Authors Alan Jenkins and Gan Golan have crafted a new graphic novel series offering a stark warning about how close the U.S. came to a fascist coup on Jan. 6, 2021.
Archive for category: #Antifascism #CommunityDefense #Revolution
In the dominant liberal political imaginary, fascist and far-right movements are framed as problems of hate and extremism. The global extremism industry – a network of government ministries, intelligence agencies, military and police forces, university research centers, think tanks, media outlets, and government-oriented NGOs – dutifully serves the ruling class by occluding liberalism’s complicity with fascism by placing antifascist movements on an extremism spectrum that also includes violent fascist formations, a mystification aimed at policing the Left and criminalizing antifascists. More
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Two years after the attempted coup on January 6, 2021, the threat of fascism has only grown. In just the last month, a neo-Nazi couple was arrested for planning to “completely destroy” Baltimore, a majority-Black city, by attacking its power grid; and in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has launched an offensive against public education, particularly Black studies — in an effort described by historian…
Intro
A recent book on the Revolutionary Cells of Germany, a network of militant left-wing radicals active in the 1980s and 90s, includes a curious exchange. An interviewer asks three former RC members about anti-imperialism, insisting that it was a “Leninist concept”. Eventually, one of the former RC members says: “The term ‘anti-imperialism’ was widely used within the left at the time, it didn’t necessarily indicate Leninism. … It meant that liberation cannot be reduced to the national frame; it needs to be international and the result of fighting an international system of exploitation.”
The questions by the interviewer, ostensibly of a younger generation, reveal a shift within the radical German left that is most commonly associated with the pro-Israel “anti-Germans” (Antideutschen), who, following German reunification in 1991, focused on criticizing nationalism, including national liberation movements. This led not only to a critique of anti-imperialism, which was associated with national liberation movements, but also to an equation of anti-imperialism and antisemitism.
In short, “anti-imperialism” became a bad word and was largely abandoned by leftist circles. An article in the soft anti-German rag Jungle World confirmed this in 2017: “Instead of a nuanced analysis of power relations, the term ‘anti-imperialism’ nowadays only serves an ideology that, thanks to a simplification of complex systems of domination, creates the basis for gruesome international left-right-alliances.”
The impact of these developments went beyond Germany. When, in 2017, I wrote a text titled “Oppressor and Oppressed Nations: Sketching a Taxonomy of Imperialism”, an old friend took me aside during an anarchist bookfair and wanted to know why I “dabbled in anti-imperialist politics”, which so clearly were associated with leftist currents that anarchists should keep a distance from.
Even within Marxist circles you can encounter mistrust with regard to anti-imperialism, since it is often associated with crude anti-Americanism, a vulgar “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” sentiment, and the uncritical support of “anti-Western” regimes, no matter how reactionary or hypocritical. In the Oxford Handbook of Economic Imperialism, editor Zak Cope states in an article titled “Imperialism and Its Critics: A Brief Conspectus” the following: “In Europe at least, the far left and far right often embrace the same adolescent ‘anti-imperialist’ (‘anti-American’) ideology, leading them to proclaim support for supposed opponents of the United States, typically autocratic imperialist rivals and their satellites.”
These aren’t just straw man arguments. Tendencies of “adolescent anti-imperialist ideology” exist within the left. But it is curious that these tendencies, which are far from dominant, would discredit the entire concept of anti-imperialism. There are “adolescent” tendencies in antifascism and the climate justice movement as well. Do they discredit these causes? No, since they are bigger than some insufficient interpretations of them. The same applies to anti-imperialism. The history of imperialism is way too closely tied to the history of capitalism to believe that anticapitalist politics can do without anti-imperialism. (If you’re not convinced, I’d recommend reading Torkil Lauesen’s The Global Perspective: Reflections on Imperialism and Resistance.)
anti-imperialism does not per se mean crude anti-Americanism, and it does not per se mean Leninism either. Lenin wasn’t the first to use the term “imperialism” to describe a global system of accumulation and exploitation forming the material basis of global capital. That was the British economist J.A. Hobson, a moderate socialist with no revolutionary agenda. Lenin’s book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, published in 1917, is certainly a classic in anti-imperialist circles, but it doesn’t tie all anti-imperialist activity automatically to him.
I myself come from a generation in which anti-imperialism simply was part of the package if you were radical left, Leninist or not. The analytical depth might have been limited at times, and the moral impetus stronger than the political one, but there was consensus on the impossibility of disconnecting matters of global justice from revolutionary movements. I came of age politically in Europe in the 1980s, but a similar understanding seemed to prevail elsewhere, too. The following is a quote from a discussion on “International Solidarity and Revolutionary Resistance” during an anarchist gathering in Vancouver, Canada, in January 1990: “Our internationalism, which connects revolutionary struggles here with the struggles in the periphery, is what creates the anti-imperialist resistance.”
I’d like to use this piece to illustrate how anti-imperialism has served as an important aspect of radical politics apart from orthodox Marxism-Leninism. I’ll be using examples from anarchism, autonomism, and the Black liberation movement.
Anarchism
That anarchism was affected by the increasing critique of the term “anti-imperialism” within the broader left has been documented as early as in 1987. In an article in the anarchist journal Black Flag, Albert Meltzer (presumably) wrote the following:
“This is a word that is undergoing a sea-change. When ‘imperialism’ was understood as powerful nation-states building up by colonial expansion, the meaning of ‘anti-imperialism’ was clear. Its support came from anarchists and nationalists (of small oppressed nations). … Anarchists worked alongside anti-imperialists for instance in struggles against the French, Belgian and British empires. … Anarchists had always gloomily predicted that when the nationalists took over they would speedily prove as oppressive as the former States, and so it was. … The new phrases ‘Soviet Imperialism’, ‘American Imperialism’, would have sounded strangely once, though they were always justified. If all this is understood, then we are anti-imperialists in the same way as ever. We find however that this is not always understood even among some anarchists (especially in Germany). Since the term ‘anti-imperialism’ has become a weasel word in the Left, and a synonym for anti-Americanism, it glosses over the crimes of the Russian Empire (the wheel has come full circle). Whenever we see the word ‘anti-imperialism’ nowadays we sniff at it carefully before opening the package, not as one would for explosives, but to see if the milk has gone sour.”
South African anarchist organizer and author Lucien van der Walt has made various contributions to the documentation of anti-imperialist politics in anarchist history. Here is a quote from the 2005 article “Towards a History of Anarchist Anti-Imperialism”:
“Anarchists cannot be ‘neutral’ in any fight against imperialism. Whether it is the struggle against the third world debt, the struggle against the Israeli occupation of Palestine, or opposition to US military attacks on the Middle East, we are not neutral, we can never be neutral. We are against imperialism. But we are not nationalists. We recognise that imperialism is itself rooted in capitalism, and we recognise that simply replacing foreign elites with local elites will not solve the problem in a way that is fundamentally beneficial for the working class and peasantry. … Imperialism cannot be destroyed by the formation of new nation-states. Even independent nation-states are part of the international state system, and the international capitalist system, a system in which the power of imperialist states continues to set the rules of the game. … We need to abolish imperialism, so creating conditions for the self-government of all people around the world. But this requires the destruction of capitalism and the state system. … It is only the working class and peasantry who can destroy imperialism and capitalism, replacing domination by both local and foreign elites with self-management and social and economic equality.”
In a more recent piece, Antti Rautiainen, an anarchist based in Finland, wrote the following in connection with the war in the Ukraine:
“The weakness of anarchism after the second world war is not due to ‘mistakes’ made in Russia or Spain, but one of the factors might be the anarchist failure to intervene in support of anti-colonial movements. The Soviet Union did what anarchists failed to do, in its own brutal way which caused lots of unnecessary (but also necessary) destruction in the global south. Any contribution by anarchists against liberation movements push the anarchist movement backwards in territories that have suffered from imperialism and colonialism. Opposing imperialism and colonialism is true internationalism.” (Kapinatyöläinen, no. 1/2022)
Autonomism
Wildcat is the German journal that keeps the legacy of operaism, based on independent workers’ struggles, alive. A 2021 text on the situation China contains the following comment: “To find answers, the international left must stop looking at things through anti-imperialist and culturalist lenses.” This is characteristic. In autonomist circles, anti-imperialism is as poorly regarded today as in anarchist circles. This has not always been the case. Wildcat, the entire operaist current in Germany, and, in fact, much of the German autonomist movement were heavily influenced by the journal Autonomie, published from 1975 to 1985. Autonomie was very non-Leninist but stood in no opposition to anti-imperialism at all. Issue no. 10, published in 1982, was titled “anti-imperialismus in den 80er Jahren” and focused on “social-revolutionary struggles to topple the imperialist world system [without] diffuse Marxist-Leninist convictions”. Materialien für einen neuen anti-imperialismus, one of Autonomie’s successor publications, continued to argue for “anti-imperialism with a social-revolutionary agenda”.
In 1987, autonomist activists in Germany edited a reader titled Materialien gegen imperialistische Flüchtlingspolitik. The editorial ends as follows: “You can’t work with refugees part-time in forms of a ‘campaign’. This work has to be the expression of and the departure point for social revolution against imperialism and its programs as a whole.” The editors saw “the international movement of refugees as part of the international class struggle”.
At the time, autonomist anti-imperialism was far from an oxymoron. In Canada, the publication Arm the Spirit referred to itself as an “autonomist anti-imperialist journal” throughout the 1990s.
Black Liberation
In Black liberation movements, anti-imperialist rhetoric has always played a major role. While some organizations espousing anti-imperialist rhetoric in the 1970s, such as the African Liberation Support Committee or the Black Workers Congress, fall into the Marxist-Leninist camp, other Black revolutionaries of the era didn’t. Malcolm X called imperialism “the slave system of the West”, and Frantz Fanon (influenced by Marxist thought but a groundbreaking revolutionary thinker in his own right) stated in Wretched of the Earth: “Imperialism, which today is waging war against a genuine struggle for human liberation, sows seeds of decay here and there that must be mercilessly rooted out from our land and from our minds.”
It has been suggested that in Black liberation circles the term “imperialism” has mainly served as a synonym for “colonialism” or even “White supremacy”. This is not only troubling in assuming that Black liberation theorists lack the skills to differentiate between analytical terms, it is also clearly false. If any proof was needed, it comes from the book Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, authored in 1965 by Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president and by no means a Leninist.
The focus on anti-imperialism remains strong in Black liberation movements to this day. In a 2017 article titled “Mask Off: The Monopoly on Violence and Re-Invigorating an Anti-Imperialist Vision for Black Liberation”, Devyn Springer writes:
“As Black people, our liberation is definitively linked to those of the Global south, and an anti-imperialist politic is not simply an abstract ‘theory’ but a politic grounded in exploiting and strengthening that struggle between us and the global south. Anti-imperialism is not aloof theory, but the lifeblood of people’s realities internationally, and we have to begin to see it as such to form a continuum of an effective Black radical tradition.”
With connections to the Walter Rodney Foundation and Hood Communist, Springer might be suspected by some to be a Leninist (doubtful), but Leninism clearly isn’t at the heart of the Black Alliance for Peace, which, alongside principles such as “intersectionality”, includes “anti-imperialism” under its “Principles of Unity”. They write: “BAP takes a resolute anti-colonial, anti-imperialist position that links the international role of the U.S. empire to the domestic war against poor people and working-class Black people in the United States.”
Horace Campbell concludes a 2015 Monthly Review article on “Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism in Africa” with the words:
“African anti-imperialism … has a pivotal role to play in determining the framework of history in the twenty-first century – and the possibility of a new world revolution.”
Whoever discards “anti-imperialism” as an outdated, useless, or even reactionary concept, dismisses significant aspects of Black liberation thought.
Outro
Why is any of this important? Am I just indulging in a pointless leftist battle over words? Does anybody really care whether the term “anti-imperialism” is part of our agenda or not? Should we not just disregard the entire discussion and move on?
I don’t think it’s that easy. The discussion impacts international networking and the collaboration of anticapitalist militants across nation-state borders, a crucial endeavor if revolutionary politics shall remain a true alternative rather than merely an intellectual exercise. We need broad, non-sectarian, yet decidedly leftist anti-imperialist politics.
In recent years, there have been changes. Even in the heartland of the anti-anti-imperialist movement, in Germany, anti-imperialism has made a bit of a comeback. Partly, this is due to a new generation of leftist migrant youth, who are not forced to grapple with their ancestors’ involvement in the Third Reich. Partly, this is due to a new generation of leftist German youth growing tired of the anti-German hegemony. The Kurdish struggle in particular has played a big role in reviving internationalist politics with an anti-imperialist bend.
On an overcast Saturday in the small North Texas suburb of Princeton, a tiny church-turned-community center became one of the latest fronts in the far right’s ongoing culture crusade against drag shows and the broader LGBTQ community. Masked members of the left-wing community defense group Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, clad in black and toting handguns and radios, had already staked out positions…
Midterm wins bought organizing time for pro-democracy forces, but MAGA authoritarianism still menaces US politics. In “Pro-democracy Organizing Against Autocracy in the United States,” scholar/activists Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks map the threat and steps that could help defeat it. Convergence interviewed the two and will be publishing reflections and responses to the report. Bill Fletcher Jr.
In this episode of “Movement Memos,” host Kelly Hayes and Shane Burley, editor of No Pasarán! Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis, discuss the state of the far right, anti-fascism and how we can build power and sustain empathy in these times. Music by Son Monarcas and David Celeste Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.
OUR DEMANDS
A People-Powered Solution
Community Movement Builders agree with the people’s demand not only to de-fund and eventually abolish the police force, but also call for the demilitarization and decentralization of all policing institutions in the United States. As the rebellion raged, state and city governments attempted to pacify protesters by firing so-called “bad apples,” insisting on more training, changing the names of programs and task forces, taking down confederate monuments, appointing commissions to study issues and moving money around. Community Movement Builders maintain that radical change will only take place when Black communities control their own institutions to resolve their own conflicts and keep themselves safe.
Community Movement Builders call for People’s Assemblies (PA) and People’s Community Patrols (PCP) in order to envision and establish a restorative and transformative justice system that views Black people as humans. We understand the ongoing rebellion as the people’s expression of their democratic will. For over 50 years, Black radicals among others have exposed the ways in which the voting/electoral system in the U.S. is manipulated to favor candidates who safeguard racial capitalism and endless war. The PAs and PCPs signal the people’s preparedness to make their own decisions on how to govern and protect their own lives.
To do so, Community Movement Builders propose that the total funding allocated to the Police Department and corresponding programs and task forces be diverted to organize, carry out, and implement the results of the PAs and create PCPs. The PAs would be the first steps towards local communities managing their own municipal budgets. These efforts must be connected to a larger plan for decolonization and redistribution of resources and capital.
In the meantime, Community Movement Builders demand the following reforms:
1.
Only non-lethal arms can be used for purposes of self-defense. Police use of potentially lethal weapons can only be exercised under specific instances that endanger the general public (e.g. mass shootings, hostage situations, etc.).
2.
All military and police troops will immediately withdraw from the streets to allow protestors to occupy public space.
3.
The cash-bail system will immediately end and all current inmates being held for inability to pay money bail will be immediately released from custody.
4.
All current inmates who are aged 60 and older; who require quarantine because of positive coronavirus test result; or who have existing health conditions that make them more susceptible to the coronavirus, including: chronic lung disease, asthma, diabetes, heart condition, liver disease, obesity, pregnancy and other conditions identified by health professionals in ongoing research will be immediately released from custody.
5.
All youth detention centers and residential facilities should be reformed to support a pathway for youth reentry into larger society as soon as possible, with needed resources to provide, housing, clothes, food and access to education. Resources should be reallocated to implement programs focused on social-emotional learning, the hiring of more in-house counselors and therapists to work with our youth on a daily basis while serving their sentences or awaiting trial.
6.
All remaining political prisoners on U.S. territories will be immediately released from custody. This includes but is not limited to organizers from the Black Panther Party, The Republic of New Africa, The Black Liberation Army, The Weather Underground, the American Indian Movement and MOVE. These heros/sheros of our struggle(s) have served enough time in a criminal injustice system meant to destroy movements fighting for basic human rights and self-determination.
7.
All detainees in immigration detention centers will be immediately released from custody.
8.
Police Departments will immediately decertify, fire or suspend without pay any officers involved in the use of deadly force against unarmed civilians pending investigation and ensuing trial.
9.
Police Departments will fire officers who have multiple complaints of excessive force and their partners who silently witnessed such acts and/or who assisted them in falsifying evidence.
10.
Police Departments will fire officers whose actions out of uniform are violent, including social media hate speech, sexual assault, and domestic violence.
11.
All police records will be made available to the public.
12.
Police officers without complaints of excessive force on the job at home will remain until the Departments are phased out and will be subjected to routine psychological and risk assessment evaluations (including racial/ethnic bias) to determine fitness to transition to the new system.
13.
Independent Civilian Review Board(s) with subpoena power will be established. No law enforcement personnel can serve on these Boards. No police departments, appointed police comissioners or elected officials will have the power to overturn disiplinary decisions. Taking into account gentrification, metrics such as zip codes will be used to ensure the eligibility and participation of comunity residents on these Boards.
14.
District Attorney offices in conjunction with the Independent Civilian Review Board(s) will review all civilian fatalities at the hands of the police for the period of 2000-2018. Reviewers will identify cases of excessive and unlawful uses of force for investigation and trial.
15.
An Independent prosecutor will be identified to prosecute all cases of misconduct of police officers.
16.
Police Departments will terminate all contracts with military and mercenary consultants. In particular, any and all contracts with the Israeli Defense Force or any subsidiary that trains police in the U.S. to use the same deadly tactics used against Palestinians fighting for their human rights.
17.
Police Departments will cease to purchase any additional tanks and armored weapons and will immediately dispose of any and all such equipment in their possession.
18.
Police presence will be removed from all public schools.
19.
Recruiters for any armed forces will be permanently removed from all public schools.
20.
Police presence will be removed from all social service/welfare agencies, including public housing.
21.
Police officers will no longer serve as first responders to mental health, substance abuse, and domestic violence calls. Instead, a team of mental health, substance abuse and domestic violence counseling, conflict resolution, and social work professionals will intervene.
22.
Minor offenses like turnstile jumping, vending without a permit, a broken tail light, failure to signal, expired tags, and other non-violent offenses that currently warrant booking, impounding a vehicle, or pretrail incarceration will no longer be penalized/criminalized.
23.
Marijuana will be decriminalized and all sentences of those arrested for non-violent drug offenses will be retroactively vacated.
24.
Police Departments shall no longer seize and auction off property of arrestees who have not been convicted of any crime.
Left political strategies have traditionally divided between social democratic parliamentarism and the Leninist idea of “smashing the state.” Nicos Poulantzas argued that neither strategy was adequate and developed his own vision of “revolutionary reformism.”
The Petrograd Soviet in 1917. (Wikimedia Commons)
The publication of Nicos Poulantzas’s Political Power and Social Classes (1968) and Ralph Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society (1969) initiated a return to the question of the state in political science and sociology after a long hiatus during which mainstream social scientists had discarded the concept. Since that time, there has been an ongoing preoccupation with theories of the capitalist state among scholars. Meanwhile, the return of democratic socialism to national political agendas in Europe and North America has led to renewed debates about political tactics.
Tactics comprise immediate actions, or methods of conduct, that are carefully planned for the purpose of reaching a clearly defined goal. However, most contemporary Marxists often fail to distinguish between strategy (long-term goals) and tactics (immediate actions). What should be the long-term goal of left political tactics, and does a theory of the capitalist state provide any answer to that question beyond abstract calls for a transition to socialism?
Road Signs
When Poulantzas published his last book, State, Power, Socialism, in 1978, he did so partly because he was intrigued by the question of democratic socialism in the context of the rise of Eurocommunism in Italy, Spain, and France. This development raised the question of the role of the state in the transition to socialism. The reemergence of democratic socialism thus required political theorists and political activists to rethink the question of socialist strategy.
The return of democratic socialism to national political agendas in Europe and North America has led to renewed debates about political tactics.
Poulantzas argued that a theory of the capitalist state could provide important insights into the role of the state during the transition to socialism. However, he observed that one could not deduce political strategy from such a theory, which could
never be anything other than applied theoretical-strategic notions, serving, to be sure, as guides to action, but at the very most in the manner of road signs. A “model” of the State of transition to socialism cannot be drawn up: not as a universal model capable of being concretized in given cases, nor even as an infallible, theoretically guaranteed recipe for one or several countries.
Poulantzas emphasized that there was “always a structural distance between theory and practice, between theory and the real.” This was a gap that could only be bridged by strategic decisions made by those engaged in the real class struggle.
With that said, what guides to action and road signs do Poulantzas’s theory of the capitalist state suggest for democratic socialism and socialist strategy today?
Winning the Battle
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels defined the long-term strategic goal of socialist tactics in The Communist Manifesto (1848) as the “formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.” Marx and Engels argued that “the first step in the revolution by the working class” was “to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.”
Marx and Engels argued that ‘the first step in the revolution by the working class’ was ‘to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class.’
Every important Marxist political theorist of the twentieth century embraced this strategic principle. Eduard Bernstein argued that “democracy is a condition of socialism” and his contemporary Karl Kautsky claimed that “socialism without democracy is unthinkable.” Similarly, in her critique of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg declared that “without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of the press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution.”
Even Lenin himself had earlier endorsed a tactical resolution adopted by the Third Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, which proclaimed that
the direct interests of the proletariat and the interests of its struggle for the final aims of socialism require the fullest possible measure of political liberty and, consequently, the replacement of the autocratic form of government by a democratic republic.
Unfortunately, a century later, we are far from having won the battle for democracy. If anything, we are now faced with the prospect of its demise throughout the world, including the Western liberal democracies.
At a time when Nicos Poulantzas was also concerned about the rise of authoritarian statism, he pointed out that it was not enough to assert that we want democratic socialism. It was necessary, he insisted, to clearly formulate strategic demands about what a democratic socialist form of societal self-governance would entail as an institutional form, i.e., a transitional democratic socialist state.
Two Strategies
In some of his earliest writings as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx embraced “bourgeois democracy” as a political advance for the working class. He considered it an essential political shell for the further development of the proletariat as a class.
The most basic foundation for “democracy” was universal suffrage. However, in writings such as The Communist Manifesto, the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany (1849), and the Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), Marx advocated an expansive program of social and economic democracy that rested upon a heavily graduated income tax (fiscal policy), a strong central bank (monetary policy), and public investment in industry, transportation, communications, and agriculture (industrial and employment policy).
At the same time, he called for a variety of programs and policies. These included free public education for all, free legal services, the abolition of consumption taxes, a strong social safety net (unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, housing, health care, etc.), and the complete separation of church and state.
Marx concluded that the Paris Commune ‘was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class.’
In 1872, Marx speculated that in mature liberal democracies, such as the United States, Britain, and Holland, it might be possible for workers to “achieve their aims by peaceful means.” For more than a century, this complex of policies and electoral tactics has largely defined the political program we call social democracy.
However, Marx and Engels changed their thinking about the conquest of political power as a result of the Paris Commune in 1871. Marx concluded that the Commune “was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.” What was different about the Parisian experiment, according to Engels, was that the working class had created a non-state political form of self-governance, while in 1848 it had been “a power in the [capitalist] state” as a result of newly granted universal male suffrage.
What Marx saw in the Commune, as compared to 1848, was a new political form that “breaks the modern state power.” He stressed the need for the proletariat to “transform the traditional working machinery” of the state and “destroy it as an instrument of class rule”:
The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for their own purpose. The political instrument of their enslavement cannot serve as the political instrument of their emancipation.
Thus, since the late nineteenth century, the Marxist debate on socialist strategy has largely been a contest between the proponents of parliamentary socialism, articulated in works like Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism (1899), and revolutionaries who insisted on the need to smash the state, as exemplified by Lenin’s pamphlet State and Revolution (1917).
Democratic Roads to Socialism
There is no question that in most of his writings, Poulantzas advocated a strategy in line with the second school of thought. In 1975, for instance, he made the following argument:
The transition to socialism cannot take place by a simple shift in state power (the working class and its allies replacing the bourgeoisie); this transition requires the state apparatuses to be smashed, i.e., it is not just a question of replacing the heads of these apparatuses, but of a radical transformation in their actual organizational structure.
However, in State, Power, Socialism (1978), Poulantzas explicitly abandoned his smash-the-state position:
There is no longer a place for what has traditionally been called smashing or destroying that [state] apparatus . . . the term smashing, which Marx too used for indicative purposes, came in the end to designate a very precise historical phenomenon: namely, the eradication of any kind of representative democracy or “formal” liberties in favour purely of direct, rank-and-file democracy and so-called real liberties . . . if we understand the democratic road to socialism and democratic socialism itself to involve, among other things, political (party) and ideological pluralism, and extension and deepening of all political freedoms including for opponents, then talk of smashing or destroying the state apparatus can be no more than a mere verbal trick.
At the same time, Poulantzas still included the following warning:
It would be an error fraught with serious political consequences to conclude from the presence of the popular classes in the State that they can ever lastingly hold power without a radical transformation of the State . . . the action of the popular masses within the State is a necessary condition of its transformation, but is not itself a sufficient condition.
In his final book, Poulantzas thus defined a strategy of democratic socialism that would incorporate the electoral politics of parliamentary socialism while simultaneously going beyond it to embrace forms of direct democracy. Instead of smashing the state, Poulantzas now envisioned what he called a “radical transformation of the State.”
In his final work, State, Power, Socialism (1978), Poulantzas explicitly abandoned his smash-the-state position.
That transformation would embrace innovations such as workers’ ownership and self-management, as well as limited forms of “council communism” based on organs of mass democracy (the original meaning of “soviet” in the Russian context). However, Poulantzas believed that these innovations would serve to strengthen, broaden, and deepen the democratic component of a modern democratic republic, instead of challenging and displacing it through a strategy of “dual power,” as occurred during the Russian Revolution.
Discussing the Russian case, Poulantzas argued that by abolishing the newly elected Constituent Assembly at the beginning of 1918, the Bolsheviks had left the state apparatus unsupervised and unregulated in the name of an “all power to the soviets” strategy. This set the stage for a socialist form of authoritarian statism, namely Stalinism, as the decentralized soviets lacked either the political capacity or the technical expertise to direct the day-to-day-activity of a complex modern society on a national scale. He concluded that during a transition to socialism, the institutions of representative democracy should be viewed “not as unfortunate relics to be tolerated for as long as necessary, but as an essential condition of democratic socialism.”
Democratic Socialism
Poulantzas concluded that democratic socialism was a two-pronged strategy consisting of policy and politics. On the one hand, it entailed a set of policies and programs designed to promote a more egalitarian society based on the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This strategy might begin with basic social democratic policies, but it required a radical transformation of what Poulantzas calls the “economic apparatus” — central banks, tax systems, employment and wage policies, trade policies, social insurance — and ultimately would have to result in public and/or workers’ ownership of the means of production.
However, Poulantzas argued that the path toward reaching these goals also necessitated a political strategy — a radical transformation of the State — that would combine a transformed form of representative democracy with direct rank-and-file democracy:
The essential problem of the democratic road to socialism, of democratic socialism, must be posed in a different way: how is it possible radically to transform the State in such a manner that the extension and deepening of political freedoms and the institutions of representative democracy (which were also a conquest of the popular masses) are combined with the unfurling of forms of direct democracy and the mushrooming of self-management bodies?
For Poulantzas, this meant that the democratic road to socialism would be a long process that involved “the spreading, development, reinforcement, coordination and direction of those diffuse centers of resistance which the masses always possess within the state networks, in such a way that they become the real centres of power on the strategic terrain of the State.”
In place of the demand for “all power to the soviets,” Poulantzas argued that a left-wing government should immediately begin to integrate popular forms of direct democracy and workers’ self-management into the state. Rather than a situation of dual power with a contest between direct democracy and representative democracy, a single workers’ state should bring the two forms of democracy together.
Consequently, Poulantzas called for a struggle “to modify the relationship of forces with the State, as opposed to a frontal, dual power type of strategy,” which would mean “a sweeping transformation of the state apparatus.” He reiterated his earlier admonition against “building ‘models’ of any kind whatsoever,” emphasizing once again that a theory of the capitalist state could be at best “a set of signposts” for strategic decision-making, but not a road map.
Democratic socialism is not just an economic program or a set of social policies. It is a strategy of constitutional reform.
These observations from Poulantzas left several questions open. What exactly would it mean to combine a transformed democratic republic with workers’ ownership, self-management, and other forms of direct democracy? However, these observations nonetheless identified a political strategy of constitutional reform which could draw on the insights of state theory, while directing political tactics toward long-term goals beyond mere disruption and protest.
Democratic socialism is not just an economic program or a set of social policies. It is a strategy of constitutional reform aimed at realigning the structural relationship of the state to the working classes. There can be no socialism without a reinvigorated and more expansive democracy.
Left political strategies have traditionally divided between social democratic parliamentarism and the Leninist idea of “smashing the state.” Nicos Poulantzas argued that neither strategy was adequate and developed his own vision of “revolutionary reformism.”
The Petrograd Soviet in 1917. (Wikimedia Commons)
The publication of Nicos Poulantzas’s Political Power and Social Classes (1968) and Ralph Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society (1969) initiated a return to the question of the state in political science and sociology after a long hiatus during which mainstream social scientists had discarded the concept. Since that time, there has been an ongoing preoccupation with theories of the capitalist state among scholars. Meanwhile, the return of democratic socialism to national political agendas in Europe and North America has led to renewed debates about political tactics.
Tactics comprise immediate actions, or methods of conduct, that are carefully planned for the purpose of reaching a clearly defined goal. However, most contemporary Marxists often fail to distinguish between strategy (long-term goals) and tactics (immediate actions). What should be the long-term goal of left political tactics, and does a theory of the capitalist state provide any answer to that question beyond abstract calls for a transition to socialism?
Road Signs
When Poulantzas published his last book, State, Power, Socialism, in 1978, he did so partly because he was intrigued by the question of democratic socialism in the context of the rise of Eurocommunism in Italy, Spain, and France. This development raised the question of the role of the state in the transition to socialism. The reemergence of democratic socialism thus required political theorists and political activists to rethink the question of socialist strategy.
The return of democratic socialism to national political agendas in Europe and North America has led to renewed debates about political tactics.
Poulantzas argued that a theory of the capitalist state could provide important insights into the role of the state during the transition to socialism. However, he observed that one could not deduce political strategy from such a theory, which could
never be anything other than applied theoretical-strategic notions, serving, to be sure, as guides to action, but at the very most in the manner of road signs. A “model” of the State of transition to socialism cannot be drawn up: not as a universal model capable of being concretized in given cases, nor even as an infallible, theoretically guaranteed recipe for one or several countries.
Poulantzas emphasized that there was “always a structural distance between theory and practice, between theory and the real.” This was a gap that could only be bridged by strategic decisions made by those engaged in the real class struggle.
With that said, what guides to action and road signs do Poulantzas’s theory of the capitalist state suggest for democratic socialism and socialist strategy today?
Winning the Battle
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels defined the long-term strategic goal of socialist tactics in The Communist Manifesto (1848) as the “formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.” Marx and Engels argued that “the first step in the revolution by the working class” was “to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.”
Marx and Engels argued that ‘the first step in the revolution by the working class’ was ‘to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class.’
Every important Marxist political theorist of the twentieth century embraced this strategic principle. Eduard Bernstein argued that “democracy is a condition of socialism” and his contemporary Karl Kautsky claimed that “socialism without democracy is unthinkable.” Similarly, in her critique of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg declared that “without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of the press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution.”
Even Lenin himself had earlier endorsed a tactical resolution adopted by the Third Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, which proclaimed that
the direct interests of the proletariat and the interests of its struggle for the final aims of socialism require the fullest possible measure of political liberty and, consequently, the replacement of the autocratic form of government by a democratic republic.
Unfortunately, a century later, we are far from having won the battle for democracy. If anything, we are now faced with the prospect of its demise throughout the world, including the Western liberal democracies.
At a time when Nicos Poulantzas was also concerned about the rise of authoritarian statism, he pointed out that it was not enough to assert that we want democratic socialism. It was necessary, he insisted, to clearly formulate strategic demands about what a democratic socialist form of societal self-governance would entail as an institutional form, i.e., a transitional democratic socialist state.
Two Strategies
In some of his earliest writings as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx embraced “bourgeois democracy” as a political advance for the working class. He considered it an essential political shell for the further development of the proletariat as a class.
The most basic foundation for “democracy” was universal suffrage. However, in writings such as The Communist Manifesto, the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany (1849), and the Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), Marx advocated an expansive program of social and economic democracy that rested upon a heavily graduated income tax (fiscal policy), a strong central bank (monetary policy), and public investment in industry, transportation, communications, and agriculture (industrial and employment policy).
At the same time, he called for a variety of programs and policies. These included free public education for all, free legal services, the abolition of consumption taxes, a strong social safety net (unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, housing, health care, etc.), and the complete separation of church and state.
Marx concluded that the Paris Commune ‘was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class.’
In 1872, Marx speculated that in mature liberal democracies, such as the United States, Britain, and Holland, it might be possible for workers to “achieve their aims by peaceful means.” For more than a century, this complex of policies and electoral tactics has largely defined the political program we call social democracy.
However, Marx and Engels changed their thinking about the conquest of political power as a result of the Paris Commune in 1871. Marx concluded that the Commune “was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.” What was different about the Parisian experiment, according to Engels, was that the working class had created a non-state political form of self-governance, while in 1848 it had been “a power in the [capitalist] state” as a result of newly granted universal male suffrage.
What Marx saw in the Commune, as compared to 1848, was a new political form that “breaks the modern state power.” He stressed the need for the proletariat to “transform the traditional working machinery” of the state and “destroy it as an instrument of class rule”:
The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for their own purpose. The political instrument of their enslavement cannot serve as the political instrument of their emancipation.
Thus, since the late nineteenth century, the Marxist debate on socialist strategy has largely been a contest between the proponents of parliamentary socialism, articulated in works like Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism (1899), and revolutionaries who insisted on the need to smash the state, as exemplified by Lenin’s pamphlet State and Revolution (1917).
Democratic Roads to Socialism
There is no question that in most of his writings, Poulantzas advocated a strategy in line with the second school of thought. In 1975, for instance, he made the following argument:
The transition to socialism cannot take place by a simple shift in state power (the working class and its allies replacing the bourgeoisie); this transition requires the state apparatuses to be smashed, i.e., it is not just a question of replacing the heads of these apparatuses, but of a radical transformation in their actual organizational structure.
However, in State, Power, Socialism (1978), Poulantzas explicitly abandoned his smash-the-state position:
There is no longer a place for what has traditionally been called smashing or destroying that [state] apparatus . . . the term smashing, which Marx too used for indicative purposes, came in the end to designate a very precise historical phenomenon: namely, the eradication of any kind of representative democracy or “formal” liberties in favour purely of direct, rank-and-file democracy and so-called real liberties . . . if we understand the democratic road to socialism and democratic socialism itself to involve, among other things, political (party) and ideological pluralism, and extension and deepening of all political freedoms including for opponents, then talk of smashing or destroying the state apparatus can be no more than a mere verbal trick.
At the same time, Poulantzas still included the following warning:
It would be an error fraught with serious political consequences to conclude from the presence of the popular classes in the State that they can ever lastingly hold power without a radical transformation of the State . . . the action of the popular masses within the State is a necessary condition of its transformation, but is not itself a sufficient condition.
In his final book, Poulantzas thus defined a strategy of democratic socialism that would incorporate the electoral politics of parliamentary socialism while simultaneously going beyond it to embrace forms of direct democracy. Instead of smashing the state, Poulantzas now envisioned what he called a “radical transformation of the State.”
In his final work, State, Power, Socialism (1978), Poulantzas explicitly abandoned his smash-the-state position.
That transformation would embrace innovations such as workers’ ownership and self-management, as well as limited forms of “council communism” based on organs of mass democracy (the original meaning of “soviet” in the Russian context). However, Poulantzas believed that these innovations would serve to strengthen, broaden, and deepen the democratic component of a modern democratic republic, instead of challenging and displacing it through a strategy of “dual power,” as occurred during the Russian Revolution.
Discussing the Russian case, Poulantzas argued that by abolishing the newly elected Constituent Assembly at the beginning of 1918, the Bolsheviks had left the state apparatus unsupervised and unregulated in the name of an “all power to the soviets” strategy. This set the stage for a socialist form of authoritarian statism, namely Stalinism, as the decentralized soviets lacked either the political capacity or the technical expertise to direct the day-to-day-activity of a complex modern society on a national scale. He concluded that during a transition to socialism, the institutions of representative democracy should be viewed “not as unfortunate relics to be tolerated for as long as necessary, but as an essential condition of democratic socialism.”
Democratic Socialism
Poulantzas concluded that democratic socialism was a two-pronged strategy consisting of policy and politics. On the one hand, it entailed a set of policies and programs designed to promote a more egalitarian society based on the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This strategy might begin with basic social democratic policies, but it required a radical transformation of what Poulantzas calls the “economic apparatus” — central banks, tax systems, employment and wage policies, trade policies, social insurance — and ultimately would have to result in public and/or workers’ ownership of the means of production.
However, Poulantzas argued that the path toward reaching these goals also necessitated a political strategy — a radical transformation of the State — that would combine a transformed form of representative democracy with direct rank-and-file democracy:
The essential problem of the democratic road to socialism, of democratic socialism, must be posed in a different way: how is it possible radically to transform the State in such a manner that the extension and deepening of political freedoms and the institutions of representative democracy (which were also a conquest of the popular masses) are combined with the unfurling of forms of direct democracy and the mushrooming of self-management bodies?
For Poulantzas, this meant that the democratic road to socialism would be a long process that involved “the spreading, development, reinforcement, coordination and direction of those diffuse centers of resistance which the masses always possess within the state networks, in such a way that they become the real centres of power on the strategic terrain of the State.”
In place of the demand for “all power to the soviets,” Poulantzas argued that a left-wing government should immediately begin to integrate popular forms of direct democracy and workers’ self-management into the state. Rather than a situation of dual power with a contest between direct democracy and representative democracy, a single workers’ state should bring the two forms of democracy together.
Consequently, Poulantzas called for a struggle “to modify the relationship of forces with the State, as opposed to a frontal, dual power type of strategy,” which would mean “a sweeping transformation of the state apparatus.” He reiterated his earlier admonition against “building ‘models’ of any kind whatsoever,” emphasizing once again that a theory of the capitalist state could be at best “a set of signposts” for strategic decision-making, but not a road map.
Democratic socialism is not just an economic program or a set of social policies. It is a strategy of constitutional reform.
These observations from Poulantzas left several questions open. What exactly would it mean to combine a transformed democratic republic with workers’ ownership, self-management, and other forms of direct democracy? However, these observations nonetheless identified a political strategy of constitutional reform which could draw on the insights of state theory, while directing political tactics toward long-term goals beyond mere disruption and protest.
Democratic socialism is not just an economic program or a set of social policies. It is a strategy of constitutional reform aimed at realigning the structural relationship of the state to the working classes. There can be no socialism without a reinvigorated and more expansive democracy.