Steve Bloom takes on Donald Parkinson’s arguments around the minimum-maximum program, warning against schematicism and calling for clarity around class content.
In his essay titled “The Revolutionary Minimum-Maximum Program” (Fight the Constitution: For a Democratic Socialist Republic—Selected Writings from Marxist Unity Group, Cosmonaut Press, 2023) Donald Parkinson argues for a program of demands rooted in immediate struggles that can “provide a practical roadmap for the workers’ movement in taking political power.” He tells us that this is what the “minimum” piece of a “minimum-maximum program” is all about—the maximum piece being the actual establishment of a social order that functions on a socialist rather than on a capitalist basis.
I have, for many decades, also been in favor of a program of demands rooted in immediate struggles that can “provide a practical roadmap for the workers’ movement in taking political power.” One difference between Parkinson’s conception and mine is that I have always called this a “transitional program.”
My first observation in this response is to suggest, simply, that if we agree about the content and goals of the program we need, it would be foolish to quibble about what name to give it. I hope this is obvious enough and I don’t have to spend more words to make the point.
In that context, however, there are two key questions where I would like to challenge the substance of Parkinson’s approach:
1) How useful is it for us to conceptualize this act—of “the workers’ movement taking political power”—as stage one of a two-stage revolutionary process?
2) Is it correct to project the understanding Parkinson offers us of the “minimum-maximum program” back on others who have used the same term in the history of the workers’ movement—most notably “the 1902 program of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party” (RSDLP)?
I will also say a few words in conclusion about Parkinson’s polemic in which he objects to the concept of a “transitional program” (still my choice for a name) as presented in an article by Nathaniel Flakin in a publication called Left Voice. I would like to suggest that a polemic against Flakin can only be reasonably projected as a discussion of Flakin’s understanding of the transitional program. It’s a considerable stretch to declare that this is a definitive refutation of the transitional program itself: i.e., whether it remains (or ever was) a useful concept.
Is the socialist revolution a two-stage process?
Parkinson writes in his essay:
Marx essentially saw revolution as a two-stage process—first the proletariat is to seize political power and establish the democratic republic, and then afterwards within this newly established framework can now take up the tasks of reconstructing society on a communist basis. The seizure of power by the proletariat does not inevitably lead to the victory of socialism. What is accomplished with the seizure of power is the inauguration of a new phase of the class struggle, where the proletariat holds control over the general means of coercion. Classes still exist, and the capitalist mode of production is still intact. The dictatorship of the proletariat as a phrase entails the existence of the proletariat, hence the existence of classes. One enters a contradictory situation where the exploited class now holds power over the exploiters. It is only through the victory of communism that this contradiction can be resolved.
Let’s spend some time with this paragraph and sort out what’s right and what’s wrong with it.
Marx essentially saw revolution as a two-stage process—first the proletariat is to seize political power and establish the democratic republic, and then afterwards within this newly established framework can now take up the tasks of reconstructing society on a communist basis.
I am not going to speak so much to the question of how Marx conceived the process of socialist revolution. The problem we confront is not one of historical excavation. I am going to speak, instead, to the question of how we, as 21st century Marxists need to see the process of revolution based on the experiences of the working class movement in the 20th century. In most of the cases, history has given us to study there was not really a first stage and a second stage in the way Parkinson is projecting. The two processes—conquest of political power and conquest of economic power—unfolded simultaneously, each one both cause and effect of the other.
In Russia, for example, the expropriation of the expropriators began before the October revolution—especially in the countryside—and the mass political mobilization of the workers and peasants that was the basis of that revolution depended on this process of economic expropriation as an essential stimulus. In Spain the revolution faltered, before the dictatorship of the proletariat was established in any sense (see more about the “dictatorship of the proletariat” below), not primarily for want of political measures but for want of social measures that would have neutralized bourgeois influences and consolidated the support of the masses behind the Republic.
On a purely theoretical level, I will argue that if our seizure of power is based on Rosa Luxemburg’s insurrectionary conception of the mass strike as at least one viable model, such a strike is already 2/3 of the way toward the economic expropriation of the capitalist class, and thus it becomes essential to conceive of the beginnings of that process of expropriation as a prerequisite to the seizure of political power rather than the other way around, even if the completion of the process of economic expropriation takes place later.
What might be said accurately, therefore, is, simply, that the expropriation of the expropriators cannot be completed without the political seizure of power, and in this sense, the actual establishment of a genuinely socialist economy does represent a “stage” of the revolutionary process, one that can only come some time after the seizure of state power. But Parkinson’s thesis is true only in this sense. It is therefore far too limited in its scope to serve as a theoretical guide. Its separation of tasks into “stages” seems more likely to disorient us than offer useful insights.
The seizure of power by the proletariat does not inevitably lead to the victory of socialism. What is accomplished with the seizure of power is the inauguration of a new phase of the class struggle, where the proletariat holds control over the general means of coercion. Classes still exist, and the capitalist mode of production is still intact.
The seizure of power does not inevitably lead to the victory of socialism. This is true. It initiates a new phase of the class struggle. This too is true (though only in a sense so we will return to consider this item again shortly). Classes still exist, true again. However, the capitalist mode of production is not still intact. Something has already begun to change in the social reality as we noted above, and this beginning of a social change is a prerequisite to the working class being able to conquer political power.
From a methodological point of view, each of Parkinson’s true statements treats the element he is discussing as if it were a discrete thing isolated from all other things, a static moment in time separate and apart from all other moments in time, rather than part of a process that involves multiple causes and effects that are relating to each other over weeks, months, and years. The important question is not whether classes still exist, for example, but whether they exist in a form that is crystalized and resistant to change, as they do in a capitalist society, or in a form that has already begun to wither away. One “still exist” is qualitatively different from the other “still exist.” Yet this difference disappears in Parkinson’s formulation.
The same problem is illustrated when we focus on the idea that taking state power “initiates a new phase of the class struggle.” As noted above this is true in a sense. It is, however, also quite reasonable to look at taking state power as simply an intensification of the stage of the class struggle that was already initiated by the mass strike—or whatever other social crisis created the conditions that make it possible to take power. Both understandings of the process can offer us insight (a “new phase” and an “intensification of the previous phase”), and therefore both can be true at the same time without contradicting each other—except in the dialectical sense.
One enters a contradictory situation where the exploited class now holds power over the exploiters. It is only through the victory of communism that this contradiction can be resolved.
For this passage to be accurate we have to add a rather important word: “It is only through the victory of communism that this contradiction can be fully resolved.” Since we are dealing with a process, however, the important question isn’t whether the contradiction still has any life at all left in it at some particular moment, but the extent to which it has, at that moment, already been resolved by earlier stages of the process, vs. the extent to which it remains to be resolved by this final, ultimate, and completed social transformation. Even more important: what is the direction of motion of the social process that is underway at every stage? Looked at from this vantage point “the contradiction” (the exploited class now holds power over the exploiters) is both posed in its most acute form by and begins to be resolved as a result of the mass strike or other social crisis, even before we take political power. It is further resolved by the act of taking power, and then resolved more and more, progressively, by the process of constructing first socialism and then communism. Once again the static conception “resolved or unresolved, yes or no” is a completely inadequate measuring stick that offers no insight into the actual social development taking place.
Note that I skipped over the sentence “The dictatorship of the proletariat as a phrase entails the existence of the proletariat, hence the existence of classes.” This was deliberate, because the point I want to stress here takes us from our discussion of Parkinson’s two-stage theory to our next most important topic of conversation: the historical use of the concept “minimum-maximum program.” What’s key for us to note in relation to this sentence is that Parkinson identifies the political reality he is discussing as “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” I agree with that characterization. It will become significant as our conversation develops further.
Schematism
Before we get to our historical consideration of the term “minimum-maximum program” however, let’s note one significant danger that lurks in the kind of blueprint for revolution Parkinson is presenting: a two-stage process—first the proletariat is to seize political power and then, afterward, take up the tasks of reconstructing society on a communist basis. One might argue that this approach, to the extent it is actually the way a socialist revolution unfolds, is general enough to be universally applicable. Still, I am cautious about any formulation that seems to anticipate revolutionary forms and processes in this kind of absolute way, because the danger of schematism immediately becomes a concern.
What is “schematism”? It’s a process of thought that elevates our theoretical models (schemas) of what we expect a social process to look like and thereby blinds us to a proper assessment and understanding of whatever real processes might actually unfold in life, since revolutions in the real world generally fail to match our theoretical expectations. The clearest historical illustration is “third-camp” currents which, after 1959, considered the Cuban revolution and said: These events do not fit the model that our theory tells us a socialist revolution should adhere to. We therefore conclude that this is not a socialist revolution.
There are many honest people who have been led astray because they begin to think in schemas.
The reality is that if we want to talk about the relationship between events that allow the working class and its allies to take political power and those that lead to overthrowing capitalist property, the dialectic described above inevitably unfolds at its own unique pace, taking its own unique forms, in every revolution, thus giving each experience its own signature. Even if I didn’t have the hesitations already noted about the way Parkinson is formulating his two-stage theory, the danger that this approach can too easily become a schema would still raise a cautionary note for me.
Indeed, there is one sentence in Parkinson’s essay that makes me wonder whether this concept may not already have risen to the level of schema: “Unless we believe that revolution itself will be the creation of communist relations of production . . . the separation of the minimum and maximum is not arbitrary but rather a clarification of the process of revolution itself.”
Whenever we believe that we have definitively captured the “process of revolution itself” in our theory it’s time for a red flag to go up regarding schematic thinking. Why? Because if we are approaching our theory realistically we know in advance that it can never be more than an approximation of the social processes that actually unfold in a social upheaval. (“Theory is gray, the tree of life is green” as Lenin once put it.) Our theory should arm us to expect that every real revolution will compel us to at least adjust aspects of our previous theoretical understanding, perhaps to totally overhaul it. It’s the same process astronomers go through every time a spacecraft gets close enough to some object in our solar system to send back real data which challenges whatever theories they previously had about the planet, or moon, or asteroid, or comet in question. Just as with astronomers, so with Marxists. An appropriate skepticism about our own theories needs to be a built-in feature of our theory at every stage. In short: the process clarifies our theory far more often (and in a much more profound sense) than our theory clarifies the process—especially when that process is somewhere in the future.
The condition that Parkinson cites (“unless we believe that revolution itself will be the creation of communist relations of production”) is hardly the only state of mind that leads to a conclusion other than the one he suggests (“the separation of the minimum and maximum is not arbitrary but rather a clarification of the process of revolution itself”). What if we believe that “the creation of communist relations of production” is not a moment in time but a process, one that begins before the seizure of state power and ends afterward? This is another way of looking at things that challenges the notion that the theoretical separation of the minimum and maximum program into two distinct phases is a “clarification of the process of revolution.”
Has this two-stage conception already become a schema, a lens through which Parkinson’s vision of all events past, present, and future, becomes distorted rather than focused? We get another hint that this might be true as we take a look at his historical assessment of Russia and the minimum-maximum program of the RSDLP.
Parkinson vs. Lenin on the “minimum-maximum” program
At the outset of considering the historical use of the term “minimum-maximum program” let us also note another weakness in Parkinson’s paragraph quoted above. Talking about Marx’s conception he tells us that “first the proletariat is to seize political power and establish the democratic republic.” This formulation does not, however, make clear what the class nature of this “democratic republic” is going to be. Elsewhere Parkinson identifies it as a “workers’ republic,” as does the title of the book in which this essay appears. Still, in the sentence just cited, talking about Marx’s view, the question is left ambiguous. This opens the door to a serious historical misunderstanding, and it’s a door Parkinson himself pushes the reader through when he tells us that the program of the RSDLP in the early part of the 20th century is an example of the kind of minimum-maximum program he is advocating. That statement is false. Parkinson’s version of the minimum-maximum program is paving the way for the establishment of a workers’ democratic republic (the “dictatorship of the proletariat”). In the approach of the RSDLP the minimum program was focused exclusively on the need to establish a bourgeois–democratic republic.
Here is how Lenin put it in comments titled “Elections to the Fourth Duma” in his collected works, presented at the 6th All-Russia conference of the RSDLP in January 1912:
The main election slogans of our Party in the forthcoming elections must be:
“(1) A Democratic Republic
“(2) The eight-hour working day
“(3) Confiscation of the landed estates.
. . .
“All propaganda on the remaining demands of the Social-Democratic minimum programme, namely: universal franchise, freedom of association, election of judges and officials by the people, state insurance for workers, replacement of the standing army by the arming of the people, and so on, must be inseparably linked with the above-mentioned three demands.
Lenin here uses the same term as Parkinson: “democratic republic.” But clearly he cannot be talking about “the dictatorship of the proletariat” as one of the three “main slogans” for the Duma elections. For Lenin, there was no question that this “democratic republic” that was the focus of the minimum program could only be a bourgeois-democratic republic given the level of social development achieved by Russia. If anyone wants to argue otherwise they need to explain why, when Lenin talked about the possibility of conquering political power in the context of this specific “democratic republic,” he offered his famous formula calling for a “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.” In this formula too Lenin clearly meant “bourgeois democratic,” because if he actually meant the dictatorship of the proletariat he would never have invented a new term. He would simply have used the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” that everyone in the Marxist movement already understood.
By using the same terminology as Lenin (“democratic republic”) but giving it a different class content (workers’ democratic republic vs. bourgeois-democratic republic) Parkinson distorts the meaning of the minimum-maximum program of the RSDLP. The minimum program here was not intended to “provide a practical roadmap for the workers’ movement in taking political power” as “the first stage of the socialist revolution.” It was to provide a practical roadmap to the creation of a bourgeois-democratic republic that could replace Tsarism.
The difference between a minimum program that leads to a workers’ democratic republic and one that leads to a bourgeois democratic republic is not to be trifled with. It must be explored and deeply understood if we are going to write about the history of programs and their meaning for the revolutionary workers’ movement. Parkinson, however, tells us that there is no difference, and thus distorts the history (and, I would say, also our theory) in a way that will inevitably make it impossible to properly understand the world around us—past, present, and future—if that distortion is not actively corrected.
Electoral power and state power
A weakness of Parkinson’s explanation that I will just mention briefly is his failure to talk about the distinction between taking electoral power and taking state power. A working-class party taking “power” in the strictly electoral sense is not “the dictatorship of the proletariat” and opens up no potential whatsoever for the conquest of economic power—at least not without some level of mass mobilization that can become the basis for a change in the nature of the state itself. There is nothing in this specific essay that suggests Parkinson falls into any theoretical errors because he fails to explore this question. Still, that failure could easily cause others to make a mistake, one that so many have made before: thinking that winning electoral office is sufficient for a working-class current to “take power.”
This underlines, in my judgment, why it would be a mistake to theorize the socialist revolution as a two-stage process of the kind Parkinson suggests. To actually take state power, rather than simply win elective office, a working-class party needs a mass struggle that already begins to directly challenge bourgeois social reality, including bourgeois property, as noted above. Without that, the only thing we can ever hope to achieve is elective office. We can never “take power” in the revolutionary sense of that term.
Transitional program?
Parkinson is correct in my view to reject the variety of Trotskyism (and there is, unfortunately, far too much of it) that approaches the question of a transitional program as if one particular quote from the founding document of the Fourth International—one that Parkinson offers us in a footnote—is still true:
All talk to the effect that historical conditions have not yet ‘ripened’ for socialism is the product of ignorance or conscious deception. The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only ‘ripened’; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. The turn is now to the proletariat, i.e. chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership.
As a statement of the condition of the world in 1938 everything in this paragraph was true and correct. One can argue that even now everything in that paragraph is still true—except for the part most often cited by self-proclaimed Trotskyists: the last sentence. Today it is quite foolish to assert that the crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership. Yet many who identify with Trotskyism as a historical current fail to understand that “The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International,” just like the Communist Manifesto and any other historical text, was a product of its times rather than holy scripture. And because they make this error they fall into a lot of foolishness, reasonably identified by Parkinson as reflecting vanguardism and an ultraleft variety of communism. I will insist nonetheless that their errors do not flow from the concept of a transitional program. The errors result from treating one particular historical document, or the writings of one particular individual, as holy text.
I therefore continue to use the name “transitional program” to describe a document that can “provide a practical roadmap for the workers’ movement in taking political power.” Still, if we agree that the concept of “two-stage revolution” has important limits, if we emphasize the need to approach our theoretical categories dialectically, if we can be conscious of avoiding schematism, and if we properly sort out the history of how the term “minimum and maximum program” has actually been used in different ways by different forces in the workers’ movement at different historical moments, Donald Parkinson will get no argument from me if he wants to continue to use that name—“minimum and maximum program”—to identify the thing I call a “transitional program.”
