Comrade Bloom has written an interesting article, and I will do my best to address some of the points of contention he has offered. First, I would like to urge all comrades sympathetic to the Marxist Unity Group (MUG) to read and engage with Bloom’s Points in order to clarify what is substantively different about our conception of socialist revolution from other traditions in Marxism. Secondly, while Bloom accuses MUG of a sort of “schematism” in regards to our conception of the revolutionary process as a fight for the democratic republic, I would argue what he actually discerns is an under-theorization of this process on our part. Regardless, it could be useful to tease out what the differences in our conceptualizations are, using Bloom’s objections as a foil.
Addressing difficulty number 1:
Comrade Bloom argues that political power derives not from control of governmental institutions, but from control and ownership of economic production. Straightforwardly, MUG as Marxists ought to agree with this assessment, but Bloom also seems to confuse what the democratic (socialist) republic is meant to be. Bloom suggests that MUG sees the democratic republic as a political order where capitalists still maintain a large degree of economic power, “[t]hus any dictatorship of the proletariat arising strictly in the form of a ‘democratic republic’ of the type envisioned by MUG, in which a working-class political power coexists with a capitalist economic power, can only be realized for the briefest possible historical moment.”
I think part of the confusion here is that there is no consensus within our group on how this process is supposed to play out, and so the level of our present theory consists of highlighting foundational “moments” of that process: the struggle for a democratic republic, or the call for a new constitution and a constituent assembly.
But I think there are implications and omissions that need to be drawn out, for it is not the case that our call is for a democratic republic on a strictly formal, isolated basis. MUG sees the call for a democratic republic being led by a Communist Party with a minimum-maximum program that proposes the concrete steps needed for a socialist transition.
The comparison with the Paris Commune is instructive. Bloom correctly surmises (in my opinion) that it corresponds most closely with MUG’s vision of the revolutionary process culminating in a democratic republic. It’s instructive in a negative sense as well, since the Communards stopped their nationalization program just short of the Bank of France, which gave the reaction in Versailles the breathing room needed to organize the counter-revolution.
The lesson there is precisely what Bloom argues: “[the revolution] must immediately, or almost immediately, begin the process of ‘despotic inroads’ into capitalist economic power, taking control of at least the most decisive elements if it really wants to exercise political power in any meaningful sense.” At MUG’s convention, this is what I argued contra Gil during debate concerning the democratic republic, so it seems to me these ideas are already actively shaping the debate within our group. Far from schematism, it seems that we’re engaged in a process of clarification with regards to our theory on this.
Addressing difficulty number 2:
Bloom presents another difficulty: how will we ensure the level of mass mobilization necessary to create a democratic republic? Bloom points out that it will require historically unprecedented levels of mass participation in order for a movement like that to succeed, and that we shouldn’t expect that to occur simply due to dissatisfaction with the existing political order.
On this score I completely agree, but I would argue that Bloom presents the problem one-sidedly. Do mass levels of political quietism and abstentionism exist in the working class? That is a self-evident fact, so the problem is clearly one of rebuilding working class political organization and reintroducing a culture of political opposition as a key part of the common sense of working people. In other words, it’s a problem of patiently building a political-oppositional movement that can encompass the wide gamut of anti-bourgeois forces in society. This isn’t done solely by insisting on a democratic republic for its own sake, as Bloom seems to suggest we are doing, but by building a movement that can function as the unified expression of all those who struggle for a democratic political order (especially the working class organized as a class, making collective decisions and organizing for effective political action at the head of this movement).
The one thing we can count on will be crises. Bloom seems to suggest that MUG’s orientation will lock us into strict agitation for a democratic republic regardless of the prevailing social conditions. I personally do not recognize this strategic orientation in MUG’s own ideas; instead, what I see is a necessity of growing our movement through repeated interventions and confrontations against crisis conditions. It is true that, for instance, the immediate trigger of the February Revolution in Russia was the collapse of the Tsarist war effort in WWI and the ensuing social crisis that it caused in Russian society. This is what gave the masses the impetus to finally topple Tsarism. But February (and eventually October) 1917 becomes inconceivable without viewing it as the later stages of a process by which the Russian movement grew through interventions to repeated crises and shocks to Russian society.
Some words on dual power, the democratic republic, and the dictatorship of the proletariat:
Bloom offers us an alternative orientation based on a conception of dual power. He also offers us a counterpoint on the necessity of the democratic republic. Bloom says “[w]e can illustrate clearly if we look at the Russian revolution: the Bolsheviks were among those who called most loudly and most consistently for the election of a constituent assembly in the days following the February 1917 revolution. And yet by the time the Constituent Assembly was actually convened, Soviet power had already been established as a result of the October revolution. With the full support of the Bolsheviks the Soviet government dispersed the Constituent Assembly—the very body that had been mandated to establish a ‘democratic republic’—by force of arms. Why? Because the Bolsheviks recognized that in this case the establishment of a ‘democratic republic’ and the development of a new constitution through the Constituent Assembly would be a step backward for the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia when compared to Soviet power.”
Bloom is seemingly conflating form and content here. While presenting itself as a “democratic republic,” the Provisional Government of the February Revolution had nevertheless committed itself to continuing Russia’s predatory and imperialist war. In his April Theses, Lenin explicitly calls the Provisional government “a government of capitalists, and should cease to be an imperialist government,” and says that only under the condition that power passes to the proletariat and the poorest peasants can there be support for a revolutionary war. It’s obvious then that the Provisional Government was not a democratic republic, since they continued to impose the predatory imperialist war over the heads of the masses.
Were the Soviets then the superior democratic form? Initially, certainly, there was great promise in it. But the subsequent history tells us clearly that Russia had not “leapt over the stage of the democratic republic,” and that the Soviet state very quickly experienced problems integrating the working class into decisive positions in the state.
Trotsky also cautions us against soviet fetishism, which is the idea that the Soviet form is necessarily an effective form of working class democracy. History hasn’t been very kind to this idea. The essence of the matter is that political forms can express a variety of different political contents, and so the forms of Soviet power (or the democratic republic) do not necessarily express the content of mass democratic rule. The decisive influence must come from the leading elements of the struggle for a democratic society, and the goal should be to cultivate an understanding in society that a democratic republic is practically synonymous with the working class taking state power.
Relatedly, the process of the constituent assembly can be seen as a phase in the class struggle taking on a generalized political character. Again, the decisive influence here is a conscious force arguing for a minimum program for working class state power as a means for implementing necessary socialist tasks, e.g. nationalizing key industries, establishing a people’s militia, etc.
An unfolding process of the Constituent Assembly, calling on all citizens to actively participate in the establishment of a new constitution and democratic republic, in the way described by Ben Grove in his article “Fight the Constitution! Demand a New Republic!” can be more than adequately described as a dual power scenario. In this situation, capitalists would still attempt to gain political control, but now under conditions of diminishing influence over the state. The class struggle would be entering an acute phase that corresponds to a pre-revolutionary choice of “socialism or barbarism”, either the culmination of a socialist order, or the death throes of the bourgeois order on the basis of civil war.
-Joseph P.
