts moving towards a dirty break in practice.” We apparently can only obtain the “dirty break” by dropping it from the discussion altogether.
Blanc’s latest series of articles is an attempt to stake a position on the relationship between legislation (which he terms “high politics” for unknown reasons) and the class struggle in the 1930s. In particular he looks at the 1933 National Recovery Act (NRA—with its famous section 7a,vaguely granting workers the right to form unions) and the 1935 Wagner Act (which finally established the legal right to unionize—and the mass upsurge of class struggle in that period. He revisits an old debate about which came first, class struggle or the legislation. And he falls right in between: struggle is important, but so is “politics.” The “left” is wrong to argue that the upsurge in class struggle alone is responsible for whatever pro-labor legislation was passed.
Blanc tweeted the following on April 26, 2022: “Radicals too often claim that labor’s breakthroughs in the 1930s were won solely by workplace militancy. In reality, pro-worker policies &politicians also played a crucial role”
It is important to clarify that no serious Marxist analysis of the Great Depression would counterpose the impact of the class struggle and legislation. So here, Blanc poses a false dichotomy. Electoral and legislative victories play a significant role in increasing working-class confidence to struggle. There is, however, the question of which plays a more significant role.
Blanc dismisses the “Left” position as “movementism” and spends a great deal of time discrediting it with strike statistics showing that there was a sharp increase in strikes and union organizing after the passage of Section 7a in 1933.
What is the point of this? Ultimately, to show that the labor movement needs to be allied with the Democratic Party:
Working people’s deepening entanglement with New Deal Democrats had very real downsides. Yet some form of electoral alliance with them was an unavoidable, if unfortunate, dynamic given the views of most workers, who had seen through their experience that it did make a difference who was in power. These pressures from below were further buttressed by the constraints of the U.S. electoral regime, combined with the obstacles and openings of a uniquely porous, disorganized, undisciplined party system. In conditions as they were, not as some radicals wished they might have been, labor’s only viable political path by the mid-1930s was acting as an autonomous tendency on the left flank of the New Deal.
Here we have the real gist of the argument: workers in the 1930s gained something from the union bureaucracy’s incorporation into FDR’s New Deal. The struggle from below was important, but so was the leadership’s backing of Roosevelt and “pro-labor” Democrats, through which important legislation was achieved, which in turn helped spur struggle.
There is evidence that 7(a) encouraged more workers to join unions. But it’s the case that there was already a substantial period of class turbulence preceding its passage—including mass strikes and a mass movement of the unemployed for relief. Mike Goldfield has also demonstrated in The Southern Key that the vast majority of the mines in several important states were already organized by the time 7(a) was passed. Moreover, there is also evidence that an earlier piece of pro-union legislation, the Norris-LaGuardia act of 1932, which was passed by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed by Republican president Herbert Hoover, also had a positive impact on the class struggle. I’m guessing Blanc didn’t include this information because it would undermine his main narrative, which is that the labor leaders were right to hitch their wagon to the Democrats.
The passage of various pieces of labor legislation in the 1930s was a response to rising levels of mass discontent and struggle—a response by the ruling party to manage the class struggle in such a way that it did not threaten the system. Roosevelt was a conservative who adapted to circumstances beyond his control. He was disliked by many employers who perceived him as too friendly to labor, but in reality he was a savior of the capitalist system. As he himself once explained: “A true conservative corrects injustices to preserve social peace.” He made concessions when he felt they were needed, but put the brakes on the New Deal as early as 1937. He began reducing government relief expenditures in 1937 despite a renewed economic crisis, claiming there was a “return to prosperity.” In 1939 and 1940 he laid off 3.5 million WPA (Works Project Administration) workers. In March 1941 he sent Federal troops in to put down a strike by workers at North American Aviation in Inglewood, California. Socialist historian Art Preis, in his important book Labor’s Giant Step, notes that
The “New Deal” proved to be a brief, ephemeral period of mild reforms granted under pressure of militant mass action by the organized workers, both unemployed and employed. By late 1937, Roosevelt had adopted the policy of propping up basic industry with government war orders, while cutting relief expenditures even though unemployment rose. The “New Deal” became the “War Deal.”
Blanc presents Roosevelt’s concessions to the class struggle as a reason for joining the New Deal Coalition, whereas the so-called “movementists” he criticizes rightly understand that the labor bureaucracy’s dependence on the Democratic party was an obstacle to further advance and is one of the reasons the reforms of the New Deal Era were so limited despite the high levels of mass struggle.
In a period of 8 years, Eric Blanc moved from being a keen critique of labor’s “suicidal subordination to the parties of the bosses” (2014) to the idea that the labor movement should engage in “some form of electoral alliance” with liberal Democrats (2022). Lenin once wrote, “practice marches ahead of theory.” Blanc has tried to present himself “discovering” through historical analysis truths that helped to illuminate for him a new political path. But I’m betting Lenin has the better explanation.
Paul D'Amato is the author of The Meaning of Marxism and was the editor of the International Socialist Review. He is the author of numerous articles on a wide array of topics.
