Music makes the bourgeoisie and the rebel

Due to popular demand, here is Linton Kwesi Johnson's Independent Intavenshan. And, in a throwback to those days when everything was simple and clear - the 1980s - here's Red Shadow, the Economics Rock 'n Roll Band, doing a dreadfully earnest - but 'jazzy!' - number called Understanding Marx. Which actually doesn't understand Marx that well, but when they say "You can't snowmobile your way through a forest to inner peace", they're probably right.

They know what they know, but they don't know what they know

I just finished a paper on how to fight for social reforms in a revolutionary way. So now I've got some questions with no answers.



Marxists say capitalism can't be reformed out of existence. It has to be smashed. Liberals and Marxists both fight for changes to capitalism - higher wages, universal health care, etc. (Actually, liberals don't fight for anything, they vote and sign petitions. But let's pretend they do for the sake of the argument.) Liberals do it because they think reforms are all that's possible. It corresponds to their class position: they're well-paid workers or professionals comfortable in capitalist society. They have no reason to be socialist (other than moral commitment or to piss off their parents.) And it's true that reforms matter for their own sake. As Ernest Mandel says,

These combats were based on the conviction that a working class that was in a wretched state, incapable of fighting for its physical and moral integrity, would also be incapable of fighting for a breakthrough towards a classless society.

This is an important point, particularly these days when the whole 'working people are bought off and lazy' argument is so common. No one revolts when they're getting the shit kicked out of them. You need a degree of "physical and moral integrity" to organise strikes and demonstrations, if only to have a square meal and a place to sleep between picket shifts.

However, if a fight for reforms isn't combined with a fight for revolution, then reforms remain piecemeal changes to capitalist society. They may ameliorate its worst aspects, but those changes can only be temporary and partial. Socialists want workers to win reforms to build the capacity of the working class to fight back. We can organise independently and democratically, posing transitional demands that, when won, go beyond what the capitalist class is immediately ready to offer. Another good reason to read Trotsky.


Not the best time to explain them, though - Ecstacy of the Angels

All well and good. But it's still abstract. For example: I looked at the Participatory Budget (PB) of Porto Alegre, Brazil. Socialists in the municipal government made the city budget democratic. Popular citizen assemblies determined spending priorities. The result was far more money put into roads, sewers, healthcare and education. Upwards of 20,000 people a year now participate in the process. Other cities and even a state followed suit. The Workers Party that initiated it eventually lost power, 15 years later, due largely to President Lula's neoliberal policies. But the PB continues.

Is the PB a reform or a means to revolution? On the one hand, it organises workers democratically. It gives them a sense of their own power, particularly important in these neoliberal times when we're told that everything - jobs, investment, social programmes, the state of the environment - is beyond our control. It takes that control out of the hands of unaccountable city bureaucrats, and it provides the basis for further demands: for example, socialists have proposed a PB for Brazil's national budget. This is a classic transitional demand: something that workers feel is possible to do, but something the ruling class wouldn't allow without a fight.



On the other hand, it gives workers the illusion that capitalist institutions - like the city government - can be taken and used for socialism. Municipal budgets only disburse 16% of total tax revenue, so it's also a fig leaf for budget cuts: democratic control over the tiny amount that's available. It's also been taken up by the capitalists themselves: the World Bank loves the PB, which increases efficiency and reduces corruption. A transparent system is easier to control, when the World Bank needs to impose cutbacks.

Is it revolutionary or reactionary? The 'from below' vs. 'from above' debate doesn't help. Socialism from below is about building grassroots organisations accountable to their members. The budgeting process does all that - but it's confined to a capitalist institution. The 20th century is littered with examples of socialists trying to use those institutions to their own ends, and either turning into a new ruling elite (the former Soviet bloc, China, Vietnam, etc.) or getting slaughtered, when the capitalist class resented having their state taken away from them (Chile, Nicaragua, etc.) Is this a reform that opens up new possibilities for democratic organising, leading beyond capitalism, or does it just repeat the mistakes that dogged social democratic, Stalinist and national liberation movements?


Now that's socialism - Aachi & Ssipak

I agree with Mandel: workers movements need reforms in the here and now. But I disagree with those who say that's all we can fight for, and that revolutions have to be put off into the distant future when we're ready for them. If we don't fight for revolutionary politics now, they'll never happen. To make matters worse, revolutions don't happen because we say so. They happen when masses of people decide to take running society into their own hands. So do revolutionary politics mean fighting for reforms and winning people here and there to the idea of socialism? But parties aren't built through agglomerating individuals - in revolutionary situations, the masses come to the parties and push them to the left.

So what do revolutionary politics look like now, in the 21st century, when in most parts of the world, calling yourself a revolutionary is like preaching the Book of Mormon on street corners? (And in my experience, Mormons are way better at outreach than socialists. They smile more, for one thing.) How do you know when you're building a revolutionary movement vs. making things better for capitalism? Is that an impossible question, only to be judged in hindsight? And if that's the case, why do revolutionaries participate in movements? Because secretly we're bleeding hearts and really care about the children and the fuzzy animals?

You can go on about Marx's 'ethical centre' all you want, but people like Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky thought capitalism would go into crisis. They weren't waiting for enough people to starve before the middle classes opened their hearts and wallets. Capitalism had objective tendencies that would lead to its destruction, and the job of socialists was to get stuck in there and argue for revolution - to show that a strategy of no-compromise won better than timidly asking for reforms, and that the logical conclusion was to take things over and run them ourselves. So, in the absence of fighting working class movements, wouldn't it be easier to leave it to Greenpeace & Oxfam and just go down the pub instead?



We can't be Warrenites, backing imperialism to the hilt, waiting for capitalism's contradictions to mature - at the cost of millions of lives. But fighting for socialism doesn't answer the question: what fights matter, and how do you know it when you're fighting them?

Answers in the comment box please. All contributions are welcome, except "It's all dialectical", which will earn an ice-pick in the forehead.