Every socialist has some answer to that question, otherwise they wouldn't be a socialist. But it's also true many on the left exist in day-to-day mode: being active and critical in any way they can, leaving the big questions till later.


I order you to think about the hard questions!

The problem with that approach is that the big questions can't be put off indefinitely. Sooner or later, your approach to the small stuff replaces the big questions. Once you lose direction, it's a quick slide into cynicism and apathy.

For those of us who think capitalism is both irredeemable, and capable of being transformed, the question remains: how do we transform it? That contains any number of smaller questions: what past lessons apply to the future? What helps challenge capitalism instead of strengthening it? At what point does our theory become a guide or a block to action?

I recently read two socialists trying to answer that question, and I thought it was worthwhile to bring them together. Daniel Bensaid gives a broad, historical sweep of revolutionary politics in The Return To Strategy. Richard Pithouse, in Thinking Resistance In Shanty Town, takes on Mike Davis' apocalpytic vision of slum dwelling. While they both approach the problem from different directions, they share a common theme: the dangers of over-generalizing historical lessons.

Socialists love history, because we find our roots there. In the face of capitalist media ignoring class struggle and erasing its memories, history shows people have always resisted exploitation. However, the temptation is to read history uncritically into the present: for example, if we can just form a mass revolutionary party like they did in 1917, then we will smash capitalism. In abstract, this is true. But do we form a party? Do we do it the same way the Bolsheviks did? Does capitalism look the same today as it did 80 years ago?


If you stay in that position too long you won't be able to move

Confronted with these questions, some socialists have gotten defensive. And understandably so. Under assault from the neoconservatives, who say capitalism is and always has been wonderful - or from the postmodernists, who say the working class has disappeared - many socialists have insisted on 'learning the lessons of the past'. Capitalism is still a system of profit extraction; the state still employs 'bodies of armed men', and so on.

But that can atrophy our thinking. At the very moment when we're surrounded by hostile forces, we can lose our ability to understand and connect with the real struggle going on around us. We become caricatures of revolutionaries, Toy Bolsheviks. We lose our tradition in the very act of trying to save it.

There has to be both flexibility and historical knowledge. Or, as Bensaid puts it:

Models are something to be copied; they are instructions for use. A hypothesis is a guide to action that starts from past experience but is open and can be modified in the light of new experience or unexpected circumstances. Our concern therefore is not to speculate but to see what we can take from past experience, the only material at our disposal. But we always have to recognise that it is necessarily poorer than the present and the future if revolutionaries are to avoid the risk of doing what the generals are said to do—always fight the last war.

Use the past - but be wary of relying on it exclusively. Bensaid goes on:

Our starting point lies in the great revolutionary experiences of the 20th century—the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the German Revolution, the popular fronts, the Spanish Civil War, the Vietnamese war of liberation, May 1968, Portugal, Chile. We have used them to distinguish between two major hypotheses, or scenarios: that of the insurrectional general strike and that of the extended popular war. They encapsulate two types of crisis, two forms of dual power, two ways of resolving the crisis.

There's a lot to study - and that's part of Bensaid's brilliance. He concretizes history. You want to talk revolution? Fine, this is what people have done so far. He goes on to list the weaknesses of popular war, which usually found themselves crushed by the far greater power of the capitalist state - their own or, if they were smart enough to succeed like in Nicaragua, a bigger imperialist state like the U.S.


History is also the history of socialism itself - Ted Grant of the Workers International League, 1942

Certain things are fixed in capitalism, and it's one of the things that sets Marxism above non-revolutionary leftism - knowing the difference between the inherent dynamics and the surface phenomena. One of those dynamics is that revolutionary crises always pose the question of state power:

The notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat also had a strategic significance, one often raised in the debates of the 1970s upon its abandonment by the majority of (Euro)communist parties. Marx clearly grasped that the new legal power, as an expression of a new social relationship, could not be born if the old one remained: between two social legitimacies, ‘between two equal rights, it is force that decides’. Revolution implies therefore a transition enforced by a state of emergency.

The historical field is narrowing a little, now; we need "force". But what kind? Minority violence fails - most obviously in the infantile disorders of the Red Brigades and the Weather Underground (why are the most ridiculous examples of the New Left lionized?) But this only points out the dangers of pacifism: the state is violent, and increasingly so. What might we aim towards?


The helmets must've trapped the heat - the Weather Underground

Bensaid relies on Trotsky's Transitional Program: form democratic demands that challenge capitalism's capacity to deliver and build activists' confidence. "The real problem is how the general will is formed", says Bensaid, and this looks different every time: constituent assemblies, soldiers' councils, etc. He draws two lessons:

1) There has to be a transition, a lead-up to revolution. Even in the last century's most revolutionary times, demanding 'revolution now' isolated a movement from the insurgent masses. "The question of participation arises in a situation of crisis or at least of a significant upsurge in social mobilisation, and not from a vacuum". Socialists have to be social activists, not just propagandists.

2) This isn't a stagist, 'wait for the revolution' approach. You have to fight for reforms with the goal of building revolutionary movements:

We are therefore against the idea of separating an (‘anti-neoliberal’) minimum programme and an (anti-capitalist) ‘maximum’ programme. We remain convinced that a consistent anti-neoliberalism leads to anti-capitalism and that the two are interlinked by the dynamic of struggle.

You have to build a model

Understanding the dynamic of struggle poses historical and empirical questions. Where are a country's social movements at, and how did they get there? "In the defensive situation the social movement finds itself in, having been thrown back for more than 20 years in Europe, no one will claim that revolution has an actuality in an immediate sense. On the other hand, it would be a risky and not a minor matter to eliminate it from the horizon of our epoch."

And here's the danger of being a revolutionary in non-revolutionary times. It's tempting to lose oneself in history - to remember the times when working people did rise up and take power in their own hands. But that vision, vital though it is, can obscure the serious defeats the working class has suffered in the past 20 years. And it can make the 'which way forward' question abstract unless we can look at what, in fact, people actually are doing.

Next: what's going on, on the ground.