The Activist

Evolution and Revolution

A hundred years ago, when socialist parties were becoming enormous and socialism really did seem to be on the historical agenda, there were famous debates about whether it could be accomplished peacefully through the election of socialists to office or if the working class would have to forcibly overthrow the existing capitalist state. The main question was whether or not the capitalist class would respect its own legal order if the socialist movement became popular enough to actually try to legislate capitalism out of existence. Given capitalist support for Hitler in Germany in the 1930s and Pinochet in Chile in the 1970s, we can be certain of the answer to this question: if capitalists feel sufficiently threatened by the socialist movement, they will even support fascists, and accept limits on their own civil and political rights, if that’s what it takes to save their system.

At the same time, there’s no getting around the fact that the majority of workers in the advanced capitalist countries have simply not been interested in revolutionary socialist politics. Part of this is due to authoritarian Communists calling their states “socialist.” Part of it is due to the predominance of market values in popular culture, especially in the U.S. Part of it is that what socialists call “the working class” is in fact very heterogeneous, not just in sex, race, ethnic identity, sexual orientation, etc., but in skill and income level (blue collar, white collar, etc.). But it’s also true that in capitalist democracies workers have been able to meet at least some of their needs via the welfare state, thereby creating a situation in which they no longer have, to quote Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in The Communist Manifesto, “nothing to lose but their chains.”

The truth is that there is no certain road from existing society to the classless society. But in the past, both moderate socialists (known as Social Democrats) and revolutionary socialists (who usually called themselves Leninists and Communists, inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917 led by V.I. Lenin’s Bolshevik Party) were both very optimistic. Social democrats believed in an electoral road to socialism, and most of them came to believe that a reformed, regulated capitalism was the only “socialism” that was both necessary and possible. The economic achievements of social democracy are undeniable. Germany and the Scandinavian nations, in particular, are probably the most democratic, humane countries in the world, without any real poverty to speak of, with strict health and safety regulation, progressive taxation, and guaranteed health care, child care and housing-all things which Americans are still fighting. At the same time, social democracy both naively equated electoral victory with radical change and fell into a pragmatism that was overwhelmed by the economic power of capital, particularly by the mobility of capital. Social democratic parties have usually been technocratic and purely electoral in their approach to politics, and have had little need for, or interest in (if not active fear of), the development of a militantly class-conscious activist movement. In our age of global capitalist domination, the role of social democracy has been, at best, to polish the sharpest edges of corporate power.

Leninists argued that there was no road to socialism except through the insurrectionary overthrow of the capitalist state. Lenin shared this conviction with socialists who were consistently both democratic and revolutionary, such as the German socialist leader Rosa Luxemburg. But Lenin took 20^th century socialism into an authoritarian direction. Although he vaguely described the replacement of the capitalist state with self-governing workers’ councils in his pamphlet The State and Revolution, in practice, Lenin’s Bolshevik Party rapidly supplanted the councils as the main governing institution in the Soviet Union. Despite his claim to Marxist orthodoxy, Lenin’s belief in the privilege of the “vanguard party”—which can do whatever it wants once it takes power because it represents the “true” interests of the working class—contradicts Marx’s belief in the self-emancipation of the working class. Leninism has generally been very unpopular in democratic capitalist societies, perhaps because self-described Leninist parties are usually authoritarian sects.