The following is excerpted from Socialist Register 2017: Rethinking Revolution, edited by Gregory Albo and Leo Panitch. Populated by an array of passionate thinkers and thoughtful activists, Rethinking Revolution reappraises the historical effects of the Russian revolution—positive and negative—on political, intellectual, and cultural life, and looks at consequent revolutions after 1917. You can purchase the edition here.
In 1917, not only those parties engaged in insurrectionary revolution but even those committed to gradual reform still spoke of eventually transcending capitalism. Half a century later social democrats had explicitly come to define their political goals as compatible with a welfare-state variety of capitalism; and well before the end of the century many who had formerly embraced the legacy of 1917 would join them in this. Yet this occurred just as the universalization of neoliberalism rendered threadbare any notion of distinct varieties of capitalism. The realism without imagination of the so-called ‘Third Way’ was shown to lack realism as well as imagination.
However reactionary the era of neoliberal globalization has been, it has seemed to confirm the continuing revolutionary nature of the bourgeoisie, at least in terms of creating ‘a world after its own image’. Nevertheless, the financialized form of capitalism that greased the wheels not only of global investment and trade, but also of globally integrated production and consumption, was clearly crisis prone. The first global capitalist crisis of the twenty-first century was rooted in the contradictions attending the new credit-dependent forms through which, amidst stagnant wages in the neoliberal era, mass consumption was sustained. Yet in sharp contrast to the two great capitalist crises of the twentieth century, as the crisis has unfolded over the past decade it did not lead to a replacement of the regime of accumulation that gave rise to it. Unlike the break with the Gold Standard regime in the 1930s and the Bretton Woods regime in the 1970s, neoliberalism persisted. This could be seen in the rescue and reproduction of financial capital, the reassertion of austerity in fiscal policy, the dependence on monetary policy for stimulus, and the further aggravation of income and wealth inequality – all of which was made possible by the continuing economic and political weaknesses of global working classes through this period.
We are now in a new conjuncture. It is a very different conjuncture than the one which led to the perception that neoliberalism, at the height of its embrace by Third Way social democracy, was ‘the most successful ideology in world history’. While neoliberal economic practices have been reproduced – as has the American empire’s centrality in global capitalism – neoliberalism’s legitimacy has been undermined. As the aftershocks of the US financial crash reverberated across the eurozone and the BRICS, this deepened the multiple economic, ecological, and migratory crises that characterize this new conjuncture. At the same time, neoliberalism’s ideological delegitimation has enveloped many political institutions that have sustained its practices, from the European Union to political parties at the national level. What makes the current conjuncture so dangerous is the space this has opened for the far right, with its ultra-nationalist, racist, sexist and homophobic overtones, to capture popular frustrations with liberal democratic politics in the neoliberal era.
The delegitimation of neoliberalism has restored some credibility to the radical socialist case for transcending capitalism as necessary to realize the collective, democratic, egalitarian and ecological aspirations of humanity. It spawned a growing sense that capitalism could no longer continue to be bracketed when protesting the multiple oppressions and ecological threats of our time. And as austerity took top billing over free trade, the spirit of antineoliberal protest also shifted. Whereas capitalist globalization had defined the primary focus of oppositional forces in the first decade of the new millennium, the second decade opened with Occupy and the Indignados dramatically highlighting capitalism’s gross class inequalities. Yet with this, the insurrectionary flavour of protest without revolutionary effect quickly revealed the limits of forever standing outside the state.
A marked turn on the left from protest to politics has consequently come to define the new conjuncture, as opposition to capitalist globalization shifted from the streets to the state theatres of neoliberal practice. This is in good part what the election of Syriza in Greece and the sudden emergence of Podemos in Spain signified. Corbyn’s election as leader of the British Labour Party attracted hundreds of thousands of new members with the promise to sustain activism rather than undermine it. And even in the heartland of the global capitalist empire, the short bridge that spanned Occupy and Sanders’ left populist promise for a political revolution ‘to create a government which represents all Americans and not just the 1%’ was reflected in polls indicating that half of all millennials did not support capitalism and held a positive view of socialism.
This transition from protest to politics has been remarkably class oriented in terms of addressing inequality in income and wealth distribution, as well as in economic and political power relations. Yet as Andrew Murray has so incisively noted, ‘this new politics is generally more class-focused than class-rooted. While it places issues of social inequality and global economic power front and center, it neither emerges from the organic institutions of the class-in-itself nor advances the socialist perspective of the class-for-itself.’ The strategic questions raised by this pertain not only to all the old difficulties of left parties maintaining a class focus once elected; they also pertain to how a class-rooted politics – in the old sense of the connection between working-class formation and political organization – could become revolutionary today. Given the manifold changes in class composition and identity, as well as the limits and failures of the old working-class parties and unions in light of these changes, what could this mean in terms of new organizational forms and practices? And what would a class-focused and class-rooted transformation of the capitalist state actually entail?
While leaders like Tsipras, Iglesias, Corbyn and Sanders all have pointed beyond Third Way social democracy, their capacity to actually move beyond it is another matter. This partly has to do with their personal limitations, but much more with the specific limitations of each of their political parties, including even the strongest left currents within them not preparing adequately for the challenge of actually transforming state apparatuses. The experience of the Syriza government in Greece highlights
this, as well as how difficult it is for governments to extricate their state apparatuses from transnational ones.
All this compels a fundamental rethink of the relationship between class, party and state transformation. If Bolshevik revolutionary discourse seems archaic a hundred years after 1917, it is not just because the legacy of its historic demonstration that revolution was possible has faded. It is also because Gramsci’s reframing, so soon after 1917, of the key issues of revolutionary strategy – especially regarding the impossibility of an insurrectionary path to power in states deeply embedded in capitalist societies – rings ever more true. What this means for socialists, however, as we face up to a long war of position in the twenty-first century, is not only the recognition of the limitations of twentieth-century Leninism. It above all requires discovering how to avoid the social democratization even of those committed to transcending capitalism. This is the central challenge for socialists today.
Class Struggle Before Class: Then and Now
The Communist Manifesto of 1848 introduced a new theory of revolution. Against the conspiracies of the few and the experiments of the dreamers, an emerging proletariat was heralded with the potential to usher in a new world. The argument was not that these dispossessed labourers carried revolution in their genes; rather it pointed to their potential for organization, which was facilitated by modern means of communication as well as by the way capitalists collectivized labour. Even though their organization would be ‘disrupted time and again by competition amongst the workers themselves’, it indeed proved to be the case that ‘the ever expanding union of the workers’ would lead to ‘the organization of workers into a class, and consequently into a political party’.
It was this sense of class formation as process that led E.P. Thompson to argue so powerfully that class was not a static social category but a changing social relationship, which historically took shape in the form of class struggle before class. Out of the struggles of the dispossessed labourers against the new capitalist order in England in the last half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth came the growing collective identity and community of the working class as a social force.6 Moreover, as Hobsbawm subsequently emphasized, it was really only in the years from 1870 to 1914 – as proletarianization reached a critical mass, and as workers’ organizational presence developed on a national and international scale through mass socialist parties and unions – that the revolutionary potential in the working class that Marx had identified looked set to be realized.7 However arcane the very term ‘workers’ state’ now may seem, it made sense to people in 1917 – and not least to nervous bourgeoisies.
Yet there was much that made this problematic even then. The fact that so many new trade unions and workers’ parties had emerged that did not aim to create socialism reflected how far even the newly organized industrial proletariat stood from revolutionary ambitions. And where there was a commitment to socialist purposes, as was ostensibly the case with the social democratic parties of the Second International, this was compromised in serious ways. The winning of workers’ full franchise rights had the contradictory effect of integrating them into the nation state, while the growing separation of leaders from led inside workers’ organizations undermined not only accountability, but also the capacity to develop workers’ revolutionary potentials. This was of course contested in these organizations even before Roberto Michels’ famous book outlined their oligarchic tendencies. But these two factors – a class-inclusive nationalism and a non-revolutionary relationship between leaders and led in class organizations – combined to determine why the catastrophic outcome of inter-imperial rivalry announced with the guns of August 1914, far from bringing about the international proletarian revolution, rather ambushed European social democracy into joining the great patriotic war and making truce in the domestic class struggle.
What made proletarian revolution ushering in a workers state still credible after this – perhaps all the more credible – was the Russian Revolution. But what Rosa Luxemburg discerned within its first year would definitively mark the outcome: a revolutionary process which in breaking with liberal democracy quickly narrowed rather than broadened the scope of public participation, ending as a ‘clique affair’. Lenin, she noted, saw the capitalist state as ‘an instrument of oppression of the working class; the socialist state, of the bourgeoisie’, but this ‘misses the most essential thing: bourgeois class rule has no need of the political training and education of the entire mass of the people, at least not beyond certain narrow limits’. The great danger was that:
Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously – at bottom then, a clique affair.
Isaac Deutscher, looking back some three decades later, succinctly captured
the dilemma which had led the Bolsheviks to bring about a dictatorship that
would ‘at best represent the idea of the class, not the class itself’. He insisted
that in consolidating the new regime the Bolsheviks had not ‘clung to power
for its own sake’, but rather that this reflected a deeper quandary. Even
though anarcho-syndicalists seemed ‘far more popular among the working
class’, the fact that they ‘possessed no positive political programme, no
serious organization, national or even local’ only reinforced the Bolsheviks
identification of the new republic’s fate with their own, as ‘the only force
capable of safeguarding the revolution’.
Lenin’s party refused to allow the famished and emotionally unhinged
country to vote their party out of power and itself into a bloody chaos.
For this strange sequel to their victory the Bolsheviks were mentally quite
unprepared. They had always tacitly assumed that the majority of the
working class, having backed them in the revolution, would go on to
support them unswervingly until they had carried out the full programme
of socialism. Naive as the assumption was, it sprang from the notion that
socialism was the proletarian idea par excellence and that the proletariat,
having once adhered to it, would not abandon it … It had never occurred
to Marxists to reflect whether it was possible or admissible to try to
establish socialism regardless of the will of the working class.
The long term effects of what Luxemburg had so quickly understood
would contribute to reproducing a dictatorial regime regardless of the will
of the working class – and relatedly, also to the gaps in the ‘political training
and education of the entire mass of the people’ – were chillingly captured by
what a leader of the local trade union committee at the Volga Automobile
Plant said to us in an interview in 1990 just before the regime established
in 1917 collapsed: ‘Insofar as workers were backward and underdeveloped,
this is because there has in fact been no real political education since 1924.
The workers were made fools of by the party.’ The words here need to be
taken literally: the workers were not merely fooled, but made into fools; their
revolutionary understanding and capacity was undermined.
The fillip that 1917 had given to fueling workers’ revolutionary ambitions
worldwide was more than offset by the failure of the revolution in Germany
and the Stalinist response to an isolated and beleaguered Soviet Union after
Lenin’s death, with all the adverse consequences this entailed. Though
the spectre of Bolshevism hardly faded, it was the spectre of fascism that
dominated radical change in the interwar years. Nevertheless, there was also
widespread recognition of the potential of the working class as the social
force most capable of transforming state and society. This perception was not
least based on worker organization and class formation in the US during the
Great Depression. As the US already was the new world centre of capitalism,
even before the Second World War, this contributed to the sense on the part
of leading American capitalists and state officials that among the barriers to
the remaking of a liberal capitalist international order, ‘the uprising of [the]
international proletariat … [was] the most significant fact of the last twenty
years’.
The strength of the organized working class as it had formed up to the
1950s was registered in the institutionalization of collective bargaining and
welfare reforms. The effects of this were highly contradictory. The material
gains in terms of individual and family consumption, which workers
secured directly or indirectly from collective bargaining for rising wages as
well as from a social wage largely designed to secure and supplement that
consumption, were purchased at the cost of union and party practices that
attenuated working class identity and community – especially in light of
the restructuring of employment, residency and education that accompanied
these developments. To be sure, the continuing salience of working-class
organization was palpable. This was increasingly so in the public sector,
but it was also measurable in class struggles in the private sector which
resisted workplace restructuring, as well as in the wage-led inflation that
contributed to the capitalist profitability crisis of the 1970s. Yet the failure
to renew and extend working-class identity and community through these
struggles opened the way to the neoliberal resolution of the crises of the
1970s through a widespread assault on trade unionism and the welfare state,
and the interpellation of workers themselves as ‘taxpayers’.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, aided by the realization of
a fully global capitalism and the networked structures of production, finance
and consumption that constitute it, there were more workers on the face of
the earth than ever before. New technologies certainly restricted job growth
in certain sectors, but this also introduced entirely new sectors in both
manufacturing and especially high tech services. Though this weakened the
leverage of class struggles in important ways, it also introduced new points
of strategic potential: strikes at component plants or interruptions of supplier
chains at warehouses and ports could force shutdowns throughout a globally
integrated production network, and whistleblowing could expose vast stores
of information hidden by corporations and states.
The precarious conditions workers increasingly face today, even when
they belong to unions, speaks not to a new class division between precariat
and proletariat. Precariousness rather reflects how previous processes
of working-class formation and organization have become undone.
Precariousness is not something new in capitalism: employers have always
tried to gain access to labour when they want, dispose of it as they want
and, in between, use it with as little restrictions as possible. There is in this
context limited value in drawing new sociological nets of who is or is not
in the working class. Rather than categorizing workers into different strata
– nurses or baristas, teachers or software developers, farmhands or truckers,
salespeople or bank-tellers – what needs to preoccupy our imaginations and
inform our strategic calculations is how to visualize and how to develop the
potential of new forms of working-class organization and formation in the
twenty-first century.
There are indeed multitudes of workers’ struggles taking place today in
the face of an increasingly exploitative and chaotic capitalism. Yet there
is no denying that prospects for working-class revolutionary agency seem
dim. It was factors internal to working-class institutions, their contradictions
and weaknesses, which allowed, in the developing as well as the developed
countries, for the passage of free trade, the liberalization of finance, the
persistence of austerity, the further commodification of labour power, the
restructuring of all dimensions of economic and social life in today’s global
capitalism. The inability of the working class to renew itself and discover
new organizational forms in light of the dynamism of capital and capacities
of the state to contain worker resistance has allowed the far right today to
articulate and contextualize a set of common sentiments linked to the crisis
– frustrations with insecurity and inequality, and anger with parties that once
claimed to represent workers’ interests. Escaping this crisis of the working
class is not primarily a matter of better policies or better tactics. It is primarily
an organizational challenge to facilitate new processes of class formation
rooted in the multiple dimensions of workers’ lives that encompass so many
identities and communities.
This organizational challenge will have to include developing socialist
parties of a new kind. As can be seen from the two examples to which we
now turn, the recent shift from protest to politics has already shown the
popular resonance which a renewed socialist appeal can have today, even if
it has only begun to probe what a consistent socialist politics would actually
entail and the barriers that will be encountered.
Political Revolution Today? From Sanders to Syriza
‘Election days come and go. But political and social revolutions that attempt
to transform our society never end.’ The speech with which Bernie Sanders
closed his Democratic primary election campaign began with these sentences;
it ended by pointing to future historians who would trace the success of the
long effort to transform American society from oligarchy to social justice
as beginning with the ‘the political revolution of 2016’. It is tempting to
treat as ersatz the rhetoric of revolution deployed here, taking the meaning
of the word from the sublime to the ridiculous, or from tragedy to farce.
The last time an American politician vying for the presidency issued a call
for a political revolution it came from Ronald Reagan. But for all the limits
of Sanders’ populist campaign, the national attention and massive support
garnered by a self-styled democratic socialist who positively associated the
term revolution with the struggle against class inequality in fact represented a
major discursive departure in American political life, which can be a resource
for further socialist organizing.
Of course, the specific policy measures advanced by Sanders were, as he
constantly insisted, reforms that had at some point been introduced in other
capitalist societies. But when the call for public medicare for all, or free
college tuition, or infrastructure renewal through direct public employment,
is explicitly attached to a critique of a ruling class which wields corporate
and financial power through the direct control of parties, elections and the
media, this goes beyond the bounds of what can properly be dismissed as
mere reformism, even if the demands hardly evoke what the call for bread,
land and peace did in 1917. And it is no less a significant departure, especially
in the US, to make class inequality the central theme of a political campaign
in a manner designed to span and penetrate race and gender divisions in a
way that explicitly poses the question of who stands to benefit more from
high quality public health care and education and well compensated work
opportunities than African-Americans and Latinos, while pointing to the
need to move beyond the ghettoes of identity towards building a more
coherent class force.
The key question is whether Sanders’ campaign really could lay the
grounds for an ongoing political movement capable of effecting this
‘political revolution’. Sanders’ argument during the campaign that he could
be sustained in the White House amidst a hostile Congress and imperial
state apparatus by a ‘mass movement’ marching on Washington D.C.
was not very convincing. Much more serious was his call after he lost the
primary campaign for a shift from protest to politics at every level, including
‘school boards, city councils, county commissions, state legislatures and
governorships’. But even if this happened, such engagement would also
have to be directed at the institutions in which workers have heretofore
been organized.
The very fact that the Sanders campaign was class-focused rather than
class-rooted may be an advantage here. It opens space for a new politics
that can become ‘rooted’ in the sense of being grounded in working-class
struggles but committed to the radical transformation of the generally
exhausted institutions of the labour movement. This ranges across turning
union branches into centres of working-class life, leading the fight for
collective public services, breaking down the oligarchic relationship between
leaders and led, contributing to building the broadest member capacities,
emphasizing the importance of expressing a clearer class sensibility, and even
becoming ambitious enough to introduce socialist ideas. This also applies to
Workers Action Centers, which have spread across the US but which are so
often overwhelmed by having to reproduce themselves financially in order
to continue providing vital services to Black, Latino, immigrant and women
workers. Becoming more class-rooted and effective would require building
the institutional capacities to creatively organize workers in different sectors
into new city-wide organizations, as well as develop a coordinating national
infrastructure.
Similar challenges would need to be put to consumer and credit cooperatives,
which are broadly identified with the left, but whose primarily
narrow economic activities need to be politicized, above all in the sense
of opening their spaces to radical education about the capitalist context in
which they operate, actively participating in left campaigns, and contributing
a portion of their revenue to funding organizers to carry out such tasks.
And to get beyond the frustrations so often voiced in the environmental
movement with workers’ defensive prioritization of their jobs, turning this
into a positive rather than negative class focus by speaking in terms of ‘just
transitions’ to a clean energy economy would also mean raising the necessity
for economic planning to address both environmental and social crises, with
the corollary of challenging the prerogatives of private property and capitalist
power structures.
A new class politics cannot emerge ex nihilo, however. The Sanders
campaign, initiated by an outsider in the Democratic Party, confirmed that
if you are not heard in the media you are not broadly heard. But whatever
the advantages of initially mobilizing from within established institutions
in this respect, the impossibility of a political revolution taking place under
the auspices of the Democratic Party needs to be directly faced (even in the
Labour Party, it is hard enough to imagine that what Corbyn represents
could be sustained without major institutional recalibration). After it
had become clear he would not clinch the nomination, Sanders and the
movement that had begun to take shape around him appeared at risk of
falling into a myopic strategy of internally transforming and democratizing
the Democratic Party. In part, this is one of the contradictions in Sanders’
choice to run as a Democrat. While the Sanders campaign showed that
Democratic Party institutions offer certain bases from which to advance a
left politics – lending his campaign a certain legitimacy and credibility within
mainstream discourse – in the long run, an alternative political pole will have
to be constructed around which social struggles can condense.
It was far from surprising that the thousands of Sanders supporters who
gathered at the People’s Summit in Chicago after the primary campaign
ended did not come to found a new party. What happened there, as Dan
La Botz described it, ‘was about vision, not organization or strategy’, so that
one could at best only hear ‘the sound made by the Zeitgeist passing though
the meeting rooms and the halls, brushing up against us, making its way,
sometimes gracefully, sometimes clumsily, to the future’. One key test
will be whether, as it ‘makes its way’, lessons are learned from the US Labor
Party project of the 1990s, links are made with attempts already underway
to spawn new socialist political formations, and traces of either Bolshevik
sectarianism or ‘Third World’ romanticism are avoided while nevertheless
also abandoning the naïve admiration for Canadian and European social
democracy that has long characterized so much of the US left.
This takes us from Sanders to Syriza, the only party to the left of traditional
social democracy in Europe that has actually succeeded in winning a national
election since the current economic crisis began. Syriza’s roots go back to
the formation of Synaspismos, first as an electoral alliance in the 1980s, and
then as an independent, although factionalized, new party in the early 1990s.
This was part of the broader institutional reconfiguration inaugurated by the
Eurocommunist strategic orientation, searching for a way forward in the
face of Communist and Social Democratic parties having lost their historic
roles and capacities as agencies of working-class political representation
and social transformation. This search went all the way back to the 1960s
and accelerated after the collapse of the Soviet bloc and social democracy’s
embrace of the ‘Third Way’. In Greece especially the Eurocommunist
orientation was characterized by continuing to embrace the tradition
of political revolution as experienced in the Civil War after 1945, even
while distancing itself from the Soviet regime; and it would increasingly be
characterized by the inspiration it took from, and a willingness to work with,
new social movements.
Although Synaspismos through the 1990s offered enthusiastic support of
European integration, as the neoliberal form of Economic and Monetary
Union buried the promises of a European Social Charter the grounds
were laid in Greece, as elsewhere on the European radical left, for a more
‘Eurosceptical’ orientation. This new critical posture towards the European
variety of capitalism was a crucial element in Synaspismos explicitly
defining, by the turn of the millennium, its strategic goal as ‘the socialist
transformation of Greek society’ while increasingly encouraging ‘dialogue
and common actions’ not only with the alter-globalization movement, but
with radical ecologists and political groups of a Trotskyist or Maoist lineage.
The goal of the Coalition of the Radical Left, with the acronym Syriza,
which emerged out of this as an electoral alliance was designed, as Michalis
Spourdalakis put it, ‘not so much to unify but rather to connect in a flexible
fashion the diverse actions, initiatives and movements … and to concern
itself with developing popular political capacities as much as with changing
state policy’. But actually turning Synaspismos, and through it Syriza, into
such a party was, as Spourdalakis immediately adds, ‘more wishful thinking
than realistic prospect’.
As the eurocrisis broke, however, with Greece at the epicentre of the
attempt to save the euro through the application of severe austerity at its
weakest point, all the elements of Syriza threw themselves into the 2011
wave of protests, occupations and strikes, while supporting the 400 or
so community solidarity networks around the country to help the worst
affected cope. This prepared the ground for Syriza’s electoral breakthrough
of 2012. Syriza’s active insertion the year before into the massive outbursts
across Greece of social protest from below was a source of radical democratic
energy that went far beyond what can be generated during an election
campaign, however successful. What this meant was eloquently articulated
at Syriza’s Congress in 2013 when it finally turned itself from an electoral
alliance into a single party political organization. The conclusion to its
founding resolution called for ‘something more’ than the programmatic
framework that resolution set out. Since ‘for a Government of the Left, a
parliamentary majority – whatever its size – is not enough’, the something
more it called for was ‘the creation and expression of the widest possible,
militant and catalytic political movement of multidimensional subversion’.
Only such a movement can lead to a Government of the Left and only
such a movement can safeguard the course of such a government …
[which] carries out radical reforms, takes on development initiatives and
other initiatives of a clear environmental and class orientation, opens
up new potentials and opportunities for popular intervention, helps the
creation of new forms of popular expression and claims … Syriza has
shouldered the responsibility to contribute decisively to the shaping of
this great movement of democratic subversion that will lead the country
to a new popular, democratic, and radical changeover
This sort of language, articulating this sort of understanding, was rare on
the European radical left, let alone anywhere else. Yet as the Syriza leadership
contemplated the dilemmas it faced as it stood on the doorstep of government,
its concern to appear as a viable government in the media’s eyes led them to
concentrate, as was evident in the Thessalonika Manifesto proclaimed just
a year later, on refining and scaling down the policy proposals in the 2013
party programme. This was done with little internal party consultation, with
the leadership mainly concerned with there not being enough experienced
and efficient personnel in the party to bring into the state to change the
notoriously clientelistic and corrupt state apparatus. Little attention was paid
to who would be left in the party to act as an organizing cadre in society.
The increase in party membership was not at all proportionate to the extent
of the electoral breakthrough, and even when new radical activists did join,
the leadership generally did very little to support those in the party apparatus
who wanted to develop these activists’ capacities to turn party branches into
centres of working-class life and strategically engage with them, preferably
in conjunction with the Solidarity Networks, in planning for alternative
forms of production and consumption. All this spoke to how far Syriza still
was from having discovered how to escape the limits of social democracy.
Syriza and the Problem of State Transformation
[This] is not a ‘betrayal’. It’s not about the well-known scenario ‘they
have sold out’. We have seen that there was real confrontation. We have
seen the amount of pressure, the blackmailing by the European Central
Bank. We have seen that they want to bring the Syriza government to
its knees. And they need to do that because it represents a real threat,
not some kind of illusion of a reformist type. So the reality is that the
representatives of the Greek government did the best they could. But
they did it within the wrong framework and with the wrong strategy and,
in this sense, the outcome couldn’t have been different … The people
who think that ‘the reformists will fail’ and that somehow in the wings
stands the revolutionary vanguard who is waiting to take over somehow
and lead the masses to a victory are I think completely outside of reality.
All this was said within a month of Syriza’s election at the end of January
2015 by Stathis Kouvelakis, whose interpretation of the dramatic unfolding
of events in his country garnered widespread attention on the international
left. Himself a member’s of Syriza’s Central Committee as a partisan of the
Left Platform, he was speaking at a meeting in London and addressing the
disappointments already felt when the new government agreed to new
negotiations with the EU and IMF. Less than five months later, as these
negotiations infamously came to a climax, he would, along with many
others, leave Syriza in response to what he now called the government’s
‘capitulation’, which indeed became the most common epithet used by the
international left. Yet the need to ask whether the outcome could really
have been different was now greater than ever. And while the answer did
indeed hinge on the adequacy of Syriza’s strategy in relation to Europe,
that in turn related to deeper issues of party organization, capacity building
and state transformation – as well as the adequacy of strategies on the wider
European left, at least in terms of shifting the overall balance of forces.
The common criticism of Syriza, strongly advanced by the Left Platform,
was that it had not developed a ‘Plan B’ for leaving the eurozone and
adopting an alternate currency as the key condition for rejecting neoliberal
austerity and cancelling debt obligations. What this criticism recoiled from
admitting was that the capital and import controls this also would require
would lead to Greece being forced out of the EU as a whole. After 35 years of
integration, the institutional carapace for capitalism in Greece was provided
by the manifold ways the state apparatus became entangled with the EU.
Breaking out of this would have required Syriza as a party and government
to be prepared for an immediate systemic rupture. It could certainly be said
that Syriza was naïve to believe that it could stop the European economic
torture while remaining in the eurozone, let alone the EU. At the very least,
this simultaneously posed two great challenges: could such a state as Greece
be fundamentally changed while remaining within the EU, and could the
EU itself be fundamentally changed from within at the initiative of that state?
For a small country without significant oil resources, a break with the
EU would have entailed economic isolation (along the lines of that endured
by the Cuban revolution, yet without the prospect of anything like its
geostrategic and economic support from the former USSR). The Syriza
government faced the intractable contradiction that to fulfil its promise to
stop the EU’s economic torture, it would have to leave the EU – which
would, given the global as well as European balance of forces and the lack
of alternative production and consumption capabilities in place, lead to
further economic suffering for an unforeseeable period. Despite the massive
popular mobilization the government unleashed by calling the referendum
in July to support its position against that of the EU-IMF, the intractable
dilemma was the same as it had been when it first entered the state. That
the government managed to win re-election in the fall while succumbing to
and implementing the diktats of the ‘Institutions’ indicated that Kouvelakis’s
observation when it entered into the negotiations back in February still held:
‘People support the government because the perception they have is that
they couldn’t act otherwise in that very specific situation. They really see
that the balance of forces was extremely uneven’.
Costas Douzinas, another prominent London-based Greek intellectual
newly elected as a Syriza MP in the fall of 2015, hopes the story may not
be over. He outlines the ‘three different temporalities’ through which the
radical left must ‘simultaneously live’ once it enters the state. There is ‘the
time of the present’: the dense and difficult time when the Syriza government
- ‘held hostage’ to the creditors as a ‘quasi-protectorate’ of the EU and IMF
- is required ‘to implement what they fought against’, and thus ‘to legislate
and apply the recessional and socially unjust measures it ideologically
rejects’. This raises ‘grave existential issues and problems of conscience’
which cannot go away, but can be ‘soothed through the activation of two
other temporalities that exist as traces of futurity in the present time’. This
begins with ‘the medium term of three to five years’, when time for the
government appears ‘slower and longer’ as it probes for the space it needs to
implement its ‘parallel program’ so as not only to ‘mitigate the effects of the
memorandum’ but also to advance ‘policies with a clear left direction … in
close contact with the party and the social movements’. This is the bridge to
the third and longest temporality, ‘the time of the radical left vision’, which
will be reached ‘only by continuously and simultaneously implementing
and undermining the agreement policies’. As this third temporality starts
unfolding, freed from the neoliberal lambast, ‘the full programme of the
left of the 21st century’ will emerge. ‘It is a case of escaping into the future,
acting now from the perspective of a future perfect, of what will have been.
In this sense, the future becomes an active factor of our present.’
It is indeed significant that the Syriza government’s continuing ideological
rejection of neoliberal logic – even as it implements the measures forced
upon it – is precisely what distinguishes Syriza from social democratic
governments in the neoliberal era. The crucial condition for the three
temporalities to coexist, however, is precisely the ‘close contact with the
party and the social movements’, which Douzinas only mentions in passing.
Even in terms of its relations to the party, let alone the social movements,
the Syriza government has failed to escape from familiar social democratic
patterns as it distanced itself from party pressures, and seemed incapable of
appreciating the need for activating party cadre to develop social capacities
to lay the grounds for temporality two and eventually three. The neglect
of the party turned to offhand dismissal when the government called the
second election of 2015. As so many of its leading cadre left the party in
the face of this – including even the General Secretary, who also resigned
rather than asserting the party’s independence from the government – the
promise that Syriza might escape the fate of social democracy in neoliberal
capitalism was left in tatters. There are still those in Syriza, inside and
outside the government, who, operating with something very like the three
temporalities in mind, are trying to revive the party outside government as
the key agent of transformation. But whether they can manage to create the
conditions for ‘Syriza to be Syriza again’ is now moot indeed.
Yet the problem goes far broader and deeper than with those who still
have hopes for Syriza. It was ironically those who advanced the ostensibly
more radical Plan B who seemed to treat state power most instrumentally.
Little or no attention was paid by them to how to disentangle a very broad
range of state apparatuses from budgetary dependence on EU funding, let
alone to the transformations the Greek state apparatuses would have to
undergo merely to administer the controls and rationing required to manage
the black and grey markets that would have expanded inside and outside
the state if Greece exited the eurozone. This was especially problematic
given the notorious clientelistic and corrupt state practices which Syriza as a
party had been vociferously committed to ending, but once in government
did not have the time to change, even where the inclination to do so was
still there. When confronted with a question on how to deal with this, one
Syriza MP who was a leading advocate of Plan B responded privately that
in such a moment of rupture it is necessary to shoot people. But this only
raised the bigger question of whom the notoriously reactionary coercive
apparatuses of the Greek state, as unchanged as they were, would be most
likely to listen to, and most likely to shoot.
Perhaps most tellingly, advocates of Plan B showed no more, and often
rather less, interest in democratizing state apparatuses by linking them with
social movements. This stood in contrast with the minister of social services,
who had herself been the key founder of the federation of solidarity networks,
Solidairty4All, and openly spoke of her frustrations that Syriza MPs,
even while paying over a sizeable portion of their salaries to the networks,
insisted that they alone should be the conduits for contact with solidarity
activists in their communities. The Minister of Education visited one school
a week and told teachers, parents and students that if they wanted to use
the school as a base for changing social relations in their communities they
would have his support. However, the Ministry of Education itself did not
become actively engaged in promoting the use of schools as community
hubs, neither providing spaces for activists organizing around food and health
services, nor the technical education appropriate to this, nor other special
programmes to prepare students to spend periods of time in communities,
contributing to adult education and working on community projects.
Yet it must be said that the social movements themselves were largely
passive and immobilized in this respect, as if waiting for the government
to deliver. Activists from the networks of food solidarity were rightly
frustrated they could not even get from the new Minister of Agriculture
the information they asked for on the locations of specific crops so they
might approach a broader range of farmers. But they did not see it as their
responsibility to develop and advance proposals on how the state apparatuses
should be changed, even minimally, so as to cope with the economic crisis.
How, for instance, could the agriculture ministry have been engaged in
identifying idle land to be given over to community food production coops,
and in coordinating this across sub-regions; or how the defence ministry
might have been engaged in directing military trucks (at least those sitting
idle between demonstrations) to be used to facilitate the distribution of food
through the solidarity networks.
The point is this. Insofar as the Syriza government has failed the most
crucial democratic, let alone revolutionary test, of linking the administration
up with popular forces – not just for meeting basic needs but also for planning
and implementing the restructuring of economic and social life – there were
all too few on the radical left outside the state who really saw this as a priority
either.
Signposts Towards Democratic Socialism
Whatever the final outcome in Greece, it is useful to look back at
Nicos Poulantzas’s ‘Towards a Democratic Socialism’, especially given
its formative influence on those who founded Synaspismos in the 1980s
(Syriza’s research institute bears his name to this day). Written in 1978
as the epilogue to his last book, what Poulantzas articulated was reflective
of a much broader orientation on the European left, already represented
by Gorz, Magri, Benn, Miliband, Rowbotham, Segal, Wainwright, and
others, towards trying to discover new strategic directions beyond both the
Leninist and Social Democratic ‘models’ which, despite taking different
routes, nevertheless evinced in their practices a common distrust of popular
capacities to democratize state structures. As Poulantzas put it: ‘There is no
longer a question of building “models” of any kind whatsoever. All that is
involved is a set of signposts which, drawing lessons of the past, point out
the traps to anyone wishing to avoid certain well-known destinations’. For
Poulantzas, the ‘techno-bureaucratic statism of the experts’ was the outcome
not only of the instrumentalist strategic conception of social democratic
parliamentarism, but also of the ‘Leninist dual-power type of strategy
which envisages straightforward replacement of the state apparatus with an
apparatus of councils…’
Transformation of the state apparatus does not really enter into the matter:
first of all the existing state power is taken and then another is put in its
place. This view of things can no longer be accepted. If taking power
denotes a shift in the relationship of forces within the state, and if it is
recognized that this will involve a long process of change, then the seizure
of state power will entail concomitant transformations of its apparatuses
… In abandoning the dual-power strategy, we do not throw overboard,
but pose in a different fashion, the question of the state’s materiality as a
specific apparatus.
Notably, Poulantzas went back to Luxemburg’s critique of Lenin in 1918
to stress the importance of socialists building on liberal democracy, even while
transcending it, in order to provide the space for mass struggles to unfold
which could ‘modify the relationship of forces within the state apparatuses,
themselves the strategic site of political struggle’. The very notion to take
state power ‘clearly lacks the strategic vision of a process of transition to
socialism – that is of a long stage during which the masses will act to conquer
power and transform state apparatuses.’ For the working class to displace the
old ruling class, in other words, it must develop capacities to democratize
the state, which must always rest on ‘increased intervention of the popular
masses in the state … certainly through their trade union and political forms
of representation, but also through their own initiatives within the state
itself’. To expect that institutions of direct democracy outside the state can
simply displace the old state in a single revolutionary rupture in fact avoided
all the difficult questions of political representation and opens the way for a
new authoritarian statism.
Indeed, as Andre Gorz had already insisted in his pathbreaking essay on
‘Reform and Revolution’ a decade earlier, taking off from liberal democracy
on ‘the peaceful road to socialism’ was not a matter of adopting ‘an a priori
option for gradualism; nor of an a priori refusal of violent revolution or
armed insurrection. It is a consequence of the latter’s actual impossibility in
the European context.’ The advancement of what Gorz called a ‘socialist
strategy of progressive reforms’ did not mean the ‘installation of islands of
socialism in a capitalist ocean’, but rather involved the types of ‘structural
reforms’ or ‘non-reformist reforms’ which could not be institutionalized
so as to close off class antagonism but which allowed for further challenges
to the balance of power and logic of capitalism, and thereby introduce a
dynamic that allowed the process to go further. In calling for the creation of
new ‘centres of social control and direct democracy’ outside the state, Gorz
was far-sighted in terms of what this could contribute to a broad process of
new class formation with revolutionary potential, not least by extending to
‘the labour of ideological research’ and more generally to the transformative
capacities of ‘cultural labour aiming at the overthrow of norms and schemata
of social consciousness’. This would be essential for ensuring that ‘the
revolutionary movements’ capacity for action and hegemony is enriched
and confirmed by its capacity to inspire … the autonomous activity of town
planners, architects, doctors, teachers and psychologists’.
What this left aside, however, were the crucial changes in state structures
that would need to attend this process. Poulantzas went to the heart of the
matter, a decade later, stressing that on ‘the democratic road to socialism,
the long process of taking power essentially consists in the spreading,
development, coordination and direction of those diffuse centres of resistance
which the masses always possess within the state networks, in such a way that
they become real centres of power on the strategic terrain of the state’. Even
Gramsci, as Poulantzas pointed out, ‘was unable to pose the problem in all
its amplitude’ since his ‘war of position’ was conceived as the application of
Lenin’s model/strategy to the ‘different concrete conditions of the West’
without actually addressing how to change state apparatuses. Yet it must
also be said that Poulantzas, even while highlighting the need for taking up
the challenge of state transformation, did not himself get very far in detailing
what actually changing the materiality of state apparatuses would entail in
specific instances. Lurking here was the theoretical problem Miliband had
identified of not differentiating state power from class power, and therefore
not specifying sufficiently how the modalities and capacities involved in
exercising capitalist state power would be changed into different modalities
with structurally transformative capacities. And as Goran Therborn pointed
out, in envisaging an important role for unions of state employees in the
process of transforming state apparatuses, it was necessary to address the
problem that ‘state bureaucrats and managers will not thereby disappear,
and problems of popular control will remain’, thereby continuing to pose
‘serious and complicated questions’ for the state transformation through
socialist democracy.
Socialists have since paid far too little attention to the challenges this
poses. While the recognition that neither insurrectionary politics to ‘smash
the state’ nor the social democratic illusion of using the extant state to
introduce progressive policies became more and more widespread, this was
accompanied with a penchant for developing ‘market socialist’ models in the
late 1980s which has subsequently been succeeded by a spate of radical left
literature that – in almost a mirror image of neoliberalism’s championing of
private corporations and small business firms against the state – weakly points
to examples of cooperatives and self-managed enterprises as directly bearing
socialist potential. Replicated here is exactly what Poulantzas identified in
the conception of those for whom ‘the only way to avoid statism is to place
oneself outside the state. The way forward would then be, without going as
far as dual power simply to block the path of the state from the outside.’ Yet
by concentrating exclusively on ‘breaking power up and scattering it among
an infinity of micro-powers’, the result is that the ‘movement is prevented
from intervening in actual transformations of the state, and the two processes
are simply kept running along parallel lines’.
Conclusions
Political hopes are inseparable from notions of what is possible. And possibility
is itself intimately related to class formation, the role of parties in this and
developing confidence in class institutions, and especially the question of
potentials to transform the state. The alliances that socialist parties would
have to enter into, not least in face of the growing threat from the far right
of the political spectrum, should not just be amongst elites but be directed
at new working-class formation of the broadest possible kind; and given
the uneven capacities of the class, should also be directed at developing
its actual potential to become the transformative agent in a transition to
socialism. New socialist parties cannot, however, see themselves as a kind of
omnipotent deus ex machina in society. Precisely in order not to draw back
from the ‘prodigious scope of their own aims’, as Marx brilliantly wrote
in The Eighteenth Brumaire, they must ‘engage in perpetual self-criticism’
and deride ‘the inadequacies, weak points and pitiful aspects of their first
attempts’. Developing commitments to socialism – getting socialism
seriously on the agenda – consequently requires not only addressing the
question of political agency, but overcoming a prevailing sense that even
sympathetic governments will either be stymied by state apparatuses hostile
to the socialist project, and/or that in a globalized world the problem in any
case lies beyond the nation state.
To stress the importance of a democratic socialist strategy for entering the
state through elections to the end of transforming the state is today less than
ever – amidst the deep political and social as well as economic contradictions
of the neoliberal era – a matter of discovering a smooth gradual road to
socialism. Ruptures, or extended series of ruptures of various intensities, are
inescapable. This is so because of the contradictions inherent in reaching
beyond capitalism while still being of it, and the virtual inevitability of
conditions being premature as the project is attempted in ‘circumstances not
of our own choosing’. The contradictions for any radical government that
would be engaged in this process will include responsibilities for managing a
capitalist economy that is likely in crisis while simultaneously trying to satisfy
popular expectations for the promised relief, and yet also embarking on the
longer-term commitment to transform the state, i.e., not pushing the latter
off to an indefinite future.
It is this tension among the various new state responsibilities which makes
the role of new socialist parties that will bring such governments to office
so fundamental. Given the legitimacy and resources that inevitably will
accrue to those party leaders who form the government, the autonomy of
the party is crucial in order to counter the pull of those leaders towards
social democratization. The party must more than ever keep its feet in the
movements and, far from trying to direct them, remain the central site for
democratic strategic debate in light of their diverse activities. This is why
strategic preparations undertaken well before entering the state on how to
avoid replicating the experience with social democracy are so very important.
But even with this, the process of transforming the state cannot help but be
complex, uncertain, crisis-ridden, with repeated interruptions and possibly
even reversals. Beginning with election to local or regional levels of the
state would allow for developing capacities of state transformation before
coming to national power. Developing alternative means of producing and
distributing food, health care and other necessities depends on autonomous
movements moving in these directions through takeovers of land, idle
buildings, threatened factories and transportation networks. All this in turn
would have to be supported and furthered through more radical changes in
the state that would range over time from codifying new collective property
rights to developing and coordinating agencies of democratic planning. At
some points in this process more or less dramatic initiatives of nationalization
and socialization of industry and finance would have to take place.
For state apparatuses to be transformed so as to play these roles, their
institutional modalities would need to undergo fundamental transformations,
given how they are now structured so as to reproduce capitalist social relations.
State employees would need to become explicit agents of transformation,
aided and sustained in this respect by their unions and the broader labour
movement. Rather than expressing defensive particularism, unions
themselves would need to be changed fundamentally so as to actively be
engaged in developing state workers’ transformational capacities, including
by establishing councils that link them to the recipients of state services.
Of course, the possibility of such state transformations will not be
determined by what happens in one country alone. During the era of
neoliberalism state apparatuses have become deeply intertwined with
transnational institutions, treaties and regulations to manage and reproduce
global capitalism. This has nothing at all to do with capital bypassing the
nation state and coming to rely on a transnational state. Both the nature
of the current crisis and the responses to it have proved once again how
much states still matter. Even in the most elaborate transnational institutional
formation, the European Union, the centre of political gravity lies not in
the supranational state apparatus headquartered in Brussels. It is, rather,
the asymetric economic and political power relations among the states of
Europe that really determines what the EU is and does. Any project for
democratization at an international scale, such as those being advanced
by many of the left for the EU in the wake of the Syriza experience, still
depends on the balance of class forces and the particular structures within
each nation state. Changes in international institutions are therefore
contingent on transformations at the level of nation states. And the changes
in international state apparatuses that should be pursued by socialists are
those that would allow more room for manoeuvre within each state. What
socialist internationalism must mean today is an orientation to shifting the
balances of forces in other countries and in international bodies so as to
create more space for transformative forces in every country. This was one
of the key lessons of 1917, and it is all the more true a century later.