Rising interest in socialism has revived the debate on socialist strategy, which can be divided into two broad categories: reformism and revolutionary socialism. Reformist socialism is based on the premise that the working class and oppressed can use the existing state to abolish capitalism and build a socialist society. Revolutionary socialism —our politics — holds that we cannot permeate and alter the fundamentally undemocratic existing capitalist state to meet our goals. These strategies are based on different theories of the capitalist state.
Reformist socialism
The basic idea of reformist socialism is that socialists elected to office will make reforms to democratize the state, strengthen union rights, expand social welfare, and nationalize key industries. These reforms will initiate a gradual transition to socialism. For liberals or social democrats, who are further to our right than reformists, such reforms would make socialism unnecessary by balancing the interests of labor and capital and ushering in a kinder, gentler capitalism.
Reformists prioritize electoral politics to the point of fetish, captives of what Engels called “a superstitious reverence for the state and everything connected with it.”
Reformists prioritize electoral politics to the point of fetish, captives of what German revolutionary socialist Friedrich Engels called “a superstitious reverence for the state and everything connected with it.”
However, the imperative for any bourgeois government is to maintain capitalist profitability, which cannot be reconciled with the interests of the working class. This gravely limits what it can do, no matter the politics of the elected officials involved. Capital’s ability to withhold investment to resist policies that affect its bottom line is usually sufficient to guarantee the failure of reformism.
Reformism has a social basis (people whose interests it represents) in trade-union bureaucrats, elected officials, and petty bourgeois social movement leaders. These groups inevitably restrain struggle and adopt moderate strategies because their material position depends on preserving class compromise, the boss-worker relationship, and the existing state. In Reform or Revolution, Polish-German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg went so far as to say, “The question of reform and revolution [is another form of] the question of the petty bourgeois or proletarian character of the labor movement.”
Reformism is our primary political competitor and it shares many of our goals, at least in words. Where we differ is in our understanding of the world and our approach to changing it — in other words, in our theory and practice.
The bogus alternative of Stalinism
One presumptive alternative to reformist socialism is Stalinism. Its basic strategy, as outlined by Charlie Post, US Marxist, Tempest member, and co-editor of Spectre Journal, is for “a self-proclaimed armed revolutionary vanguard to destroy the existing state and establish a single-party dictatorship that rules in the name of the working class.” Anyone committed to democratic values and the Marxist principle of working-class self-emancipation should reject this out of hand.
Despite its radical rhetoric, contemporary Stalinism is not an alternative to reformism, but a tendency within it.
But despite its radical rhetoric, contemporary Stalinism is not an alternative to reformism, but a tendency within it. Since Stalin prescribed the Popular Front tactic to the world’s communist parties in 1935, Stalinists have pursued reformist strategies. In What is the Real Marxist Tradition?, British Marxist John Molyneux considered the elements of western Stalinism: “reformist pressure group politics, dependence on trade union leaders, alliances with the ‘left’ of the bourgeoisie, nationalism, and bureaucratic organisations,” and asked, “What is this but a carbon copy of the elements that made up Social Democracy?”
By contrast, revolutionary socialism, or Marxism, recognizes that the existing state is a mechanism of capitalist domination that must be dismantled. Only the class-independent self-organization and self-activity of the working class can win reforms and transcend capitalism through revolution.
The Marxist view of the state
According to Engels, “The state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy.” Elsewhere he wrote that “State power is nothing more than the organization with which the ruling classes, landlords and capitalists have provided themselves in order to protect their social prerogatives.”
In order to reestablish the Marxist view of the state on the eve of the Russian Revolution, Russian Marxist Vladimir Lenin wrote in his monumental pamphlet, The State and Revolution:
The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. […] an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of “order” that legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes.
The bourgeois state is not, as reformists believe, a neutral body standing above society that can be used by any group for its own purposes. It has been historically and structurally designed to defend the ruling class. It is their instrument for guaranteeing their accumulation of capital. It serves to organize the class struggle of the bosses and disorganize that of workers. And it serves to represent the national capital in its rivalry with other states.
The bourgeois state is not, as reformists believe, a neutral body standing above society that can be used by any group for its own purposes. It has been historically and structurally designed to defend the ruling class.
According to the otherwise excellent article by Post cited above, “Capitalists don’t need the state to enforce economic domination over the working class.” I have to take exception to this. While it is true that capitalist social relations are primarily reproduced through the dull compulsions of the market, that market is created and upheld in large part by the state.
The “free market” is anything but free — it depends on a “strong, market-facilitating state, but it is also dependent on the state as the coercive force of that freedom,” according to German Marxist Werner Bonefeld. The state develops a legal and institutional framework to enable the exploitation of labor. It intervenes to enforce contracts, manage infrastructure, and repress resistance that might threaten the flow of profit. Police protect property, break strikes, and evict debtors from their homes. Immigration controls manage where workers can live and work. Diplomats and militaries open up foreign markets and mediate the flow of money and commodities.
For capital, the state is “a necessity for social order, the protection of private property and accumulation, defense in a competitive and violent world, negotiator of the terms of globalization, instrument of imperial expansion, and subsidizer,” as US Marxist and labor historian Kim Moody wrote in On New Terrain.
Is the state a tool we can use?
We may talk about the state as if it is a thing, like a gun or a car. I just quoted Engels calling it a machine and Lenin calling it a product and an organ, but that language is just shorthand. The state is better understood as a relationship between classes. “The state is not an entity with an intrinsic instrumental essence,” according to Greek-French Marxist Nicos Poulantzas, “but it is itself a relation, more precisely the condensation of a class relation.” More specifically, in Post’s words: “The capitalist state is itself the institutional crystallization… of capital’s dominance over labor.”
If the state were a mere tool, it could be snatched from the hands of the bosses and used for our purposes. But upon observing the real-world political developments of the Paris Commune, German revolutionary socialist Karl Marx was so convinced this was not the case that, 25 years after coauthoring The Communist Manifesto, the only change he thought necessary to it was to concretely state that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.”
Reformism’s track record
The history of socialists’ attempts to reform the state and vote socialism into power has only resulted in socialists administering austerity and imperialism on behalf of capital, adapting to nationalism, disorienting and disorganizing the working class, and making no advance toward overturning the mode of production. Reformist socialist governments have abandoned the pursuit of reforms in the face of capitalist resistance and resigned themselves to managing capitalism.
Examples abound, such as Spain under the Popular Front from 1936–39; Chile under Salvador Allende from 1970–73; France under François Mitterand in the early 1980s; South Africa under the African National Congress (ANC) since 1994, Bolivia under Evo Morales from 2006–2019; Greece under Syriza in 2016; and Venezuela today. According to British Marxist and historian of Latin America, Mike González in Revolutionary Rehearsals, one key lesson of Allende’s Chile is that, in moments of rising struggle, “the enemy of revolution is reformism, the politics of those more committed to the defense of the bourgeois state than to the transformation of the world.”
Thanks to reformist and Stalinist ideas, the 20th century saw social movements and labor struggles abandon tactics of mass disruption and attempt to advance their goals through state institutions and legal means.
The Popular Front
After the Soviet Union allied with the liberal capitalist powers against Nazi Germany, Stalin ordered the world’s communist parties to adopt the Popular Front strategy as a complement. The idea was that an enlightened section of the capitalist class would prefer a bourgeois democratic state to an authoritarian one, and would tolerate reform to insure the stability of their profit-making system.
The Popular Front’s dual policy of permeating and allying with the left wing of the trade-union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party remains the dominant strategy of the socialist movement in the US.
“Popular Frontism takes reformism to the level of a system,” in the words of Robert Brenner, US Marxist and economic historian. Workers were instructed to ally with the liberal bourgeoisie in the interest of democracy, civil liberties, and reform.
During the Second World War, the labor movement and the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) promoted “labor peace” by asking workers to give up the strike weapon to ensure uninterrupted war production. The AFL and CIO were offered a seat in the state apparatus via representation on a variety of wartime boards. Union bureaucratization and a system of industrial jurisprudence based on the grievance procedure displaced strike action.
These dynamics of demobilization and subjugation to one of the bosses’ parties have resulted in working-class passivity and social movements that have been unable to win or defend substantive reforms. The exceptions only succeeded by rejecting reformist approaches, like the Black liberation struggle of the 1950s and 60s.
Yet in 1965, US reformist socialist Bayard Rustin instructed the Civil Rights movement to move from “protest to politics” — meaning from the streets into the voting booth, and not only that but into the Democratic Party. Even in the face of success, reformists point us toward defeat.
The Popular Front’s dual policy of permeating and allying with the left wing of the trade-union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party remains the dominant strategy of the socialist movement in the United States.
The façade of democracy
Because the bourgeois state represents the institutionalization of capital’s dominance over labor, it is an obstacle to working-class goals, not an avenue for their pursuit. Reliance on struggle within state institutions is a dead end for winning and defending reforms, and even more so for fighting for socialism.
In thinking we can take over the government by democratic means, reformists are preoccupied with the formal side of democracy, “but do not take into account the other side, its real content” — class rule.
“The representative institutions, democratic in form, are in content the instruments of the interests of the ruling class,” according to Luxemburg. She continued, “As soon as democracy shows the tendency to negate its class character and become transformed into an instrument of the real interests of the population, the democratic forms are sacrificed by the bourgeoisie.” This was made most clear in the 1973 coup against Allende in Chile.
In thinking we can take over the government by democratic means, reformists are preoccupied with the formal side of democracy, “but do not take into account the other side, its real content” — class rule. Thanks to the ruling class’s domination of the state and its legal system, its vast fortunes to buy political favor, and its monopoly on violence, the ruling class has ample options if democracy threatens its power.
Revolutionary strategy
The road to proletarian revolution runs through mass, disruptive, often illegal political and economic struggle — strikes, protests, occupations, and uprisings that cripple the economy.
Fights against the bosses and fights for reforms are crucial insofar as they raise class consciousness and organize and train the class. But, according to Luxemburg, “once they are considered as instruments of the direct socialization of capitalist economy, they lose not only their usual effectiveness, but cease being a means of preparing the working class for the conquest of power.” If trade-union and reform struggle is separated from the movement and considered an end in itself, “such activity, not only does not lead to the final goal of socialism, but moves in a precisely opposite direction.”
Organs of working-class power, like trade unions, political parties, local assemblies, and workers’ councils (soviets), must be built to mobilize workers so that they can eventually convert themselves into instruments of popular rule. Ultimately, in Post’s formulation, “the organs of popular power would have to frontally assault the core institutions of the existing capitalist state and replace them with a workers’ state based on the highest forms of working-class self-organization — workers councils.”
The need for organized socialist intervention
Organizations of revolutionaries embedded in struggle, educated in theory and practice, and capable of moving the process forward are necessary at every step. But revolution cannot be accomplished by the sheer will of socialists, nor is it inevitable due to some law of capitalism. Certain social conditions must ripen: a ruling-class crisis, acute mass suffering, and a sharp increase in independent political activity.
For mass mobilization to assume a revolutionary trajectory, the conscious and organized intervention of revolutionary socialists is necessary. The current task of the revolutionary socialist left is to rebuild a militant minority of what Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci called “permanent persuaders” capable of spreading class consciousness and promoting class-independent political action among a decisive layer of the exploited and oppressed. That is the basic purpose of revolutionary organization, and eventually a revolutionary party.
Image: Andrei Molodkin, The White House Filled With the Blood of U.S. Citizens (2020).
