All of this makes critical engagement with the new reformism most valuable.7For a few helpful critical pieces see Charlie Post, “The ‘Best’ of Kautsky isn’t Good Enough,” Jacobin, March 9, 2019; Mike Taber, “Kautsky, Lenin and the Transition to Socialism: A Reply to Eric Blanc,” available at https://johnriddell.com/2019/04/06/kautsky-lenin-and-the-transition-to-socialism-by-mike-taber/; Gil Schaeffer, “The Curious Case of the ‘Democratic Road to Socialism’ That Wasn’t There,” New Politics, April 24, 2020. Yet, such engagement encounters real limits. Reborn Kautskyism endures despite exposure of its theoretical confusions and historical evasions. And this is because the left alternative appears to lack credibility. It is here that Marxists need considerable honesty and self-reflection. Otherwise, the defense of revolution risks becoming defensive.
This is why we need to develop a historical materialist account of our predicament. We need to rigorously analyze the social-historical processes that have marginalized revolutionary movements the better to critically re-examine the very meaning of socialist revolution today. But before that, we need to clarify key terms of discussion.
The Politics of Dual Power
What then of socialist revolution?
In order to address this question, we first need some elementary clarity over the terms of debate. Crucially, this requires addressing the suggestion that revolutionary politics are a species of insurrectionism.8A claim made by Blanc, “Why Kautsky Was Right.”
This suggestion is not terribly new. It was promoted by Ralph Miliband in the 1970s. Rather than grouping socialists into reformist and revolutionary camps, Miliband proposed to identify them as belonging either to the “constitutionalist” camp or the “insurrectionary” one. Although acknowledging that this categorization was not without “problems,” Miliband proceeded to claim that those in the latter camp practiced something called “insurrectionary politics.”9Ralph Miliband, Marxism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 155, 166, 169. But it must be said that his description of these politics betrayed precious little understanding of the outlook of most revolutionary socialists.
While taking issue with the idea of insurrection, Miliband largely ignored the three crucial and interrelated claims that are fundamental to the revolutionary approach. First is the insistence that the alienating and bureaucratic forms of the capitalist state are not amenable to deployment for socialist ends.10See David McNally, “Race, Class, the Left, and the US Elections, Studies in Political Economy, forthcoming 2021. Related to this is the idea, secondly, that socialist transformation of society will require the cultivation of new institutions of grassroots democratic popular power. Rooted in workplaces and communities, these councils or assemblies should embody a radically more direct and participatory form of democratic decision-making from below—one which makes possible the radical democratization and disalienation of political power. Finally, socialists in the revolutionary tradition argue that, at least since the Paris Commune of 1871, insurgent workers’ movements have shown a historical propensity to create just such institutions of popular power.
As a result, the revolutionary perspective is most accurately described as a dual power strategy because it promotes new centers of popular power outside of (an in opposition to) the apparatuses of the old state. In this scenario, the building of workers’ power creates new institutions of democratic self-rule that contest the powers of the old. Hence: dual power, a strategy of building new centers of popular power alongside of—and dedicated to supplanting—the old ones.
True, revolutionaries expect that direct conflicts are likely to arise between these competing centers of power—especially between the insurgent mass movement and the institutions of repression such as the army, the police, and the prison complex. “Insurrection” occurs if and when the revolutionary movement is required to resolve these conflicts in its favor by force. In October 1917, for instance, the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Saint Petersburg Soviet of Workers Deputies undertook an uprising in order to block government efforts to disarm and disband the soviet.11See the detailed discussion in China Mieville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution (London: Verso Books, 2017), 270-90. See also Alexander Rabinovitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976), Ch. 13-15. But insurrection of this sort—the use of force to block the advance of counter-revolution—is a conjunctural and tactical question, having to do with concrete struggles and balance of forces. It follows from the strategic perspective of building institutions of popular power that encroach upon the authority of the old state.
Such an approach certainly has nothing to do with a fetish of violence. This was made clear a century ago by the Hungarian Marxist, Georg Lukács. Acknowledging the role of revolutionary violence in history, Lukács argued that “violence is no autonomous principle and never can be.” For revolutionaries, he insisted, “violence is nothing but the will of the proletariat which has become conscious and is bent on abolishing the enslaving hold of reified relations over man and the hold of economics over society.” As if to demarcate this position from any attachment to the idea of revolution as a singular magical act, Lukács adds, “This abolition, this leap is a process.”12Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 251-52. In short, for revolutionary socialists, the concerted use of force is about “the will of the proletariat,” and it involves a process through which members of that class curb the violence of capital (“the enslaving hold of reified relations”) over their lives. Institutionally, this entails building, expanding, and strengthening new centers of democratic popular power from below.
Miliband, Poulantzas, and the Problem of Dual Power
Arguably, the most important challenges to dual power strategies came from two theorists who were well aware of the failures of reformism, Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas. Each sought to articulate a “democratic” or non-revolutionary road to socialism. Yet, an honest accounting compelled each writer to take on board much more of the dual power perspective than is often recognized.