Comrade Bloom’s “The Struggle for a ‘Democratic Socialist Republic’ and the dictatorship of the proletariat” makes the argument that the Marxist Unity Group has a schematic view of revolution, wherein intellectual dissatisfaction with the constitution results in a mass constitutional convention. He rightly argues that no country has ever achieved such a drastic political change sans revolution, and that Marxist Unity Group’s idea of revolution appears different from the most significant socialist revolutions of the 20th Century–Russian, Cuban, Chinese. Following a discussion of these different theories of change he asks members of the Marxist Unity Group to explain themselves, or accept that they are dogmatically reproducing classical Marxist aphorisms at odds with reality.
While I view this as an ultimately mistaken assessment, I want to thank Comrade Bloom for writing a thorough criticism which reflects other comrades’ concerns regarding MUG. Indeed, the real catalyst of this article was not Bloom (who I am sure many comrades more able than myself are also writing responses to), but a comrade in my chapter expressing similar concerns. I want to thank Bloom for ultimately elevating the conversation to a higher quality of public engagement than that seen on Twitter.
In this response I intend to critique two elements where I feel Bloom is incorrect. The first is the way he uses history to provide clear and easily implementable practical ‘models.’ In order to speak to the nature of revolution, I discuss the Cuban Revolution and note that what makes socialist revolutions distinct is that they emerged from demands which unite the whole movement. The second is his assumption that our main demand of a democratic republic requires a stageist view of social revolution, where I view it as an indispensable unifying demand.
Historical examples
In the introductory section, Bloom argues:
Of these four [revolutions] only the Commune conforms in any meaningful sense to the MUG model of a “democratic republic” as the initial form through which “socialism will eventually be achieved.” We cannot reasonably derive this idea from the experiences in Russia, China, or Cuba. The challenge MUG theorists have, therefore, is to reconcile the contradiction between their theory of a “democratic republic” and the actual lived experience of real revolutions in the 20th century. If they cannot do this, and personally I don’t see how they can, then the theory needs to be abandoned, even if it is 100 percent consistent with what we read in Marx’s collected works.
First, to address this question: I think that it flattens real social and historical differences to either require MUG’s program meet with the wildly different contexts of the Chinese, Cuban, and Russian revolutions as a country that has never come close to socialist revolution, or on the other hand to impose the forms of those revolutions on the US. If carbon copying these famous revolutionary experiences onto the US worked, 20th century organizations aspiring to the same would not have been such dismal failures.
But there is a further problem here with the use of history, which sees ‘intellectual’ demands, mass organization, and military struggle as fundamentally disconnected, and further sees historical examples as models which can be directly applied. Reading history is always a fundamentally political act where we read different contexts from our own, but each of these countries had particular differences which must be addressed.
For instance, Celia Sanchez, Castro’s right-hand woman in the Plano group of M-26-7, got her start in college activism, doing something quite common for progressive young women at the time in helping political prisoners escape from the government. This already tells us that there was never a ‘normal’ period in which Cuban politics looked like our own, because Cuban history was the history of colonialism followed by 50 years of neo-colonial pro-US rule which saw multiple military coups, culminating in the openly corrupt Batista regime. Years before the Moncada Barracks attack, left-nationalist groups of all stripes were already organizing with a level of militancy with no reflection in the United States today.
It was precisely the widespread militancy and popular disdain for the Batista regime that allowed the strategy of Focoismo–the creation of a military center able to directly oppose the Batista regime’s military–to flourish. The Cuban revolution is often painted as a military struggle substituting for a mass struggle, but that ignores that by far the larger portion of the July 26th Movement (Castro’s organization, named after the date of the Moncada attack) was the ‘plains organization’, consisting of civilian groups in the towns or cities. In the towns and cities, first Frank Pais and then Celia Sanchez brought together forces across the spectrum of Cuban opposition, from radical left students to Catholic bishops to the economistic Moscow-aligned Popular Socialist Party.
This gets at what I consider a misunderstanding of the role of a democratic republic within Marxist Unity Group. Much of Comrade Bloom’s article speaks about the democratic republic as if it were a precise point in our graph of a teleological history, that it is a scientific claim which can be disproven. Rather, a democratic constitution is a political demand, a way to add what was present in the Cuban and Russian Revolutions and was developed intentionally by the Communist Party over a generation-long civil war: a unified programmatic demand. These demands were simple, action-oriented, and aimed at uniting disparate opposition towards a clear goal. Groups which began as separate entities with positively sectarian orientations towards one another were eventually able to be united by practical programmatic clarity.
This programmatic demand was present in all successful revolutions and is missing in the United States. We can pretend that all that is needed is organizational work until everyone in the world comes to our meeting, or that one day a rally will occur and everyone will come already armed with an idea of what they want to do, but we cannot get around people’s ideology, nor can we pretend that doing so is ‘materialist.’
United Programmatic Demands
I will now briefly explain the current context and the role I think the demand for a democratic republic plays in that. Bloom argues that the question is “to understand how and why history is pregnant with more than one potential road to working-class power.” I made a similar argument in Building the Road of Rupture, and I agree that we cannot simply force our timeline onto the movement. But both Bloom’s argument and my own insufficiently focus on subjective factors, and in doing so fail to understand that such historical moments do not fall into our lap.
I wrote at length about the necessity for a new unifying strategy after Sanders’s failure in Building The Road To Rupture, but to summarize, the DSA unified with other actors supporting Sanders’ 2020 presidency Bid. When that failed, we were left as an auxiliary without a center. DSA is still active, but with little coherence from chapter to chapter or even working group to working group. This has begun to change, but much of DSA is still stuck in the same pattern, maintaining the walls of a hollow core. This makes for incoherent and sloppy socialism. Since there is no broader goal we can rally around, there is no way to discern opportunism from principled practical work. This has led to cut-corner decisions on electoral work in particular, such as the continued endorsement of the pro-Zionist and pro-police Nithya Raman.
But that is just the DSA, which suffered from inertia through much of the post-Bernie years but managed to survive. Outside the DSA, conditions are even bleaker and less unified. The social media personalities who played a large part in the spread of Bernie’s ideas are thoroughly adrift, the sectarian organizations which doubled down on the idea of a ‘normal’ working class are now betrayers of the movement, and while some socialist organizations have benefitted from DSA’s inertia of the past three years, many of them are just starting to deal with the problems that affect similarly sized DSA chapters.
The disorganized left is larger than ever, but their lack of country-wide networking has kept them from developing their own subjectivity, instead usually showing up to support various already-existing localist projects. As a whole, the left has increased massively from the post-Occupy years, but is as fragmented and localist as ever.
The wave of pro-Palestinian protests across the country after 10/7 appears to provide a solution to this, as with previous protest waves. The struggle against Zionist aggression is a crucial one, and the US left’s response to it has largely been principled. But while we must actively take part in the struggle for Palestinian liberation, we have now seen enough protest waves to know that they do not themselves resolve the problem of a fractured left. These protests have more resembled the de-facto coalitions that emerge during electoral campaigns, where unaligned progressives show up to support a good cause and make their voices heard in numbers which are unsustainable long-term. In DSA parlance, they are mobilizing rather than organizing, which is necessary but insufficient to build a mass movement. I suspect that when Palestinian liberation forces win due to mounting pressures on Israel, the fact that splits have occurred to the right and left of the broader pro-Palestine movement while no mergers have occurred will be felt more sharply. And while these protests have led to widespread coordination among parts of the local left, without the development of a practical program the interpersonal links made by this coordination will remain immediate and pragmatic.
Furthermore, while I believed that the assault on the rights of women and queer people would start a wave of organizing within comparatively tight knit networks of queer people, that has not manifested to the degree I expected. Preexisting organizations did win the fight for abortion in Ohio and prevented a bevy of queer-phobic Republicans from being elected, but my expectation of a proliferation of new collectives and organizations has not come to pass.
I also suspect that the Palestine protests have been so large partially due to the politicization of queer people from the last year, which has maintained the momentum and engagement of so many involved in the 2020 protests. Yet for the massive growth in the ‘intermediate layer’ of socialists that organized socialists have considered our base, no organization has really experienced a massive period of growth. To me this indicates that the socialist base are looking for leadership, and are not satisfied by what they see or do not feel they have the time to engage.
What is needed is a single programmatic demand which the left can unite in fighting for. I believe this is true despite the organizational underdevelopment of working-class, socialist, and other liberatory struggles in this country. Indeed, I think that a lack of program and a lack of unity is holding us back, as is the pseudo-anarchist insistence that we wait for our demands to fall from the sky. Socialists are participants in social struggle and our role is in bringing together different strands into one universal demand. That demand should be for a democratic republic if we want to fight for revolution, even if it does not perfectly predict how a revolution will go.
While we can compare different historical moments, we have already had an uprising in this country this decade, with BLM protests including up to 7% of the US population. Those protests saw the creation of autonomous zones in cities and the organization and agitation of a far larger number of people than those who just showed up. But it was not us, but fascists, who ended up trying to take state power through force. Why was that?
While our goal of Abolishing the Police implied a complete rearrangement of state power, calls for revolution or a change in government only emerged as disconnected demands on social media, and there were few attempts to organize across cities as we each narrowed our lens to the precise city we lived in. Even though the largest protest wave in US history was happening in our cities, with even small towns which had not faced protests since the 18th century on the streets, the idea of even seizing local power seemed generally absurd.
This came both from the nature of a spontaneous uprising and the desire within the left for spontaneous demands against concerns of vanguardism. This anti-vanguardism meant that we fought any attempt to influence the crowd, and ended up ceding hegemony over to social media influencers at best and NGOs at worst. This is the outcome of letting spontaneous revolts do the work of socialist development for us, hoping one day we’ll look back and find that movements about different struggles, occurring in different workplaces and municipalities, just developed a coherent revolutionary message on their own.
As Communists we should know better, should be advancing demands which can combine all of these struggles, and should work out agreement by the left on those demands. A democratic constitution makes sense not because every revolution has come from a demand for a new constitution, but because it is a natural outgrowth of the demands that have been advanced in the last decade, and because it problematizes precisely the ideological structures which have held back every movement since Occupy.
Comrade Bloom says that the real enemy and real power is capital, since capitalists can stage a capital strike if the state acts out of line with capital. While this is true, one might ask why no pure struggle against capital power has effected revolution, revolution always starting with a struggle for a different government and rapidly expanding to a struggle against capital. While police and state power may not be determinant in the final instance, in the first instance you can be killed by them all the same. The 2010s saw struggles against capital (Occupy), against colonial-extractive-capital (Standing Rock), against local police violence and the oppression of Black people (Black Lives Matter), but each of those was destroyed not directly by capital but by the police and the national guard. At the same time every time we win some policy at the local or state level, we find that effort stymied by any number of competing layers of checks and balances.
This is not incidental! Our government structure is a system of ‘checks and balances’ across local, state, and national levels, with a disproportionate amount of spending being done by the state and local levels compared to other countries. This allows oversized and unaccountable police forces to exist in nearly every village, town, and city, but also means that the majority of government bodies are too small for even modest welfare spending. This is not an accident. Our ‘Founding Fathers’ created a government strong enough to guard against internal threats (enslaved Black people, colonized indigenous people, etc.) and complex enough to frustrate popular forces on purpose. This means that any number of constitutional tricks are used to ensure that ‘checks and balances’ apply against popular movements. If you win total local power, as Cooperation Jackson did, it will turn out that only the state has the ability to make decisions on local power. If you establish a Police Accountability Board with a petition that wins 75-25 as we did in Rochester, such a policy will be held up in the courts for years. If you win a state-level policy meant to help people, as New Yorkers did with the Build Public Renewables Act, it will be mismanaged within the Executive branch of the state, where we have no power. This state intransigence coexists with one of the largest growths in policing power in human history, accumulating at every level of government. Power does exist within the state, and only in a room where we aren’t.
This problem seems most easily resolvable by ignoring it for now–after all, we are nowhere near actually achieving state power, so the problem with trying to change things through the state was in thinking that a mere puppet of capital could give us anything we want in the first place. We could instead organize the class where it is in various workplace actions. There are two significant problems to this approach. The first is that, if our project is just held within each workplace, each municipality, each apartment, there is little reason for coordination outside of those workplaces and apartment buildings. Without a greater unifying demand, this mass work is important but can not create even a class-in-itself, a conscious political working class, because dispersed work can only reify the divisions capitalism creates.
The other problem is that even if we studiously avoid the problem of the constitutional system, that does not mean that everyone will maintain such an agnostic position. Constitutional loyalism, and state loyalism more broadly, is a strong force in this country. Our military and legal systems call for oaths of allegiance to the settler-colonial constitution. People in this country are propagandized from childhood about the value of our particularly undemocratic and colonial form of government, and that propaganda also matters. The spontaneist vision of ‘what if I held a protest and everyone came’ does not matter if those people come to our events as state loyalists, unwilling to combat the state apparatus. We cannot simply sidestep this problem by pretending it does not exist.
Loyalty to this system has held all our movements back, constraining us either to toothless reformism or directionless anarchism. We must be able to speak of and target the totality of the state apparatus as the enemy, and in front of the broad masses at our events, as a means to connect different parts of our movement. Our spaces should be venues for exposing the flaws in our governmental system and discussing our solutions. Our labor and tenant work should point to the nature of the state in supporting bosses and landlords. Every protest or organizing event should make clear that if we fight the police, imperialism, colonialism, this means the US state. Such a demand would be a clear development in the local-abolitionist fight against policing and would help unify the national liberation struggles occurring within our prisonhouse of nations. A clear demand for a new constitution with points of unity around the shape of a democratic republic would help us bring the left together, not for a single project or out of interpersonal nicety but towards actual programmatic unity. And it is a demand we can use to pose revolution concretely, which it is a cry we can and must bring to the masses. It is the concrete manifestation of what a revolution means in this country, and I am tired of acting otherwise.
-Jean Allen
