This letter is an attempt to intervene in some of the debates originating from Steve Bloom’s articles late last year, first polemicizing against Marxist Unity Groups’s conception of the minimum-maximum program, and then the democratic socialist republic, accusing our faction of engaging in theoretical “schematicism.” In response, three letters were dispatched by MUG members Joseph, Jean, and Luke, and in return, Bloom published a response to Joseph’s letter. Just last week, an excellent critique written by Mike Macnair appeared on the pages of the Weekly Worker. It was Bloom’s response to Joseph that convinced me to sit down to write—as much driven by an attempt to clarify our politics against Bloom’s persistent (though admittedly good-faith) misconceptions as a desire to participate in some of the recent debates in MUG. As Joseph emphasizes, the theorization of our strategic conception of democratic-republicanism is an ongoing project.
Hegemony and the Democratic Revolution
I first begin with a general defense of the centrality of the demand for a democratic constitution and some notes on the question of the democratic-republican program. Bloom is correct enough that the response to any arena of injustice may ignite the crisis that paves the way for a new constitution, and not “mass intellectual dissatisfaction with the current US Constitution as a legal document.” But this is a strawman of our position, made clear in MUG’s canonization of Lenin’s “Political Agitation and the Class Point of View,” in which he insists that “every conflict with the government arising out of progressive social interests, however small, may under certain conditions (of which our support is one) flare up into a general conflagration.”1 The minimum program for a democratic constitution/republic is the real means to bring together the various strands of discontent into a unitary assault on the bourgeois state, building the hegemony of the socialist working-class movement within and through the various democratic struggles against oppression of all types. This is the basic message of “What is to be Done?” on the importance of political agitation and socialist consciousness.
Our centering of the demand for a democratic constitution does not exist in a vacuum. It embodies the necessary break from the state loyalist opportunism that dominates the Left and seeks to vie for power within the existing state, emblemized by the liberal constitutional order, instead of smashing it. This approach is also a critique of economism, which raises the question of class struggle abstractly without presenting a coherent political challenge to the existing state. If our agitational literature has so far been intellectual and speculative, it is because our intended audience is by and large the socialist movement itself. The U.S. Left has demonstrated an aptitude for denouncing bourgeois rule as such, but this amounts to little when it fails to reckon with how the bourgeoisie rules and neglects to pose a concrete alternative. Revolutionary movements crash on the rocks of bourgeois reformism when they fail to appreciate the patient work of winning the working class to a positive vision of democratic proletarian rule, relegating themselves to a negative critique of the class and property relations of contemporary society. Bloom replicates these weaknesses and would have us tail the vacillations of existing public sentiment, responding to “social crisis” or following “the course of struggles,” without ever putting forward a concrete program for political power.
Opposing Models? Strategy of the Democratic Republic
To borrow Macnair’s rough delineation, I have outlined above the instrumental tactical value of the slogan of the republic/constitution. Beyond this, it operates as a strategic description of the institutions necessary for proletarian rule. This is what Bloom characterizes as “schematicism.”
The formula of the democratic republic has two underlying assumptions that I hope Bloom will agree with; the first being that the proletariat cannot exercise power generally as a class except under conditions of absolute political democracy. If these conditions do not exist or are impossible, the interests of the class can only be represented abstractly by an unaccountable representative—a situation extremely vulnerable to degeneration. To bring the democratic principle to governance we must operate off of a republican framework, the opposition in principle to political organization which subordinates one group to another in perpetuity. This is the institutional prerequisite for subordinating representatives, bureaucrats, and civil servants to the popular will of the proletariat. Macnair makes the point clear enough that this form of state is necessary to achieve a communist society and the free association of producers. The history of the 20th century, instead of providing us with a wealth of “alternatives” as Bloom argues, has demonstrated in no uncertain terms the consequences of abandoning political democracy—the depoliticization of civil society, state repression, and the defanging of the independent class power which is the only social force capable of resisting the capture of the state by those who wish to return to capitalism. Our commitment to the democratic republic of the Paris Commune type is not a reach back into the annals of history but a recognition of its practical significance in outlining the institutions of proletarian rule programmatically.
In and after October the Bolsheviks attempted a full democratization of the state through the soviets, but also drawing from the exemplary model of the Commune. Bloom wrongfully assumes that the dismissal of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 in favor of the soviet power was an explicit rejection of the democratic republic, ripping this action out of context and ignoring that Lenin directly counterposed the “Paris Commune type of state” to the “bourgeois parliamentary republic” of the Provisional Government.2 In the end, Civil War conditions prevented the immediate construction of a republic and worker’s councils proved a weak form of sovereign authority leading the Bolshevik Party to take on the functional role of governance. The over-theorization of this contingency— making “a virtue of necessity”3 and spreading this distortion throughout the communist movement—is the tragedy of the political legacy coming down from the Russian Revolution: the sidelining of the struggle for political democracy in the socialist revolution.
The second assumption of the formula of the democratic republic is that the transformation of social relations can only be generalized and then made permanent through the struggle for and seizure of state power. Bloom does admit this to be the case, but he denies that there is any explanatory power or strategic necessity in giving primacy to the struggle for democratic political power. He prefers to speculate on the possibilities of a general strike or a military uprising, which does little to help us conceive of our tasks, especially because these cannot be posed contra the republic as they originate in tactical approaches to achieving state power. Democratic-republicanism has itself been used to legitimate both military struggle (Castro) and mass-strikeism (Luxemburg). While Bloom is right to assert that a transformation of social relations may begin before the proletariat takes state power, the struggle to conquer political power is the only means by which to universalize and tie together the diverse threads of protest, which can, in turn, only be generally reflected in the struggle for democracy, i.e. consummated in a democratic state. If the proletariat does not take decisive political control and the bourgeois state is not smashed, it will use its supremacy to roll back and crush progress. This is why, repeated ad infinitum by nearly every revolutionary Marxist beginning with Marx, the essence of Marxism is the tendency of the class struggle towards the dictatorship of the proletariat. Building revolutionary socialist consciousness means that it is necessary, at some point, to conceive of a generalizable political form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and to communicate it widely. For this we are charged with “schematicism,” and so be it.
Addendum on MUG Politics
At this point, I must be clear that I firmly reject the hardline “democratic constitutionalist” tendency in MUG represented most visibly by Luke and Gil in the pages of Cosmonaut, which downplays the social revolution and the importance of the property question in the struggle for democracy and narrows the democratic republic to the slogan of universal and equal suffrage. The general problems with this tendency are well-summarized in the pre-Congress debate between Luke and Edward. I do not believe I am alone in aligning with the argument of W.E.B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction that political democracy requires a redistribution of economic and social power, liberatory education, and military force, not merely a change in political institutions. Echoing Marx, suffrage must be “transformed from the instrument of deception that it has been until now into an instrument of emancipation.”4 The debate at our annual Congress on whether to promote the “democratic republic” or the “democratic socialist republic” turned precisely on the question of the relationship between the political and social revolution, and the necessity of enacting both the political and economic sections of the minimum program to bring the proletariat to power. The proposal to replace instances of “democratic socialist republic” in our Tasks and Perspectives with “democratic republic” failed. A similar proposal, to cordon off constitutional agitation as an independent sphere of factional organization, was defeated in spirit by an amendment to assign this task to our program committee. I cannot be clear enough that this is a minority tendency within our faction. But when confronted with this divergence in thought by Joseph’s letter, Bloom insists that this “guarantees nothing in advance,” as if we are to be judged now for the potential future results of our political debates.
Marx’s vignette of the communist raison d’être in the Manifesto, that “Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things,” and that “in all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question…”, retains its validity today. But we must make the crucial addendum that Marx could take for granted the revolutionary struggle for democracy that was everywhere in 1848 and that the distinguishing characteristic of the communists was to infuse this political-democratic movement with a discourse of class struggle and social revolution against the existing property regime. Today the reverse is true. The discourse of social revolution must be embedded with a positive vision for proletarian democracy and the overthrow of the existing state. Since those days and Marx’s proclamation of the necessity of the revolution en permanenz, it has been made clear that the proletariat must take leadership, not only over the socialist revolution but also the democratic revolution, deepening and extending it into the direct assault on the power of private property. Our slogan, the democratic socialist republic, is an attempt to express the unity between the political and social, the democratic and the socialist, together into one historical goal and objective: the state form under which we transition to socialism.
– Gant R.
