Change the World

Tens of thousands of young activists have taken to the streets this summer and fall. The response to the minimal slap on the wrist for the police in the Breonna Taylor case is only the latest example of this movement. The marchers are not only calling for specific legal measures, such as the charging of police officers, they want a new, better way of organizing relations between human beings. They believe that “a different world is possible,” as the saying goes.

It’s obvious that one needs a strategy, a course of action, a plan, to achieve such a huge and fundamental goal. One’s got to work out how to change the world. Different activists have different approaches on how to do this.

Three approaches

Some years ago, the late Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright charted three basic approaches to achieving social change. They provide a straightforward way of discussing the different strategies, even though they sound rather like painful stomach conditions! Erik said that the three approaches were the symbiotic, the interstitial, and the ruptural. By symbiotic, he meant the gradual, peaceful process of social change historically advocated by social democracy. Today this is the strategy favored by Bernie Sanders and large sections of the Democratic Socialists of America.

The second approach, the interstitial, means “changing the world without taking power.” This refers to the building up of alternative social structures in the here and now, outside of the power structures of capitalism. This viewpoint takes many different forms: co-operatives, mutual-aid, base building, and “serving the people.” The basic idea is that social change will be achieved by building new forms of organization today, not by a generalized assault on capitalist power. Advocates of this approach can be found in the anarchist and “base building” groups that have developed in the movement.

The third and final approach is the ruptural. This refers to the model of October 1917 and the Bolsheviks. This outlook sees a rising working class movement forming its own workers council form of organization. This workers movement, through mass strikes, workplace occupations, and insurrection would directly confront the capitalist state power. Throughout this process, a well-organized mass revolutionary party would be a vital source of direction and cohesion.

The huge majority of young activists today favor different forms of the first two approaches. The ruptural strategy of Lenin, Trotsky, and Luxemburg, is a very small minority in the movement. The purpose of this article is to explain why the ruptural or Leninist strategy provides the best hope of changing the world, the hope that is in the hearts and minds of today’s activists.

Marxist theory of the state

The Marxist theory of the state is the starting point of Leninist strategy. Marx saw the state as the center of ruling class power. It was formed by the ruling class to protect its own interests. As class society developed, those who controlled the surplus formed organizations to protect their control of the surplus product. This control was not in the interests of society as a whole, but in the interests of the rulers of society. This essential aspect of state functioning has continued to this day.

Furthermore, the state functions as the, “executive committee of the ruling class.” It ensures that society functions in the best way to facilitate the accumulation of capital. This means social stability and infrastructure, providing a means for the orderly settling of disputes among different wings of the ruling class, and protecting the interests of the ruling class against all challengers, both domestic and international.

The central strategic problem is that the state apparatus will block and prevent the change desired by the symbiotic viewpoint. In the 1980s, the US Congress passed the Boland Amendment which forbade aid to the contras in the Nicaraguan civil war. The state apparatus, in its military and intelligence sections, happily and completely ignored the legislature. They continued aiding the Contras as if nothing had ever happened. There are a thousand such examples of the permanent core of the state apparatus blocking reforms and progressive measures passed by the legislature.
The state apparatus blocking social change can also take the most dramatic of forms. In 1970, Chile peacefully and democratically elected the government of left social democrat Salvador Allende. On September 11, 1973, the military violently overthrew that government in a coup that killed thousands.

In this regard, we would like to ask a question to the thousands on the street on the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Look ahead of you. You will see armored personnel carriers, unidentified special Federal squads, riot police, and SWAT teams. Does it seem reasonable to you that these forces are going to quietly stand aside and permit progressive social change that threatens their interests to take place?

Capitalist economic power, rather than naked violence, thwarts the change desired by those influenced by interstitial ideas. Cooperatives are too small-scale to involve large sections of the population. Coops and businesses that attempt to function outside the values of the capitalist system are either forced out of business, forced to function according to the laws of the market, or find that when they reach a certain size that they end up replicating the economic relations of worker and boss that they had claimed to oppose. This is common in large health food stores and upscale food chains.

Our aim is to free the mass of the population, the working class, from suffering, not just to opt-out ourselves. This means fundamental change at the level of state and society, not just changing our own personal daily lives by changing where we shop, who we socialize with, and who we learn from and follow. We may be able to create a more fulfilling daily existence for ourselves, but the great bulk of the population will still live under conditions of exploitation and oppression.

We have seen how the first two of the three approaches are unable to overcome capitalist resistance. However, all is not lost because the third, ruptural or Leninist approach, offers an alternative theory of revolution. The rest of this article will look at that theory.

Marx creates the backdrop

Karl Marx created the foundation of the Leninist theory of revolutionary change. The nature of the enemy is clear: capitalism—a system based on a constant need to accumulate profit, a system which uses the exploitation of the working class to accumulate surplus value. An economic system which, in a drive to increase profits, leads to crises of overproduction and to a world of constant inequality and crisis.

Capitalism also has created the force to overthrow it, the working class. This is a class of people with no source of income other than the sale of their labor power. A class which works together in large collective workplaces and which has the power to bring the economy to a standstill.

Many will agree that capitalism is our opponent, but believe that the working class is a thing of the past. The truth is the working class is more exploited than ever before, not less. There is greater social inequality now, not less.

Classic proletarian conditions exist in the new workplaces. Fulfillment centers, call centers, logistics warehouses, and hi-tech assembly lines are the Victorian factories of Das Kapital. The working class is larger internationally than ever before with a gigantic growth of its numbers in the Global South. While its political class consciousness may be weak, a potentially highly powerful working class exists today.

Marx and Engels presented a picture of the two armies standing on the battlefield, the bourgeoise and the proletariat. They began to show that the working class could win that battle. Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks took the strategy to the next step by outlining a theory of revolutionary working class change.

Leninist strategy

The strategy is based on the premise that class struggle between labor and capital is a fundamental and permanent feature of class society. This class struggle can, from time to time, erupt into major confrontations.

Revolutionary socialists argued that these major confrontations can be extended and generalized into national confrontations between the two classes. They also believed that in these confrontations the working class would create new organizations and forms of class power and control. These are the soviets or workers councils of classical Marxism’s “dual power”.

Lenin envisaged these class confrontations escalating to the scale of pre-revolutionary crises where, “the rulers are no longer able to rule and the ruled no longer wish to be ruled.” For the ruled to prevail, there are four crucial ingredients. They are workers councils, the mass strike, an insurrection, and a strong revolutionary party.

The revolutionary party is the final component of Lenin’s strategic outlook. He saw that to navigate the rapids of workers struggles, a strong organization, a party would be needed. The early Russian revolutionaries saw the party and its members existing as a wing of the workers movement, putting forward their proposals and ideas in united workers struggles and organizations.

A revolutionary organization seeks to have a plan and overall strategy that enables worker militants to move their struggles forward. Such an organization organizes and unites its own militants in the daily struggles of the working class. For any of this project to take place the fullest democracy in working class and revolutionary organizations is an essential precondition.

Lenin did not see a revolutionary organization limiting its work to the fight against the employer in the work place. He saw revolutionaries fighting all forms of oppression, whether of gender, race, or nation. Any chain that stifled and restrained human beings had to be broken. Struggles of the oppressed were not only justified in their own right, but were a means of bringing powerful allies of the working class into the field of battle. For example, today a Leninist organization would not only throw itself into supporting the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, it would also explain to the rest of the working class why this summer’s demonstrations were in their class interests too.

Is it possible?

We should anticipate the immediate objection to this plan of action for social change. That is the charge that it is a pipe dream or a utopia, that it bears no relationship to contemporary reality. But is that really the case? Russia in 1917 was not the only time we have seen factory seizures and workers struggles that had the potential of changing society. We can add Germany and Italy in the years following World War One, France in June 1936, Spain during the Civil War, Hungary in 1956, France in May and June of 1968, Portugal in 1975, and Poland during the Solidarnosc upsurge of the 1980s.

The United States has not been an island exempt from workers struggles. The US working class has shown itself capable of massive class struggle. The great strikes of 1877, the Wobblies, the Seattle general strike of 1919, the tsunami of strikes led by the CIO in the 1930s, and the social explosions in the Detroit auto plants are only a few examples.

American workers

A second objection may now be raised. “Alright, all this happened a long time ago. Nothing like that could happen today.” To answer this, I would like to draw on some personal experiences. Living in Chicago, in recent years, I’ve had the pleasure of supporting and marching in in the following events:

•   the 1997 UPS national strike
•   the huge immigrant rights marches of May Day 2006 and 2007
•   the Republic Windows and Doors Factory Occupation
•   the 2011 Wisconsin public workers upsurge
•   the Chicago teachers strikes of 2012 and 2019

In each of these situations, one could observe the same things: they were the center of discussion all over the city, strangers would start discussions with one another about them, bystanders cheered and clapped, there was a surge of unity and camaraderie, participants were proud of the symbols, colors, and slogans of the workers, and marshalling, food, and assistance were run by the workers themselves. The case shouldn’t be overstated. These were nothing like a general strike. There were certainly no signs of workers councils or insurrection to be seen. However, they did show that the US working class is capable of important and impressive fightbacks. They did show that a rising and combative working class movement in this country is not impossible in this day and age.

Revolutionary party

We can’t will or wish into existence workers upsurges. What we can do is to build an organization capable of extending and deepening such upsurges. What we can do is to build an organization that brings the lessons of the past struggles and a strategy for victory to workers in struggle. While the idea of a Leninist party may well be in disrepute today, no one has developed a superior and more feasible plan for fundamental social change.

We should give Lenin the final word, “Work for the establishment of a fighting organization must be carried on under all circumstances, no matter how ‘drab and peaceful’ the times may be, and no matter how low the ‘depression of revolutionary spirit’ has sunk. More than that, it is precisely in such conditions and in such periods that this work is particularly required: for it would be too late to start building such an organization in the midst of uprisings and outbreaks. The organization must be ready when the moment arrives.”

This is our job today.